All corporations struggle to capture critical information in a way that can be easily maintained, digested and understood by the people who need it. This situation presents itself in every company, every department, and even within business teams of a notable size. Most of us have experienced the frustrating and time consuming processes of:
- Sending out a document with 'tracked changes' turned on, and then reconciling all of the versions that come back to you- doing your best to resolve conflicts.
- Looking through a large document (product user guide, development specification, market research, etc.), only to find that the content is completely out of date- with no plan or strategy to update it!
- Writing a document to address questions that are asked over and over again, but knowing full well that the questions will keep coming.
By distributing the responsibility of managing your corporate knowledge, you give yourself the best chance to avoid these situations and actually achieve goals that you never thought you could.
As an example, we will look at the third item from the list: creating an FAQ document. Everyone in the process has a vested interest in having this document created and maintained:
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Product Managers, Analysts, and Developers: don't want to have to answer the same questions over and over again.
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Customer Service: don't want to have to wait on responses for answers to client questions, and want to ensure a consistent, accurate answer
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Management: wants all employees to be more productive by eliminating the unnecessary emails between employees.
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Clients: want to get their questions answered quickly and accurately!
So, instead of having a single person or group be responsible for updating a word document that sits on a network folder somewhere, which is not searchable, is difficult to locate, and can have multiple outstanding versions- create a BrainKeeper page that everyone can contribute to.
Now, you have a living knowledge repository that can be comprehensive and stay up to date. If a new product feature is released, a Product Manager can add questions that are likely to be asked, and review existing pertinent questions to see if existing answers should be updated. Developers or researchers can add questions that they receive from Customer Support. Anyone from Customer Support could add their own questions and answers as well.
Inaccuracies are resolved as they are found, by the person who finds them- rather than having to send an email to a document admin and wait for a response. New employees have a place to go to learn about the products they will be working on / supporting. Management can have peace of mind, knowing that clients are being serviced better than they had been.
Through distributed knowledge management, the entire company benefits. In this example, clients are also given a much better experience with the vendor. There is quite simply no better way to keep large documents relevant and accurate.
