A knowledge management system is the organised place a company keeps what it knows, written down and searchable and owned by somebody, so that an answer gets found rather than worked out a second time by whoever happens to be asking. Nobody decides they need one. There is no morning where a company sits down and works out that most of what it knows is sitting inside four people’s heads, that is not the way any of it happens. It stays hidden instead, for years at a time, on account of the workarounds all being small and all of them working, and then one week a workaround is not there and the shape of the thing turns up.
Nuala found hers on a Wednesday in June, and what gave it away was not a failure. She does the operations side of a firm outside Carlow, twenty eight of them altogether, installing and servicing water treatment for dairy farms and a few small food producers, and she was putting a quote together for a creamery that wanted a second unit matched to the first. Which meant the settings the first one had been commissioned at, three years back. She went to the shared drive and found a folder with the job number on it, a scan of the invoice inside, and nothing else at all. So she rang Séamus, who fits and services and has been there nineteen years, and Séamus was in Portugal, on his holidays, and he gave her the settings off the top of his head in about eleven seconds and asked was the far pump still noisy. The quote went out that afternoon. Everybody was pleased with themselves. It took her until the following week to notice what had actually happened there, which is that the whole of the company’s memory of that installation was a man on a beach, and the reason nobody had ever gone and fixed it was that ringing him always worked.
That is the part worth sitting with a minute. The problem does not announce its self, on account of the workaround being so cheap. A phone call takes a minute. A question over a desk takes less again. Nobody is careless and nobody is hoarding a thing, the knowledge simply never had a reason to leave the head it was living in, since asking was always faster than writing. And it was faster. It still is, right up until the week it is not.
Knowledge management is the habit, and the system is only where it lives
The software and the practice get called by the one name, which muddles people, so it is worth pulling the two apart before anything else. The system is the thing you buy. Knowledge management is the practice going on inside of it, and the practice is small enough to say in a breath. Somebody has to get what people know out of their heads and onto a page. Somebody has to file it so it turns up again when it is wanted. It has to reach the people who need it, and it has to be kept current, else it quietly turns into a lie with a date on the bottom. Everything in the textbooks is elaboration on that much.
Now the uncomfortable half, better heard here than discovered in month six. Software is genuinely good at two of those jobs, the filing and the reaching. Getting things out of heads runs on people, and so does the keeping current, and both of them run on somebody being responsible rather than on any feature anybody can sell you. Which is how a company goes and buys a fine system and owns an expensive empty shelf a year after. Nuala had watched that happen at a job before this one. There was a wiki, and there was a launch with a cake in it, and eighteen months on the newest page in the thing was a year old and nobody opened it at all. Nobody killed it either. Nobody was ever asked to keep it alive, and that turned out to be the whole story of it.
The knowledge that is written down, and then the knowledge that is Séamus
Séamus went in for a hip in October and was out of it for six weeks, and those six weeks taught her more about this subject than any article had managed.
Some of it was fine. The commissioning ranges, the parts numbers, the service intervals the manufacturers publish, all of that existed already in paper and in PDFs, and the only work was moving it somewhere a person could find it and putting a name against it for the day a manufacturer changes something. Two afternoons, near enough. That is the explicit sort, and it is the sort every guide gets written about, on account of it being the easy sort. It was also the smallest part of what he had.
The next layer was stranger and it took her a while to even see it was there. She sat in on a call before he went, listening to him talk a younger fitter through a unit that kept tripping, and there was an order to what he did. He asked about the feed water first, always, before anything else at all. He asked what had changed in the last fortnight before he asked what was wrong. And he had a way of telling from the noise whether the trouble was the pump or the thing after the pump. Nineteen years of that and not one line of it written anywhere. He was not withholding it, to be honest with you. He could not remember that he knew it until something went and asked him. So she stopped asking him to write anything at all and started asking him to talk while she typed, and the talking shook loose thirty odd pages that the writing would never have got near.
Then the last layer, the one that does not go onto a page. Which farmer will take a call at half six in the morning and which one will not. When a reading that looks fine is wrong anyway. He tried, fair is fair, and what came out were stories rather than rules, this job, that near miss, the reasoning still sitting inside them somewhere. She wrote four of the stories down and let the rest of it go, on account of a written system holding pieces of judgement, worked examples with the thinking left attached to them, and never holding the judgement its self. A company that takes that on board early saves its self a great deal of disappointment in its own library later on.
Five fairly different products go by this one name
The shopping came after, and it was confusing from the first call, since five different products wear this same label and every vendor selling one of them believes they are selling the thing you asked for.
