DICE delivers free DICEWise Wiki to save clients time, money

BAY CITY, Mich.—DICE has begun using the knowledge management solution SamePage from Fremont, Calif.-based eTouch to tighten up operations, cut down on wasted paper and postage and deliver up-to-date efficiency to its central station clients through the implementation of the DICEWise Wiki. The best part about all this saved time and money, according to DICE president and CEO Cliff Dice, is that it's free for DICE clients. “Someone at the DICEWise Wiki seminar at the Dice Users Group asked me, 'How much does all this cost?' I just said, 'It's free. It's how we develop and deliver our documentation,'” Dice said.

“This is enterprise 2.0 collaboration. It gives you a web-based interface to create and disseminate content to your colleagues and external stakeholders. It includes document management and content management. It really is a combination of many, many things all brought together in SamePage,” said eTouch head of marketing and business development Devang Mehta. “The heart of the product is the wiki, which has many adjacent features like blogs, photos, plug-ins, file management … This changes the dynamic. It allows companies to communicate with their employees and clients in a way that is not unidirectional, and is much more timely and engaging.”

DICE's documentation department developed the DICEWise Wiki out of SamePage. The wiki contains help documents complete with supplementary video and other content to aid employees and customers in real time. Experts within DICE are also using SamePage internally for document creation, document management and editing. Through the blogs and other features of SamePage, DICE staff and central station customers are also able to share ideas and best practices.

Dice praised the leap forward SamePage provides. “In the past we moved from having paper for manuals to digital copies on disc. Nowadays, with our software being cloud computing based—anybody can access it through a browser anywhere in the world—the need for training and documentation takes on a new dimension. With cloud-based computing environments, which are deployable anywhere, you have embedded documentation, which takes us to the wiki,” Dice said. “People think of documentation as a living, breathing thing now that they can modify and add to … You want your customers to be able to add to it … If you're using my product now and you don't know what a particular field is, you can go click on the arrow and it will deliver the webpage with the wiki embedded. And it builds in the whole knowledgebase.”

It's not all about more efficient and timely delivery of documentation, however. “We're in such a green environment now that when we're able cost effectively cut out the printing and the shipping and save on all that paper, that's a pretty big thing,” said DICE client services and head of marketing, Melissa Courville. “It's free to use the Internet.”