How to Create an Internal Knowledge Base for Your Growing Team
Knowledge base initiatives — if done incorrectly — can be unsuccessful and ineffective. Learn how to create a useful internal knowledge base from Guru.
Creating a knowledge base takes time. You need to document all of the information that your team needs, systematize the docs and naming conventions, and curate the content in a way that is usable (and scalable). Once it’s created, you need to devote your time to continually updating it. Most importantly, you need to create something your team actually uses. It must be very easy to find information, and they should be able to clearly tell if what they are reading is accurate or out-of-date. Knowledge repositories are notoriously unsuccessful because of the time required to produce and update them, combined with uncertainty that they are even being leveraged by the team. No one wants to spend time on something that never gets used, so the repository gets stale over time and eventually stops being used altogether.
There is good news: your team is already developing a knowledge base! Through the questions they ask and information they request, they are indicating what content should be added to your knowledge management system. There is also bad news: instead of becoming a resource to benefit the entire team, this wealth of knowledge is getting trapped in one-off emails and chat conversations, making it too hard to find or know if it is still accurate. Because of this, your employees are interrupting their work on a daily basis doing endless searches and asking experts the same questions over and over. The more your team grows the more impactful this becomes to your team.
We want managing and sharing knowledge to be easy, which is why we started Guru. Today we are excited to announce our new Q&A feature, which takes the typical process of asking questions and adds in a workflow that allows the answers to be automatically stored and updated. Like chat and email, all you have to do is ask the question and select the person or group you would like to answer it. Unlike chat and email, Guru stores this question so your entire team can easily find the answer, and our verification workflow reminds the expert to update their response (which takes about two minutes). Your content remains relevant without anyone having to remember to find and update their content.
All you have to do to start this process is ask your coworkers to ask their questions in Guru. Then, when the questions reach a critical mass, you can use the Card Manager to organize the information into Collections and provide a curated experience for your employees with only a few clicks. Doing exactly what you were doing before, answering your team’s questions, you have built a knowledge base that your employees can use as a resource for answers and information without ever leaving their workflow or interrupting their coworkers. Now you can stop toiling over the structure of your wiki, get back to your job, and watch a meaningful knowledge base emerge before your eyes.
Creating a knowledge base takes time. You need to document all of the information that your team needs, systematize the docs and naming conventions, and curate the content in a way that is usable (and scalable). Once it’s created, you need to devote your time to continually updating it. Most importantly, you need to create something your team actually uses. It must be very easy to find information, and they should be able to clearly tell if what they are reading is accurate or out-of-date. Knowledge repositories are notoriously unsuccessful because of the time required to produce and update them, combined with uncertainty that they are even being leveraged by the team. No one wants to spend time on something that never gets used, so the repository gets stale over time and eventually stops being used altogether.
There is good news: your team is already developing a knowledge base! Through the questions they ask and information they request, they are indicating what content should be added to your knowledge management system. There is also bad news: instead of becoming a resource to benefit the entire team, this wealth of knowledge is getting trapped in one-off emails and chat conversations, making it too hard to find or know if it is still accurate. Because of this, your employees are interrupting their work on a daily basis doing endless searches and asking experts the same questions over and over. The more your team grows the more impactful this becomes to your team.
We want managing and sharing knowledge to be easy, which is why we started Guru. Today we are excited to announce our new Q&A feature, which takes the typical process of asking questions and adds in a workflow that allows the answers to be automatically stored and updated. Like chat and email, all you have to do is ask the question and select the person or group you would like to answer it. Unlike chat and email, Guru stores this question so your entire team can easily find the answer, and our verification workflow reminds the expert to update their response (which takes about two minutes). Your content remains relevant without anyone having to remember to find and update their content.
All you have to do to start this process is ask your coworkers to ask their questions in Guru. Then, when the questions reach a critical mass, you can use the Card Manager to organize the information into Collections and provide a curated experience for your employees with only a few clicks. Doing exactly what you were doing before, answering your team’s questions, you have built a knowledge base that your employees can use as a resource for answers and information without ever leaving their workflow or interrupting their coworkers. Now you can stop toiling over the structure of your wiki, get back to your job, and watch a meaningful knowledge base emerge before your eyes.
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