| Company: | Outward Bound |
| Location: | Sandy, Utah, USA |
| Purpose: | Consolidating information from disparate international group |
There is more in us, the collective us, than we know, and
if we can be made to see it, we’ll never settle for less.
Outward Bound International’s (OBI) mission is to help people discover and develop their potential to care for themselves, others, and the world around them through challenging experiences in unfamiliar settings.
At the time of writing there are Outward Bound schools located in 34 different countries offering a variety of courses that are aligned with its operating principles of character development, adventure and challenge, learning through experience, compassion and service, and social and environmental responsibility.
While the details of the courses may vary from location to location, the core principles and many of the operating procedures are common. However, not all the different international organizations were in sync, and due to geographical distance, OBI found that rather than building on experience and knowledge of older, more established, locations, there was a high duplication of effort in establishing new schools.
The result of these findings was the creation of the Outward Bound International World Resources Project. The project’s three main strategic goals were the following:
To support these strategic goals, the project team developed a further set of operational and technical goals, including the following:
After the wiki had been selected and sample content added, the first test of the project was to train Outward Bound staff members on the use and capabilities of the new platform. To do this Outward Bound set up a series of “wikifest” training sessions. These were a mix of in-person workshops (held at seven different global locations) and online webinars in order to reach the largest possible number of potential contributors.
After the first 12 months of operation, the Outward Bound International wiki had attracted 2,029 users and contained 8,287 pages of information. Total page views numbered over 176,000, with just over 34,000 page edits. While the number of wiki page views per month varied – for example, there were noticeable spikes in activity around the time of scheduled training sessions – the underlying trend was positive, growing from 5,000 page views per month to 20,000 page views per month over a 12 month period.
There was also a noticeable increase in activity per user as community members became more familiar with the content and as the value of the content increased. One technique used to introduce the wiki, and to get community members comfortable in contributing and editing content, was to ask each person to complete an online profile (branded as the WikiHR Database), which, in addition to collecting basic information, offered members the chance to share information on subjects and activities that interested them.
Through their own participation, senior management encourages use of the wiki as a way to share knowledge and increase communication between regional centers of operation. Each month a wiki newsletter publishes the latest usage statistics, highlighting new content and specific areas of interest.
The wiki is now so central to Outward Bound operations that knowledge management is built into each Outward Bound school’s annual business plan, and each school has appointed a person to act as “Knowledge Management Liaison.”
Thanks to the shared knowledge aspect of the wiki, a set of best practices has been developed that allows new Outward Bound schools to build on the experiences of other schools. The result is a more efficient set-up process, which has led to new schools being fully operational more quickly than before. Operationally, Outward Bound has moved from separate national islands of information acting under the same brand name to a true international community.
Outward Bound International is now building on its wiki implementation knowledge and experience by developing sister wiki sites for some of its affiliate brands. As well as providing internal operational benefits, the wiki has enabled Outward Bound to position itself as an industry shaper as well as a product leader, enabling it to make a much greater impact at a strategic level.