Collaboration is important to any business. The sharing of ideas and information inevitably breeds better ideas and more refined information. In an investment bank, sharing is essential.

Everyone is aware of the issues and limitations that exist with current standard communications technologies. Email works better as a point-to-point means of communication or a one-to-many, but as a many-to-many tool it is inefficient and in many ways counter-productive.

Any attempt at one-to-many communication results in 10 conversations occurring at one time and email loses the ability to build trust in an environment where trust is essential.

Instant messaging (IM) was adopted by the financial services industry with vigour, but remained a consumer technology bent to fit the needs of enterprise. In a highly-regulated industry such as investment banking, this was not good enough. We needed to bring people together in a way that enabled them not simply to connect, but to co-create, and neither IM nor email was capable of doing that.

The answer was to implement solutions that filled that gaps between these established technologies and give users an alternative that encouraged better collaboration.

Today the firm is a very different place from 18, or even six months ago.

We have, as far as it is possible to verify these things, the largest internal corporate wiki in existence. More than 3,000 pages have been created by our staff, and more than 1,800 users – some 30 per cent of the bank’s workforce – access and use the wiki. We also have more than 450 internal blogs, as well as what we believe to be the investment banking community’s first ever external blog – telcotech.drkw.com – which is being used by our equity research department to connect with clients in an increasingly competitive market. Users can be updated on changes to the blogs and wikis via RSS.

We have also installed an internal instant chat system called Grapevine – a facility that is also set to be rolled out to clients – that offers an IM function which meets our enterprise and regulatory needs.

But what are the tangible benefits? With the wiki, the most interesting results have been seen in day-to-day changes to the way people do business, and that have a direct effect on productivity.

Once users started hosting meeting agendas on the wiki, they began to see a direct benefit in terms of productivity. The agenda was always up to date and people were much more likely to make dynamic changes to it.

This had happened with email but the difference with wikis was clear to all. Why? The key is inclusion. Junior employees are more confident of making changes and voicing their opinions. The wiki is a collaboration and so an individual was less intimidated by adding to that than by emailing directly to superiors.

It is a minor change in perception but the results are tangible. The wiki counters what you might call the ‘conference room questions’ problem, where people have important ideas, information and questions to contribute but do not want to be seen to do so directly.

With blogs the benefits are more obvious. Internal blogs are used in one of three ways: to ask for help; to transfer information and to do so in a way that is not just a statement but the initiation of a conversation; and to bounce ideas that invite other people to refine the idea, to inform if it has already been achieved and to lend support.

The simple act of making what in many ways are coffee machine conversations open to the whole bank in an efficient manner has its own obvious results. In one case a blog entry complained about a functionality issue that concerned the user, a couple of comments agreed and then a third confirmed that the issue had been fixed. The application’s owner was not aware of the problem, the user was not aware of him, but through the use of collaboration the problem was solved in minutes.

These are small changes to the way people work, but through better collaboration and communication, small changes soon add up and make a real difference to productivity. When a wiki is set up to serve a certain project, email volume relating to that project drops by 75 per cent.

People want to co-operate, collaborate and communicate. Through the top-down recognition of the value of collaboration and the spread of use and learning from early adopters through the business, the uptake of these technologies has been essentially viral, but it is the nature of our employees that drives them.

JP Rangaswami is head of alternative market models and former global CIO at investment bank Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein. He was speaking on this topic at the Blogs and Social Media Forum in London this week.