First up was an intranet, though nobody said the word intranet at any point in that call. Grand product, mind you, no complaint about it at all, and if her trouble had been holiday forms and the staff handbook and a noticeboard she would have bought on the spot. Her trouble was a man’s head and a beach in Portugal. The second call was a document management system, files rather than pages, contracts and signed things with version history and retention rules over the lot of them, and she could hear while he talked that the accountant would love it and the fitters would never once open it. A fortnight in, two separate vendors pitched her learning management, courses and modules and completion tracking, built for putting a cohort through onboarding rather than for the fourth time this month somebody needs a commissioning range. By then she had a blunt question she asked inside the first two minutes of every call, which was what exactly are you, and it saved everybody a good deal of time. The calls got shorter after that.
What she actually wanted turned up in the last two demos. One was a library of articles built for answering questions, search across the top and categories underneath and a wall between what customers see and what only staff see, and when a support desk says knowledge management this is generally the product they have in mind. The other one loosened the hierarchy, anybody edits, pages link sideways to each other, the structure grows out of use rather than being drawn first. Lovely thing for engineering documentation, and famously prone to going to seed when nobody owns the pruning of it, since the freedom that lets it grow is the very freedom that lets it tangle. She had personal experience of the going to seed. Most companies past a certain size end up running two or three of the five side by side and that is healthy enough. What costs money is buying one and asking it to do another one’s job, a wiki pressed into service as a customer help centre, an intranet made to hold a support library, each of them a small daily tax on everybody who has to go rooting about inside of it.
Knowledge base and knowledge management system, the difference that shows up at purchase
These two get swapped about freely and the difference is a small one, though it is worth having straight before money moves anywhere. The knowledge base is the software, the shelf and the search box on the front of it. The knowledge management system is that plus the looking after, the capture habit, the review calendar, the one name responsible, the numbers telling you which pages nobody can find. There is a whole page over here on the first half, what a knowledge base is, so this one will not go over that ground twice. Nuala learned the distinction by asking a vendor what happens when an article goes stale and being told, honestly enough, that the customer handles that part. Which was the true answer and also, plainly said, the entire point of it. You can buy the software half in an afternoon. The other half a company goes and builds for its own self, and there is no invoice anywhere that gets you out of the building of it.
What she could actually put in front of the accountant
Money had to be argued for, so she went and counted rather than asserting anything at anybody. One quarter of the mail into the office address. Six hundred and twelve questions in it, and two hundred and forty of those were something already answered before, somewhere, by somebody. She counted it a second time because the first number seemed too high to say out loud. Two in five, near enough. Teams that run this count on their own mail generally land between a third and a half of the queue, and it is worth doing on your own inbox rather than borrowing anybody else’s figure, on account of it taking one afternoon and turning the budget conversation from a feeling into arithmetic. Every repeat that a customer or a colleague answers off a written page is a conversation nobody has to have at all.
The second return arrived without anybody planning for it. A new fitter started in the spring and read the handover pages instead of interrupting four people all week, so the four people kept their week. That is the sort of saving that never goes into a business case, since nobody thinks to put it there. It did not go into hers.
Quieter again, and slower to show its self, is the third one. When two people answer the same question off the same page, the company says one thing rather than two nearly identical things, and when something changes you go and edit one page instead of hoping a memo reached everybody in time. McKinsey put the cost of hunting for information at close to a fifth of the working week, which is roughly a day a person a week spent looking for things the company already knew somewhere. A leak that size is never dramatic on any particular day. It just runs, every week, quietly, and that is precisely the sort of problem a system exists for.
How it actually got built, which was duller than the guides make out
Implementation guides in this category are fond of telling you to create a culture of sharing and then wandering off somewhere. Here is what she actually did, in the order it actually happened, and none of it was clever.
The counting came first, and it doubled as the seed list. Twenty questions dominated that quarter’s pile, so those twenty got written, chosen off the evidence rather than off a whiteboard in a meeting room, and that alone is most of the difference between a library people open every day and a library people are vaguely proud of. Teams that skip the count and trust themselves to just know the topics are guessing at it, and they guess partly wrong every time. The counting took her a week.
Then the thing that nearly sank the whole of it, which was ownership, and it got settled almost by accident because one person cared enough to put her hand up. One name, a couple of hours a week fenced off in a calendar, and the job was never writing everything. The job was making sure written things happened, got looked at again, got retired when they stopped being true. Over here at Maxdesk we have watched a fair number of these systems die and every single one of them died of nobody owning it. Not one exception comes to mind.
