Over half a year ago, “Wiener Wohnen”, Europe’s largest public-housing management service, transferred their company manual and their complete process and document management system onto a wiki platform. Here is a progress report.
“Introducing the wiki was a bit like doing a clear out,” says engineer Dietmar Milkovits. He is the head of the quality management department at “Wiener Wohnen“, a company full of tradition which can trace its roots back to the 1920s. As an agency of the municipal authorities of Vienna, “Wiener Wohnen” manages, renovates and operates about 220,000 council flats in 1,800 residential areas, making it the largest public-housing management service in Europe. During their work, about 750 employees are faced with a multitude of regulations: the Word document in which they used to be collected together was a good 600 pages long. Manipulating this data was thus very laborious, as was searching for regulations and using the connected documents required.
“More than just hype”
“The greatest challenge for the future was to make this mass of information understandable and transparent for our staff, and we wanted to make use of a well-known and proven tool,” said Milkovits. For this reason, in 2017, the company management decided to transfer this company manual and all the document and process management systems into a BlueSpice 3 wiki from Hallo Welt! GmbH, known as MAAS (this is short for the German word MitarbeiterInnenanleitungssystem meaning “Staff Instruction Manual”). Even the in-house intranet was replaced in the process, as though in passing, and since May 2018 “if I need anything, I look in MAAS.”
“A wiki is more than just hype. It is something stable, lending itself to extensions and being customised for future challenges,” says Milkovits, whose department looks after MAAS and operates the platform. He names the fundamental plus-points as the search function, the simple structure with many cross-linking possibilities, the function to print documents as PDFs, a pleasant layout and a rights system which is easy to adapt.
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