Managing Knowledge with an Enterprise Wiki

What is an enterprise wiki?

An enterprise wiki is a digital knowledge repository. It works in exactly the same way as the role model “Wikipedia”, but is used specifically for a company.

A wiki consists of a network of articles that are linked to each other via links. Each article deals with a specific topic. If an author refers to a related topic within an article, he can refer to it in the text by creating a link. This allows the reader to quickly jump from one article to the next.

The word “wiki” comes from Hawaiian and means “fast”.

An internal company wiki is an important component of knowledge management, because companies collect their know-how in it. It thrives on employees documenting their knowledge and experience and sharing it with colleagues.

What is an enterprise wiki used for?

In-house know-how is a valuable resource, but is often neglected. As a result, departments do not cooperate optimally or important processes depend on individual persons.

A wiki prevents such undesirable developments by collecting, networking and sharing knowledge. Employees use it to provide important information, processes or documents that colleagues can access quickly and easily.

This results in many use cases for companies. In the following, we present some examples:

What are the advantages of a corporate wiki?

Companies that use an in-house wiki benefit from several advantages:

• Transparency: an enterprise wiki makes important information accessible throughout the company. It promotes cross-departmental exchange and prevents expertise from being lost when employees leave the company.

• Efficiency: Thanks to the networked structure of a wiki, information can be found easily and added to quickly. In the form of a cloud solution, employees can also access the wiki at their home office or while on the road and do not have to ask colleagues for the information they need.

• Participation: A wiki thrives on the fact that it is maintained and designed by many employees. It enables employees to share their own knowledge and benefit from the experience of others, regardless of the company hierarchy. This additional level of communication promotes a good corporate culture.

• Standardization: A corporate wiki is the central point of contact for employee questions and replaces many other sources of information. This ensures that information is consistent and up-to-date (single source of truth). The layout is predefined so that all wiki articles also have a uniform visual appearance.

What are typical objections to an enterprise wiki?

Certain objections are often raised by employees or the works council against the introduction of an enterprise wiki. We will discuss some typical examples in more detail below:

• • Security: passwords, malicious code or false information can get into the wiki.
    • Dangers of this kind arise from improper or even abusive use of the wiki and cannot be ruled out even with comparable systems. Appropriate training and the multi-eye principle that prevails in a wiki help to prevent security risks.

• • Data protection: Employee data is tracked during editing and can be analyzed.
    • Automatic versioning is important in order to be able to track the change history of a wiki article. Only the editor and the time of editing are stored. Sensitive employee data is not accessible, but remains in the protected HR area of the system.

• Costs: The effort to introduce and maintain a wiki is not in proportion to the benefits.
  • Wiki articles can be easily created and quickly found. Without a wiki, the right contact person must first be found. This costs time and ties up employees, especially experts in the company. A wiki ensures knowledge transfer and therefore pays off in the medium and long term.

These and other concerns should be considered and discussed before introducing an enterprise wiki. On closer examination, however, the points mentioned can be put into perspective.

What is special about the projectfacts Wiki?

The projectfacts Wiki is a full enterprise wiki. It offers all the functions you expect from a wiki system. What makes it special is the networking with other company departments.

As an all-in-one enterprise software, the wiki is fully integrated in projectfacts. Instead of relying on isolated applications, you have everything in one system. You will recognize this often in your daily work:

Topic-related Wiki

Create topic-related wikis in projectfacts, e.g. for projects or customers. With this you record everything important that needs to be considered for a customer. Introduce a project glossary or a changelog for your development projects. You can link the associated project or the customer’s CRM contact directly in the wiki article. This way you work seamlessly in one system instead of switching from application to application.

Interactive Wiki

You can embed a variety of other system elements directly into the projectfacts Wiki, e.g. the business cards of employees, system directories or individual files. For example, simply store a contact person for certain Wiki articles, who is available for further queries. The colleague’s business card is updated on the basis of the HR data. If a phone number changes, you can be sure that it will be displayed correctly in the wiki.

Reporting Wiki

Reports in projectfacts can also be integrated into your wiki articles. Simply add relevant statistics about your company or individual departments. The embedded reports are always up-to-date and can also be filtered and edited in the wiki. This way you automate your reporting, because the manual creation of Excel sheets or PowerPoint slides is no longer necessary.

How does the projectfacts wiki work?

Wikis have a kind of “universal language” that makes it easy for users to create contributions. projectfacts is also based on this language. So if you have already worked with a wiki system, you can start right away.

In the following we present some basic commands that you can use in the Wiki editor of projectfacts.

Headings

The Wiki distinguishes between several hierarchy levels for headings, just like HTML. H1 headings are marked with an equal sign before and after your text. Subordinate headings get one more equal sign per level:

Font style

You can adjust the font style in several ways. Bold and italic print is marked with apostrophes, and superscript and subscript print is marked with resepctive tags:

Links

Links can refer to articles within the wiki as well as to external websites. Also addresses on the own server can be addressed in projectfacts:

Enumerations

The projectfacts Wiki distinguishes between simple and numbered enumerations. Simple lists are marked with asterisks, numbered enumerations with hashtags. With each enumeration level a star or a hash is added.

Images

Images are inserted using the “[[Image:Image name]]” command. After a vertical hyphen (pipe) additional parameters can be passed, e.g. a caption, the orientation (right, left, center, none) and whether the image should be displayed in original size or as a thumbnail (orig, thumb).

Tables

A table is virtually “painted” in Wiki syntax. The following scheme applies:

• {| Table |}
• |- New row
• | New column
• ! Header

For example, a simple table is constructed as follows:

Further elements

In the projectfacts Wiki a number of additional elements can be integrated into an article. You can find an overview here:

• Business cards [[Card:Name]]
• Reports [[Report:Name]]
• Search function [[Search:Name]]
• File [[File:Name]]
• Folder [[Folder:Name]]

The easiest way to add new items is to first call them up and then select them from the list of recently used items in the sidebar.

Header image: © jannoon028 – freepik.com (2022)