In the beginning there were the filing cabinets. Often they were located far away from the employees who needed them, either down the hallway from their desks or on another floor entirely. And yet if you needed an HR form, a project document or a copy of a company memo, you could expect to find yourself standing in front of half-open drawers, flipping endlessly.
Eventually, once PCs took over most companies, there was the shared folder or drive. On the plus side, you didn’t have to get up from your desk to access the information you needed. For any organizations, though, shared folders became a dumping ground, where nothing was really organized and it was still a laborious process to stay up to date on major initiatives, find answers to common questions and more.
Thankfully, the rise of digital tools has given everyone from large enterprises to small and medium-sized businesses or startups the ability to collect, store, organize and provide access to critical information from any device. Depending on where you work and how you set one up, these might be described in a variety of ways:
Intranet: An internal website that customers don’t see but is purely designed to let employees browse through sales enablement materials, marketing collateral, project documents and more.
Wiki: While wikis can be used as an intranet, they are designed to encourage real-time collaboration where anyone can edit the files stored on them, much in the way volunteer editors update the articles on Wikipedia pages. In this case, of course, the wiki would still be reserved solely for staff.
Knowledge Base: This is a broader way of describing a digital resource that may combine elements of both intranets, wikis as well as business social networking tools that facilitate conversations among employees or teams of coworkers.
There are even more ways to describe the kind of tool we’re talking about, but they all come back to a common purpose: knowledge management.
In the most successful organizations, regardless of their size, you’ll often notice an unusually high level of team cohesion and collaboration. Even if you’re dealing with several different individuals from the same firm, they seem to act as one, basing their decisions from a common vision, the same data and other resources. That’s knowledge management in a nutshell.
Knowledge management is more important than ever because so much of our workforce is mobile, decentralized and juggling multiple priorities at once. A company knowledge base keeps everyone on the same page, and reduces the time it takes to bring new employees up to speed. Cross-training becomes much easier. It also ensures that, if someone leaves for another job, there are ways to capture some of what they learned.
If you don’t have an intranet, wiki or knowledge base set up today, here’s how to think through developing one:
Step 1: Think like a search engine
If you begin typing a query into a search engine, you’ll often see it attempt to complete your sentence for you. That’s because its algorithms have noticed the most frequent searches around a particular topic. Knowledge management at a company can work much the same way.
Before even determining the technology tools you’ll use, for example, figure out what kind of information needs to be disseminated and used across the entire company.
Think about conducting a simple internal survey or poll among your team. What kinds of files or documents do they all use regularly but struggle to find? Where is it important to maintain version control across such shared documents?
This is where you’ll begin to see the forms, files, documents, templates and other materials that will be common across everyone who uses the knowledge base. From there, you’ll start to see more specialized resources that might be important to a particular department. You can begin to build special areas for these groups to minimize the time they take searching.
Step 2: Assign roles and levels of authorization and access
Digital tools like wikis and intranets can be great in that any employee can look at them, but that doesn’t mean everyone needs to see everything.
A knowledge base might contain some sensitive information around salaries, for instance, or customer agreements and supplier contracts that should only be viewed by those with the right level of seniority or clearance. Think about what kind of permissions you’ll need to assign across various individuals and teams before you go live with anything.
Also make sure it’s clear who is responsible for ongoing management and updates to your intranet, wiki or knowledge base. Though these are tools intended to be helpful to all, they need the same kind of ease in resolving problems that you offer externally through your customer service teams.
Step 3: Imagine your engagement strategy
It’s an age-old problem in too many organizations: a lot of time and effort goes into creating an intranet, and almost no one in the company uses it.
Much like bringing a new product to your external customers, the best way to avoid those kinds of issues is to think of a sort of internal marketing campaign that will drive the kind of activity that will be most valuable to your team.
Some examples of this include offering regular updates on what’s been newly posted on the intranet, wiki or knowledge base via an employee-only newsletter. Other companies use internal social networking tools to share links back. Even group text messages might work in some organizations.
You should also think about how you integrate the knowledge base into your standard business workflows. Maybe the minutes for your next meeting could be captured on an intranet or wiki in real-time, for instance. Or you could launch a project by asking everyone involved to dive into the knowledge base to get the background materials, and then share their status updates there instead of a long email chain.
While your customer-facing website might only get refreshed occasionally, think of your intranet, wiki or knowledge base as an ongoing work in progress. Much like knowledge management itself, the work is never fully complete, but it can always be improved upon.
