Starting a Company Knowledge Base (Score 1)

Getting some sort of knowledge base / business process repository off of the ground is extremely hard to do company-wide. I started as 'The IT guy' 4 years ago when there were only 12 of us. Our employee count has ballooned out to 150 since then.

About six months ago I rolled out a plan to start documenting business knowledge. We used Sharepoint Services 3.0 - not the best knowledge base, but it's what we had available.

The knowledge base has been a huge success in Marketing, IT, and among the Executive Team. It has been a total failure in Customer Service, Shipping and Receiving, and Accounting.

In departments where it was a success, it was partially due to:

• Department-level managerial support
• A manager who could spend some one-on-one time to understand every individual's responsibilities
• Having at least one employee in the department who actually sees value in process documentation. (As a side-note, these are the people who are ambitious to take on more challenging responsibilities)
• Communicating with the department when new knowledge base articles are created

Departmental failures were caused by:

• Lack of managerial support
• Small department size. (There are only two people in accounting. We don't need to do this)
• A manager who is inherintly disorganized

No matter which knowledge base you choose, starting is the hard part. Ironically, I only got the buy-in of the executive team after a few months of using the system, and they offered a budget to get a 'real system'. I don't have time to spend on it, so I'm leaving it as-is. The content can always be ported into something more suited to the job, but Sharepoint works for now.