Kreissparkasse
Saalfeld-Rudolstadt

1. Which contents should be displayed?
   The wiki should map the organization manual, i.e. the areas: Process and structural organization, operational organization, personnel organization, but also safety, material and resource organization, as well as corporate management. There is an area that must meet strict auditing requirements, but there is also a free area that is currently mainly used as a kind of glossary. Questions such as “What is a cost center?” and “How is a reference interest rate calculated?
2. How to comply with legal requirements of the audit?
   The revision requirements are very strict, so the Wiki had to offer solutions. We have a solution in the form of a workflow and release mechanism that is only activated for the organization manual. The business organization can now carry out the review regularly.
3. How can existing regulations in office format be integrated into the Wiki?
   Many documents were stored in Office formats on different drives. These were integrated into the Wiki and are now centrally located in one place and searched by the search function. Changes are now easier to track and the documents receive more attention. This motivates the authors to update and improve the manuals.
4. Present the competencies of employees in a transparent manner
   In a savings bank with 350 employees, knowledge about the competencies of the employees must be quickly available, which is why we have created user profiles in which the areas of responsibility and interests of the employees are made transparent. Name, organizational unit, telephone number etc. are taken from the central data administration.
5. Reduce the information overflow and promote communication
   During the joint meetings with the users it became clear that there was a surplus of information due to non-filterable information letters, information e-mails and the like. Therefore we have integrated a blog into the wiki; news are now posted centrally. Topic categories can be subscribed to according to interest and responsibility. However, the section “Information from the Board of Management”, for example, is mandatory. In just a few days, the blog developed into a lively communication platform with productive comments and valuable contributions from all of the Bank’s specialist areas.

Screenshot: The main page of the S-Pedia refers to important new features

• Open Source Software has saved us costs. Because instead of investing money in a vendor lock-in, it is invested in sensible consulting and adaptation services as part of the cost of action.
• An experienced and competent service provider is of great importance to make the wiki user-friendly, to meet revision requirements and to select suitable extensions.
• Especially the part of the wiki that has to meet the revision requirements is of great importance. Therefore, a lot of time must be planned to discuss the processes available in-house with the service provider in order to be able to map them appropriately in the wiki.
  When the existing organization manual was taken over, many documents could be disposed of because they were outdated or redundant.
• It is difficult to develop new templates and standards. Reading and orientation habits must be brought into line with the possibilities of the new system. In terms of article numbering, however, it brought significant advantages, as the wiki eliminates many numberings, which increases readability.

Information is found again; it is linked in such a way that necessary knowledge for a situation can be developed for itself. Linking to corresponding documentation sections saves long leafing through instructions. In general, communication is completely different, because questions are only asked and answered once, and can be read by everyone.

Almost every day we have new ideas on how to expand the system and make even better use of it. For example, we want to introduce “homepages” for individual areas, which can be used specifically for area marketing. Area-specific or even personal pages are to be used to replace even the still existing hand files with an automatically updated version.

This story is a summary of the article “Finally more time for business through Web 2.0 – The Kreissparkasse Saalfeld cracks its knowledge silos and finds a new way of dealing with rules” by Christian Sauer (Head of Department IT and Business Organization of the Kreissparkasse Saalfeld-Rudolstadt). The article was published in the November & December 2012 edition of the newsletter “Banken-Times Spezial” of the Finanz Colloquium Heidelberg.