Building an Internal Knowledge Base
Small organisations run on knowledge held in a few people's heads. That works until someone leaves, is ill, or is on holiday when something breaks.
A knowledge base converts that into something the organisation owns. The obstacle is never creating it; it is keeping it current.
What to document first
Start with what would cause the most disruption if the person holding it were unavailable.
Process documentation for recurring tasks: month-end, payroll, onboarding, ordering, common customer requests.
System documentation: what systems exist, what they do, who administers them, where credentials are held, and who to contact at the supplier.
Decisions and their reasoning, which prevents relitigating settled questions and explains why things are as they are.
Do not attempt to document everything at once. Ten genuinely useful pages beat two hundred that nobody trusts.
Structure and findability
Findability determines whether it is used. Good search matters more than elegant hierarchy, because people search rather than browse.
Consistent titles help enormously — name pages as the question someone would ask.
Keep documents short and single-purpose. Long documents covering several topics are hard to find and harder to keep accurate.
Keeping it current
This is where knowledge bases fail. Stale documentation is worse than none, because people follow it and get wrong results.
Assign an owner to each page, with a review date. Unowned documents rot.
Build updating into the work: when a process changes, updating the document is part of the change rather than an afterthought.
Delete aggressively. Archiving obsolete content is better than leaving it findable.
Tools
The tool matters less than the habit. A well-maintained set of documents in your existing suite beats an elaborate dedicated platform that nobody updates.
Requirements are straightforward: good search, easy editing, version history, permissions, and links between pages.
Avoid platforms that make editing difficult, since friction in editing is what causes documentation to go stale.
Encouraging use
Answer questions by linking to the page rather than repeating the answer. If the page does not exist, write it and then link to it.
Include documentation in onboarding, which both helps the new person and surfaces gaps, since they will find what is missing.
Track which pages are actually viewed. Pages nobody reads either address something nobody needs or cannot be found, and both are worth knowing.
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