Your Business Nervous System: How to Store & Retrieve Information Which is Vital for Your Business!

[Mohsin Rasool]

Well Business Nervous System term was used by Bill Gates
(if i remember correctly) in his book Business @ The Speed of Thought ,
where he shared that how he have built an in-house knowlegebase
for his company for his staff....

Yes we are not Microsoft...but every business small or big have
some information which is vital for its life and growth...
we better manage it RIGHt..how we do it, is the Question of today!

Ok Warriors here is the case:

You just came across the great post in this Forum. You read it and
you find a great tip in that post. You liked it, You reread it,
You Memorize it , and wow now you KNOW it!

You maybe bookmark it, print-it out, store to Word document...

Same is true for everything you noticed important in any ebook you read,
any course you took, and video you watched, any flowchart you studied
or any case study you may came across....

You had your own vision, own goals, and mission and plans...
now with your own stuff mixed with the information you have got now...
you got a great MIX

Onward you will be consciously or unconsciously using these pieces of information
in your business which will affect the way you do the stuff and results will
also affect due to the action and mindset.....

As You Now know what to do, what not to do, what to do and WHY to do what you do....

Great! Quality Action with Great Mindset results into Quality Results
and your business flourish....

Your business is now more demanding and it is becoming bigger than you...
You bring outside people (Freelancers, Virtual Staff, Staff) and give them the processes,
the mindmaps, the training videos...but this is FACT you cannot transform from your mind
to their minds everything which you know....

Even if you can train them the Best Tasks with Most important info...things are changing
fast...you have so much new information every day..and in that flow of information you
get best tips every day which is equally Vital for your business.

And there are new websites your team make, new articles posted...new tasks...new
lessons...

Question is HOW you manage and store this all information
(online bookmarks to --> passwords for your article directory site!)
in way that it is readily available to anyone in the organization
who needs it to perform the action in best way...

I know it would be an ideal case where we have an ideal application which we just
get and store all information there...which is easy to use, and where our data is
secure , have data in portable formats so we can transfer the data from one place
to other easily....

I want to add that I have used Spreadsheets, Word Documents and Presentations
in the past to store my important information and i hate that way...
as storing the information in their is easy but retrieval is not...

As i said we do not want to store whole threads or ebooks
or reference material but just the important information which
is related to our unique business, goals and processes...

This post of mine is a Question to all fellow Warriors as well as few tips from what
I have already discovered which is working in this case....

In the past few months I had used (to store my imp info) with
CMS(Content Management Systems) like Joomla, and also Wordpress ,
installed at private server and storing information there in categories...

But I have not have much success with it...it was slow and searching,
and linking was not enough...so retrieval was real pain...

Now a days I have been using MediaWiki( Wikipedia software/script) and it is working
great..I have documented my own business processes there, critical information,
access information...and also have got my little in-house knowledge-base working great..
where I have categories like: Content Generation, Website Promotion...and i have been
happy to have some great information logged there which I know and come across every
day at this forum and on any other learning medium....

My purpose of this post was to share what I have learned so far and what we can
learn from the experiences of other Warriors... As I know MediaWiki may not be the
good solution for this...as we cannot limit access level on pages level...it was designed
for public content, not for secret business information...where you decide who can
view/edit what ....

Great thing about this Wiki is that my team members are also contributing to it...
and I have learned many new things from them, their bookmarks were wonderful

Hope this post gives your some ideas you can use for your own business knowledge
management. Please share your own views and tips on this very important subject
managing information in your growing online business....

Best Regards,
Mohsin Rasool