During my entire stint at ETC my good friend David North and I have always done a good bit of complaining about how we record and store information about our products. At first it was more about how to get info out of his BIG, semi-photographic, Electrical Engineer brain and into my tiny, dyslexic, barely graduated from high school, BFA in Production brain but then it was about how to record information for new ETC Service employees who were being hired at an alarming rate throughout the late 1990’s. What is an SD dimmer? How do I do an I3M upgrade and what is an I3M? DAS…I don’t know anything about DAS…what do you mean you cannot field program the system. I bought a Q119 from you guys and put it into my Colortran D192 rack but only 1 of the 2 dimmers is working…Um….. and the racks are pre-production Beta. Okay this last one was me calling David North in 1992 while I was at NSCA and he was the repair tech at Stageworks Lighting in Raleigh, NC but the fact remained that it was very difficult for someone who never even worked with an LMI dimming rack to provide ‘expert’ support to ETC customers calling for help.
The first way that the ETC Service Department dealt with ‘knowledge issue’ was to build massive product binders for each phone support tech. When someone new started they were given about 10 3-ring binders with manuals and drawings. Slowly each individual would add things to their binders so that they could reference them when needed. Of course this did not help with the sharing of information between service employees. It did not do anyone else good that I had an excellent mark-up sheet of the I3M upgrade process in my binder…at my desk…which got moved every 3 months or so.
The next step was to invest in ‘Knowledge Base’ software program. Tony Romain and David North settled on a nice product and now everyone in the department was being told to start putting info into the database. This would be great. Not only could we share info internally, but we could publish info for our Service Providers and End-Users. Well…it was great…kind of. In the beginning we found the most challenging thing was to edit the info for accuracy and ensure that ‘internal use info’ was kept separate from ‘public use info’. This task fell to me for many years and was quite time consuming. In the end we did manage to get a version onto the Service Technician Pages of etcconnect.com….the 2nd generation of which is still in use today and is now also available to all users of the site.
Mike does Wiki….The whole reason I decided to spend my working time today writing about all of this is because I spent my working time yesterday playing with the ETC Wiki Page (I’m sure to get mail form Fred Foster, Dick Titus or the always lovely Sarah Danke about why I’m not spending more time working during my working time). But let me tell them why, THE ETC WIKI IS THE GREATEST THING to hit the Technical Service Department since the I3M pin extraction tool. I know that a number of people have had a hand in making this happen but the largest leap has come over this summer as Technical Service employee a summer intern to do nothing else but add Wiki pages based on our knowledgebase and other miscellaneous technical information that was floating around the company. I was so inspired that I had to spend the better part of a day play with the Wiki and trying to learn how to add stuff by myself…a little bit of success but I will need some tutoring during my next trip to Middleton.
So…Check it out:
http://www.etcconnect.com/Community/wikis/products/etc-product-wiki-table-of-contents.aspx
And add your own stuff as well….
Have a good show!
Mike