Knowledge base is often one of the most underrated element of company’s information systems. If exists, it is treated as necessary evil to maintain and (why?) to use. Good knowledge base can save company a ton of money. In this article we will give you top 5 reasons why you should implement knowledge base in company.
- All information in one place
- Great resource for new employees
- Processes and procedures
- All resources up to date
- Avoid ’it’s not my responsibility’ issue
All information in one place
Knowledge base should be a center of your information system. Every important piece of information in one place. In many cases finding somewhat simple info, like phone number to accountant or IT department, can be a problem. Employees are wasting time trying to find someone who has that knowledge. And we’re talking about something trivial. But there are many similar problems every day: no complete company info needed for invoice, manuals how to use internal network, procedures, company structure and many more (way more).
Great resource for new employees
Everyone started somewhere. In new job, new office, everything is a mystery. Unless you have knowledge base and special categories for newcomers. You can spend tremendous number of resources to train your staff but at the end of the day they need some info that you didn’t realize they would need, you didn’t consider it as important or even you don’t have it…When they have access to knowledge base, they can easily find basic information they need. They don’t have to ask anyone, which sometimes may be embarrassing (even though it should not be). New employee can doublecheck, if her/he remembers correctly and avoid making mistake. Some parts of knowledgebase content may be also new or unexplored for more experience employees. Many times, they have to do some “unusual” activity, or they have to replace colleague for short time period. Then, having available knowledgebase resources can make this work much easier as no one is fully familiar with all colleagues’ responsibilities.
Processes and procedures
Processes and procedures are great if everyone knows about them and can easily find them if they need to. Many times, we see that things are reorganized, quickly implemented with bright new procedures to be followed. And they are… for one week, month, maybe two months not really used in practice by employees. Familiarizing with them should always be done during implementation phase. Sometimes, in practice, they are just shortly introduced. Then, even more than usual stress should be put on making sure they are very well described and easily reachable by all employees. This is a key to the successful implementation. If you cannot easily check or doublecheck it, you won’t use it.
All resources up to date
If everything is in one place and managed with some sense, you can avoid one of big problems – information which is outdated. It’s a problem especially when resources are in many places and no one is really responsible for anything. When you have company knowledge gathered in knowledge base, it is much easier to manage and maintain it. Also, it is easier to find information when for example some article was added to the base or updated. If you are looking for recent changes in some procedures, you can easily find out if the article about it was recently updated or not yet.
