User generated content @ FI’s
March 16, 2007 – 3:26 pmSo we’re talking about making a product manual for our staff to have quick reference to all of our product info. Everyone is talking about “manual owners” and who will be responsible for updating it, making it work in conjunction with the other manuals, etc, when I blurt out “what if we did a wiki?” And everyone but about two people said, “What?”
After a brief explanation of what a wiki is, most people got a little defensive saying things like: “We can’t let everyone make changes” or “We’re in a highly-regulated industry. We don’t want people to have the wrong information.”
So how do you combat comments like that? Is it possible to have wiki-based manuals in an FI due to the strict regulations we face? Obviously some things are fixed verbiage dictated to us by regulations, but internal policies, product descriptions, etc aren’t so they seem fair game for a wiki.
We do all programing in dot net with SQL backends, so what wiki would work best in our situation? Can FI’s even do wiki’s internally?
4 Responses to “User generated content @ FI’s”
We’re using a pretty heavily modified MediaWiki installation for our internal Products and Services manual. We slowly migrated people from a beautiful (but expensive) hard-copy binder, to an online PDF, to the wiki. From a maintenance standpoint, it’s a godsend, and our staff seem to be fine with browsing it.
One thing we made sure to do is make it easy for people to send in notices of out-of-date content by placing an email link on each page that pulls the page name into the subject line automatically. It’s been great for the few times when a rate or fee change slips by us in the training department.
Good luck in your search/implementation!
By Robin Martin on Mar 16, 2007
I’m posting my comment here as I am a graduate student in instructional design; and am consumed with informing the public through training and education; about credit unions and financial matters. Even people I think are smart don’t know basic things. A lot of people don’t know about shared CU services, and some CU websites I’ve reviewed are not clear or easy to navigate for finding products and services. Anyway, I have experience working on Wiki and I can see that it might cause some confusion if people added to it who did not have correct, or did not communicate correct information. But having a Blog for the CU, with a group working in it, can be just as effective. What do you think? I would like to do some graduate internships on writing training and instructional materials on products and services for credit unions. Does anyone have any idea how I could approach the CUs to volunteer these services?
By Deb2929 on Mar 18, 2007
Robin Martin’s iterative approach is good. Another way to cause this to happen is to just set a wiki up and start using for “trivial” things. It let’s people get used to the idea, without triggering their fears and corresponding rejection.
I’d be happy to help you set one of these up if you would like. Feel free to contact me at jesse.robbins (at) blackrockfederal.com
By Jesse Robbins on Mar 18, 2007
I once had an Biology teacher who constantly raved about how accurate Biology journals were because they were peer reviewed. Accuracy of journals is ensured since everything submitted to journals is reviewed by experts. So imagine my suprise when he marked one of my papers down for citing a wiki as a source. My arguement? If journals are so accurate because they are peer reviewed, then wiki’s are even more accurate because not only are they peer reviewed but they’re also not printed and can be changed as soon as new information is available.
Peer review is the key argument you should make. Sure, anyone who wants to can get on and make changes, but then everyone watching that page can see those changes and verify them (or change them back). This is made even easier with RSS feeds and the built-in RSS readers in IE7 and especially Outlook 2007 (which shows RSS feeds just like regular emails)! Just get a couple people who are specialists in a specific area and have them watch those pages. When a change is made, they’ll know almost right away and can review the changes for accuracy.
By Anonymous on Mar 19, 2007