Launching BeaconHQ - a collaborative, knowledge-sharing platform
This month we have ticked off item 1 of our strategic plan and launched BeaconHQ - a place where we will collaboratively create, share and evolve our organisational knowledge.
Most company intranets are predicated on one way knowledge sharing where information is pushed out to teams by management and generally don’t work due to a number of reasons, lack of buy-in and irrelevance to the user probably topping the list.
We’re hoping that BeaconHQ will be different. Rather than taking the shape of a traditional ‘company intranet’ we are taking the path of launching a ‘company wiki’. Those familiar with Wikipedia will understand that it has many contributors, knowledge is sourced from the crowd and the content is reviewed and scrutinised by peers and moderators.
What is it?
To rip off an unsourced top line of google search, a company wiki is “a central database full of content specific to your business that can be created or edited by your team members. Company wikis are used by employees to collaboratively create and share company knowledge. A wiki can have many contributors and store extensive amounts of information.”
Why use it?
For many years we have wrestled with knowledge management and we hope that by launching BeaconHQ we are taking one small step in the right direction - establishing the shell where anything that matters to our team is documented and shared across our team.
Over the past years we’ve added a number of productivity tools to our kit bag, all with the purpose of improving how we work together to deliver great outcomes for our clients:
Google Drive has allowed us to share all of our files in the cloud and have them accessible from wherever our team is working
Google Docs and Google Slides have allowed us to go ‘multiplayer’ to eliminate the hoarding of knowledge and untimely review processes
Slack has improved how we communicate in public, and
Monday.com has improved the way we manage projects
What has been clear for some time and was further reinforced through our recent strategic planning workshops is there is a clear need for having somewhere central for storing and easily accessing things like: organisational policies, our default approaches to delivering our core services, previous work examples and templates, training and development resources and many more. Additionally, many have raised the importance of iteratively developing our knowledge base and ways of working so that we see improvements across the board with each project delivered.
How it works
The first iteration of BeaconHQ will have basic functionality, including content such as:
Operating System: where we'll store our internally-facing strategies, policies and user guides.
Knowledge base: where we'll store our client-facing default processes, templates and much more.
Team directory: where we'll store information on our individual work preferences to do a better job of surfacing up all of the important information about our work styles to improve how we collaborate.
Communication: an aggregation of all our internal and external communication channels so we can keep up with the many channels that we communicate on.
BeaconHQ will be a central tool that we’ll use to collaboratively document our ways of working, make information a little easier to access for our team and improve the quality and consistency of our work.