At Caloundra City Council, the Customer Service Officers (who staff the front desk and call centre) have come up with a great way of keeping their intranet up-to-date. It’s called the buddy system, and it works something like this:

Volunteers within customer service are partnered up with key staff within the different business units. They then discuss how the arrangement will work, including who will do what, when contact is made, and who updates the intranet.

The customer service staff then take the initiative, and keep in touch with their assigned buddies, to find out whether there are changes or updates that they need to know about. The decision was made to conduct all of these communications via e-mail.

In this way, the customer service staff, who really need to know what’s happening (because customers ask them questions), drive the proccess. This has been working very well, and the business units have become increasingly pro-active in passing across information.

When a new piece of information is identified, this is forwarded to the rest of the customer service staff, and added to the intranet.

I think this is a great way of sharing knowledge in an organisation as disparate as a Council…