Goal "Shorten the time it takes for your new employees to get productive"
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Content
Check out our blog article Knowledge Management: Flying only got successful once people stopped imitating birds (in German)
Make it easier for your employees to get organized
File systems mostly offer a single "one-size-must-fit-all" view on your organization's information. Relevant resources may be buried deeply in directory paths. This requires your new employee to learn and memorize ways of accessing things. Those ways are not necessarily logical but may have grown organically.
The reason why illogical directory paths persist is simple: on one hand, "either-or-filing" in folders forbids "as-well-as-filing" according to topics, and on the other hand all existing employees might have happily memorized directory paths. So you wouldn't want to break their work setup in favor of making life easier for your new employees.
- SMW allows your new employees to design their personally optimized{{#tip-info:in terms of what they need as well as her perceived terminological logic}} dashboard for naming and accessing the resources relevant to them.
- SMW allows your new employees to interact by keywords, like so: "Hey SMW, what is there about Ansible?" (Check out SMW's answer in the context of SMW CindyKate. Among other things, they learn that there is a build- and a restore-instruction as well as a repository of Ansible roles on Ansible Galaxy.)
- SMW heeds Principle "Uniform Resource Identifier (URI)" which avoids fuzzy access paths to resources as well as Principle "Information by reference instead of information by value" which avoids outdated information e.g. in e-mail inboxes.
Make it easier for your employees to get used to your organization's vocabulary
Here's an illustrative example: let's say your company manages customers and one of those customers is referred to as National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Now you hire someone who is somehow familiar with your business domain. However, at his former employer he referred to the client NASA instead of to the customer National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Instead of forcing your new employee to adopt your terminology and referential habits (immediately), she can
- add client as a synonym for customer (Design Pattern "Allow for component types to have multiple synonymous titles") and
- add NASA as a synonym for National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Feature "MediaWiki Redirects").
And your company might even benefit from your employee's "fresh view" allowing you to improve your corporate terminology. SMW's capability to efficiently rename things allows you to honour the boyscout rule.
Make it easier for your employees to be up-to-date
Feature "Watchlist" allows your employees to be alerted whenever selected information resources (identified by URIs) change.
Make it easier for your employees to gain deeper understanding
For many corporate tasks and positions, people have to learn more than just procedures and practices. They need to gather understanding, which is obtained by grinding through and studying things. One aspect that facilitates understanding the present is to know about how things developed in the past.
Feature "MediaWiki View History" enables full insight into how a piece of information was created and how it developed into how it looks today. Heeding Principle "Revisions Accounted For (RAF)" it also allows the student to refer back to revision authors for further explanations.