Six Credit Unions Use Wiki Platform as a Means of Peer Collaboration

Kevin Jepson, Credit Union Journal
September 27, 2007 | COMMENTS

Meet the newly-formed OBDC, six credit unions with a mission: dream up the perfect online banking platform.

They are spread across the country, but they meet regularly. They don't travel, which is expensive and inconvenient, or use telephones, which are awkward and fleeting. And e-mail isn't their thing.

Instead, the Online Banking Development Cooperative meets online at its own wiki, or private website designed for collaboration, taking the century-old cooperative spirit of the credit union movement onto the Internet.

"It's proven to be a great way to find out if our home-banking ideas resonate with a wider credit union community," explained Dale Davaz, director of online services at $875-million Spokane Teachers Credit Union (STCU), which spearheaded the collaboration at Jotspot, a wiki provider.

"The wiki platform is a perfect vehicle for free-form, peer collaboration," he added. "As new ideas are thought up week to week, the wiki lets us openly discuss and prioritize them in near-real time. It organizes large amounts of information far better than trading e-mails ever could."

Even amateur users can easily edit content or take advantage of the shared calendar tool. Users get e-mail notification when content is updated.

STCU's venture is typical of the new way credit unions and other businesses across the world are using the Internet to brainstorm with other businesses—even competitors. And though credit unions aren't new to the idea of crossing the line to collaborate with one another, the new breed is doing it online.

The philosophy is simple, as expressed by John Brozycki, information security officer at $2.1-billion Hudson Valley Federal Credit Union in Poughkeepsie, New York. "Innovation can happen any time people get together," he said. "But online conferencing makes it easier to get people together and allows them to do so more frequently."

Take $172-million South Western Federal Credit Union of La Habra, California, which uses listservs, collaborative websites, and web conferencing sites, among others, to troubleshoot technologies and "push ourselves to learn just a little more," according to computer analyst James La Borde.

La Borde has dipped into third-party fountains of knowledge at collaborative websites that allow users to post questions and get answers from other users, such as Experts-Exchange.com. He also participates in application-specific listservs, such as those hosted for Microsoft products.

The results? "I've been able to expand my learning far beyond what I otherwise would have," La Borde said. "They also give me the confidence to try more ambitious projects, as I know that I have resources available in case I get stuck. So we've been able to produce solutions in-house at huge savings both in dollars and in time."

La Borde brushed up on his Visual Basic for Applications skills through one listserv, enough so that he was able to fry bigger fish. La Borde created an alert tool within Microsoft Access to identify complex core processing, ATM, shared branching, optical, and home-banking system errors. He now shares the tool with other credit unions at a core system listserv.

In fact, many credit unions are tied into their core processors' listservs. EECU of Forth Worth, Texas, gets "a wealth of ideas, a forum to assist with problems and an easy way to get free code," from its host system listserv, said Bill Burrows, chief information officer at the $615-million credit union.

The listserv's 1,200 participants send Burrows more than 50 e-mails per day, he said. One valuable tidbit in those e-mails was free programming code for quickly adding electronic alerts to EECU's Internet banking.

But perhaps the "most beneficial means of collaboration" at HVFCU is "WebExing," according to Brozycki. WebEx is the trademark used as a generic term for web conferencing.

HVFCU Webexes to train on new products, view product demonstrations, review upgrades, and get technical support for servers—"you just WebEx from the problem server to your vendor," he said.

La Borde agreed. "We can connect to a vendor and allow them to take over the system in question. That allows us to see the fix being done without the expense of bringing the person to the credit union. It's also a great learning tool as it is so much easier to grasp what is being done when you can see it first-hand."

Meanwhile, Vantage Credit Union in Bridgeton , Missouri , is using an online collaboration tool called Basecamp to manage its CRM technology project with the software provider and a CUSO consultancy. Basecamp provides message boards, file-sharing, calendars, milestones, to-do items, and time tracking for the $500-million credit union.

Unlike work completed without Basecamp, "we've seen improved understanding across the board of what's going on, what needs to be done and agreement on due dates and tasks," said Eric Acree, executive vice president at Vantage. "We've even started using this tool for smaller internal projects."

This article appeared at www.cujournal.com and is reprinted with permission.