WikiWelten– Learning in Sync with Corporate Life

OEB: Mr. Westeneng, at the beginning of this year, your company introduced the corporate social software tool WikiWelten. What was the idea behind it?

Paul Westeneng: Welten offers interim professionals to banks and insurance companies in the Netherlands. Like in a lot of other knowledge intensive industries, in the financial services industry, knowledge is rapidly aging. We understood that delivering only “canned knowledge” in traditional courses to our interim professionals is not enough to keep up with the high professional standards we want to apply.

OEB: What relevance does WikiWelten have - or should have - compared to other existing learning tools in your company?

Paul Westeneng: All Welten employees enjoy a significant amount of training annually, for which we use several forms of standard courses and exams - mostly classroom-based training for skills and online learning accompanied by books. Passing some exams is a prerequisite to being able to work as a financial advisor in the Netherlands, and these “traditional” formats are well equipped to support an interim professional to advance from a novice level to a junior level. For further growth to a medior and senior level and for keeping up-to-date with the changing environment, traditional formats appear inadequate.

OEB: Surely such an extraordinary project needs a lot of preliminary work. What did your company do to get things started?

Paul Westeneng: Under high pressure and with a lot of overtime, we succeeded in creating a high- quality starting situation: a networked structure of knowledge elements representing financial concepts and related client products. We started off by using what we call the four forces model: technology, content, process and culture. From earlier projects at a different company I used to work for, I knew that technology usually is the easiest part and culture the most difficult.

We selected MediaWiki as our engine because most people in the company, the majority of them young professionals, have seen and used it before when using Wikipedia. We were convinced that by using MediaWiki with a “Welten-like” skin, the threshold for recognising and learning the application would be as low as possible. Furthermore, we predefined a sound structure in the Wiki and filled this structure with all sorts of formal knowledge available in the company.

OEB: Could you tell us more about the issues you focus on?

Paul Westeneng: Well, we are convinced that most learning takes place on the job. But the disadvantage is that our about 1000 or so interim professionals work at about 600 locations. Most of them meet only at social events! So the biggest challenge is to bring about knowledge dissemination among them.

OEB: How does learning on the job take place within this kind of hyperlinked network structure? Where do you see the advantages?

Paul Westeneng: It appears that interim professionals especially use the Wiki just before undertaking a new assignment at a department or institution they are not yet familiar with. After they’ve started, the hyperlinked structure encourages them to wander around through the Wiki and learn even more than they intend to.

Another advantage is that in a Wiki, participants are generally free to contribute to pages and to change them. The WikiWelten pages contain information that is key to professional performance. Nevertheless, Welten decided to keep the Wiki freedom, although only Welten employees can log into or see the Wiki. As a background control measure, specialists of the Welten education department each added a set of pages to their watch list.

OEB: Like in any other social software project, the success of WikiWelten is strongly linked to people’s commitment. How did your staff respond to the tool? Is any encouragement needed to make people use it?

Paul Westeneng: We set up a communication-and-encouragement programme to stimulate the use of WikiWelten. It appears that most people use the Wiki as a consumer quite easily, but only a relatively small group is contributing. Although this is also the case with public Wikis like Wikipedia, we definitely want to take some actions in this area. We especially want to encourage our people to share their field experience.

OEB: Do you have any future plans, concerning the development of WikiWelten?

Paul Westeneng: We definitely want to focus WIKI Welten more toward the purpose for which it appears most applicable. Our approach is threefold. We use classroom and e-learning programs for the formal learning part, like general knowledge about financial services, processes, consulting skills etc. Next, we use a database with detailed up-to-date information about financial products to support our interim professionals on the job. Finally, we want to focus the Wiki increasingly on informal aspects of working in a certain role, at a certain institution or in a certain department. We believe that this threefold approach ensures an optimal mix in keeping our interim professionals fit for their job and enabling them to grow.

 

You can learn more about WikiWelten in the session WEB21 “Social Software in Workplace Learning”, Thursday, November 29, 14:00 - 16:00

 

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