Wiki To Enhance Productivity At Prayag

Bangalore based Prayag Consulting, which offers a suite of marketing services to clients in the technology industry, has switched its Intranet application from Microsoft Sharepoint to Wiki. The implementation is still under progress and Prayag plans to go live with Wiki, across the organisation by the end of this month.

Need For A Better System

In a knowledge-driven economy, managing and using information effectively is a critical success factor. According to sources at Prayag, there are a few challenges that arise from managing diverse information. The major challenge is archiving information easily and retrieving it quickly.

Sudha Kumar, CEO, Prayag Consulting, said, “Our earlier approach was to rely on, off-the-shelf knowledge management (KM) software as well as the traditional directory structure. While this was a step forward, it did not address our needs comprehensively. We had a two-step process for updating the KM system, which involved, submitting artifacts with keywords or tags to a KM resource that then updated the actual system. Hence, accessing, searching and updating the knowledge management system were cumbersome, leading to underutilization of the knowledge asset. Moreover, we had to rely on more than one source for the information, as it was not a single repository that catered to our needs. Meanwhile, the need for better information mining only grew.”

Sharepoint Fell Short Of Efficiency

Jayanthi Badrinath, Principal Consultant, Prayag Consulting said, “There is no doubt that Microsoft Sharepoint was very useful to us in the beginning, but as the company grew we realized that the application was falling short of intelligence to suit our requirements. We were also keen on exploring something new and better for ourselves. The small business server edition version of Sharepoint was what we were using. The search option on the application was not intelligent enough to search from the enormous content and information that we were accumulating. The application was not motivating our staff enough, and increasing their efficiency level. The knowledge management feature was not competitive as well. We felt leveraging the information properly was very necessary in our kind of business and this application failed to deliver our requirement.”

Why Wiki

Wiki is often used to create collaborative and power community websites, and is increasingly being installed by businesses to provide affordable and effective Intranets, or for use in Knowledge Management. According to Prayag, Wiki is highly effective where group communication and collaboration is needed. “It is as easy as accessing a site on the Internet, where you type the URL to launch your Wiki; the only difference is that it resides on the internal server and is accessible only to people within the organization. Wiki offers a WYSIWG (What You See Is What You Get) editor and there is no elaborate syntax or programming involved, which is a boon for professionals who are not very familiar with. It encourages daily updates to the knowledge repository. People are motivated to use it because they are quite familiar with the format and so there is literally no training to invest in,” said Jayanthi.

For an emerging company, Pragya needed a solution that involved simple installations and maintenance and easy user interface and Wiki appeared to be that solution.
Easy To Use

Excited about Open source and its offerings, Jayanthi added, “A friend of ours had already experimented with Wiki and suggested the same to us. When we saw a demo we understood that this application was exactly what we were looking for. We then decided to deploy it in our organisation. The best thing about Wiki is that the user interface is simple and is available on open source, which means that we did not need to send anything to get this up and running. Wiki is like a blank canvas and we can mend and mould it according to our need and interest.”

Prayag deliberately chose the version which did not involve too much of programming. The company did not need a new server to host the application and thus had absolutely no extra cost involved. Pragya finds Wiki very intuitive and expects that the staff productivity will certainly increase once it goes live with Wiki by the end of this month.

We are looking forward for our staff to start using Wiki soon, as few of us have experimented using it for sometime now and we find it extremely useful," commented Sudha.

Web 2.0 Is Global

Sudha added, “As a player in the technology industry, we have been tracking web 2.0 developments with growing interest. We have been reading a lot about Wiki and its implementation in many global organisations. In addition, we had a chance to witness a live demonstration by a friend at a client’s site. What we saw truly impressed us. Easy retrieval of information is the key benefit that we expect.”
Expectations From Wiki

Prayag is expecting its research team to use Wiki more frequently, as it allows them to keep the information current and access it in a format that is very familiar. For a business that depends on leveraging knowledge assets extensively, the company is confident that Wiki will further its productivity and quality of work.

Jayanthi and her team are now configuring Wiki in a way that will no user need an additional login ID or password, but can automatically log in to Wiki as soon as they log in to Windows.
Concluded Jayanthi, “We researched on the various open source and ‘free’ software available and settled on ‘Perspective’. “We are still in the beta stage and have completed the installation and initiated a population of information. A select few people have been identified to use the system and so far what we have seen is highly encouraging. We are planning to release it to all users at Prayag in January 2008. We are configuring it with a single ID and password for Wiki and Windows as it will be easier and will prompt our staff each time they need to use their Intranet. They will not need to log in separately to the Intranet, which will also save time.”