Dec 23, 2009
Knowledge Management
In the last few months of the year, I was able to convince one of my co-workers to use delicious for his bookmarks. Until then, when we wanted to inform the other about an important or interesting link, we sent an email, saying something like “Look at this” and added the link in the actual mail. This had the drawback that we most often didn’t visit the linked website because we forgot about the mail at some time and that we thought that there is no need to keep the link somewhere, because it’s already in our postbox (thanks to Xobni we were even able to find the links again).
Delicious really eased the thing and made it possible for us to quickly inform the other about new maritime products or interesting news, keeping the bookmark in a well-defined place at the same time. And now comes the interesting question: What should we do with documents from within our company? Of course there is the possibility to also store local paths within delicious (and make them private, so nobody else can see them), but the interface is of course not made for this (copying paths around is really not the thing I want to do).
Additionally, what about meta-information we want to store. Descriptions, comments and guidelines which have no place in a normal document, because they are either updated on a regular basis, should be accessible for everybody within our company and/or where maintaining a word document is not really appropriate and useful. Yeah, I know, the best thing would be a Wiki, and we actually have one within our company. But unfortunately it’s a Sharepoint wiki, which sucks completely. For sure, it integrates into our IT infrastructure just fine, but editing and maintaining your pages is horrible. Everybody can format their text as they like (I haven’t seen two pages with the same font, text size or color), attachment handling is even worse (scrolling through dozens of pages to get to your directory – fun!) and once you’ve pasted a linked to your page, you cannot edit the location, you can only delete it and define a new one.
Our current solution is to maintain an offsite-wiki which works for us pretty fine but has the disadvantage that it’s not integrated into our IT infrastructure, so for example users need to be added manually.
What’s your company’s solution to this problem? Where and how to you maintain information, bookmarks and documents? Is your company even aware of the fact, that it looses traction and money with non-existing information and knowledge management?
