Our small business has grown and internal communications are driving us crazy! What should we do?

Growing from a small to medium business involves a lot of frustration for owners and staff alike. We all know that tasks performed in a consistent and repeatable manner lead to better efficiency, productivity and quality, but how do you make that happen with a bigger team and changing roles?

Information Technology provides solutions to the inconsistency problem - particularly inconsistent recording and access to information. What many business owners do not realise is that they have already paid for a solution and just need to start using the tools they have.

Businesses that run Windows Small Business Server have access to an application called SharePoint. On this application platform we can run a Wiki to collaborate on information. Wiki is the Hawaiian word for quick or fast - a valuable quality when talking about information.

Wikis enable teamwork and collaboration by giving a format for multiple people to add information to a searchable central source. Documents can easily be attached or linked, leaving no excuse for leaving documents hiding in deep folder structures or buried in the My Documents Folder.

We can argue that this is not the best place for a wiki or we can build one online in the cloud, there are many possibilities, however many of you already have the tools and just need the right advice to get them turned on and working for you. The collection, collaboration and dissemination of information is more important than the platform if you have nothing today.

Once your wiki is live there are "no excuses" not to document.

As it is updated, relevant people can be automatically sent updates.

We implemented the system in our business after one of our team members learned the product and scored 100% on his Microsoft Exam. The benefits for our company have been many:

• Allows team members to simply edit the knowledge base.
  
• Grows the team's shared memory and knowledge.
  
• More efficient storage of guides, tips, hints.
  
• Repository for company policy and procedure.
  
• Repository for HR related information.
  

Some clues for making a good wiki are:

• Create sample pages and a skeleton structure - don't start with a blank slate.
  
• Edit often, encourage your team to edit and update as they go.
  
• Extend the wiki into new areas - team feedback, post project notes, organising events, discussing company goals, strategy tactics or operations.
  
• Encourage users to search the wiki for answers - and to update anything they find is incorrect!
  

Some traps for new players:

• Watch out for people who stick to the ‘old' ways - those who send broadcast emails or write memos / secrets in their My Documents. Actively encourage them to change.
  
• Make sure the wiki doesn't go stale, if the information is old, its value drops.
  

The barriers to entry for this technology are low, as all Microsoft Small Business Server sites have access to the software free of charge and the set up time is minimal (just a couple of hours) if you know how to do it.

The trick seems to be to focus on one area at a time and get some value out of that, and gradually extend its use as your experience and its usefulness grows. But it's relatively cheap to change your mind if something isn't quite working the way you need it to.

But get a small amount of expert help to get you started. It will save you hours of effort and frustration.

David Markus is the founder of Melbourne's IT services company Combo. His focus is on big picture thinking to create value in IT systems for the SME sector.