The writing itself took a fortnight, twenty articles split among five people, and before anybody wrote a word they agreed the shape and kept it small. A title phrased the way a person actually asks the question, the answer inside the first two lines, the steps under that, a last-reviewed date sitting visible at the bottom of it. Resisting the urge to launch with three hundred pages took some discipline, mind you. They resisted it narrowly. A small library where every page can be trusted beats a big one where the reader is gambling on each page they open.
Placement mattered more than it sounds like it ought to. Articles went into replies as links, the search box went where people already go when they are stuck, and the rule she settled on is blunt enough, an answer that takes four clicks to reach may as well be in a drawer. Hers sits at one. And the review calendar went in before anybody celebrated anything at all, a date on every article, quarterly on the busy ones, stale pages fixed or retired without any sentiment about it. Six weeks at a gentle pace, and the habit was the actual deliverable of it. The software was only ever the room the habit happened in.
How she knows whether the thing is working
The first Monday of the month gets ten minutes and a spreadsheet, and it has stayed ten minutes all year, funnily enough, on account of the checks being few and cheap. She has not missed one yet.
Loudest of the lot is the ticket count on the topics she seeded. An article about invoicing either shrinks the invoicing questions or it does not, and hers had by the second month, those falling from around forty a month to somewhere near fifteen. No clever attribution required anywhere in that. You watch the very topics you wrote about and you see do they fall.
Empty searches she treats as somebody else writing her to-do list for her. Every decent tool logs the searches that came back with nothing, and each one of them is a person telling you, in their own words and on their own time, what wants writing next. Hers taught her vocabulary as well. Farmers kept searching for hardness while every article said scale, and one synonym went and fixed a dozen dead searches in a day.
Freshness she watches with a suspicious eye after the wiki, the share of pages still inside their review date, and the working floor sits somewhere around 80 percent. A reader who walks into one stale page starts doubting every page after it, and they have no way at all of telling your good articles from your abandoned ones just by looking at them. Hers has not gone under the floor yet.
And the last check is not a number. She goes and asks the fitters whether they are using it. If people are pasting articles into replies daily the thing is alive. If they are answering from memory while the library sits there untouched then something in it is failing them, usually the search or the friction of the writing, and better to hear that in month two than to find it in an annual review. Ask them straight out. They know, and they will tell you a good long while before any dashboard does.
When one of these is the wrong buy, and where we come into it
Now the honest bit, which the vendor guides in this category leave out entirely. If the whole company fits round the one table, a tidy shared folder with a naming convention will carry you a surprisingly long way, and the discipline you learn in the folder transfers whole to a real system the day the folder gets outgrown. Buying software before that day mostly buys ceremony. If nobody will own it, do not start at all, on account of an unowned library rotting in public, and a wrong answer wearing an official look does more damage than no answer at all, since the customer who follows a stale article into a wall does not blame the article. And if the real trouble is people holding on to what they know, no software melts that, no two ways about it. That one is a conversation with a manager in it, and the tool arrives after the conversation rather than instead of it.
Past a dozen people the case is boringly strong, though, and here is our one mention of our own selves, kept where it belongs. Maxdesk ships a knowledge base inside the helpdesk on the free plan, and no plan of ours charges per agent, so the whole team comes in at $0 the same as it would at any price, which matters more in this category than it does in most for the adoption reason above. Hire another fitter and the number sits still. There is a trade and you should hear it from us rather than find it yourself with an eyebrow up. The free workspace carries supporting ads, and those sit in the workspace your own people look at rather than anywhere near a customer, and the conversation history you can see runs to the most recent three months on a rolling window that follows a ticket’s last activity rather than the day it opened. If what is drowning you is the mail itself rather than the knowledge, that is a shared inbox problem first and a library problem second, and it is worth being honest with your own self about which of the two you have.
Whichever software you land on, ours or somebody else’s, the advice this page actually stands on is smaller and cheaper than any purchase. Go and count your repeated questions this week, off your own mail, not off anybody’s benchmark. Write the twenty articles the count points at. Give one person the job of keeping them alive and put it in their calendar where they can see it. Nuala’s library is eighteen months old now and the newest page in it went up last Tuesday, and considering how the last wiki she was near ended up, that is the measure she actually brags about. Séamus is still there, mind you, and still the first man anybody rings. The difference is that the ringing is a choice now rather than the only road there was.