Svenn Bjerkem

After two years of commuting 3 hours a day by train I decided that I wanted something closer to home. Switched to another German employer, this time in IC business. This time we're running on grid computers so it is not so easy to have a wiki running on the unix servers, so it is back to W2K, this time it is a desktop computer. Apache and ActivePerl is now powering my third company usemod wiki.

After working for a Japanese and an American semiconductor company, it was time to try a German one. This employer did not directly offer devices, but I did internal ASIC development. Again, knowledge management was a topic.

I am also beginning to see a need to manage my own experiences. I see an advantage in UseModWiki being dependent on perl only as packing down the info and moving it to another machine is not so complicated as other wikis depending on a backend database.

I used to work in customer support in a large American semiconductor manufacturer I had to manage a lot of customer questions and engineering answers. I tried many ways of organizing the info that passed my desk and usemod wiki helped me the most.

It was a one user wiki running on windows 2000 on Apache 1.3. Due to the unstable nature of a windows 2000 laptop, it was shut down and taken home, I couldn't share with my colleagues. After I left nobody cared about the information I had gathered, tough luck.

I used to work for a medium large Japanese semiconductor manufacturer and my experience is that the one who provide simple, easy to update information sites, will have friends forever. I have seen simple systems grow complex and unusable because the list of features became too long. The Americans say KISS, Keep It Simple, Stupid, and this is a good rule for all kinds of knowledge management systems.