One of the best ways to accelerate innovation at your organization is to build and maintain a robust, up-to-date knowledge base. Building and maintaining a repository of important information prevents knowledge loss when employees move on or transition to new roles, and it saves employees valuable time because they don’t have to spend time searching for answers to questions that others have already worked out.
In this article, we’ll talk about what a knowledge base is and its role in knowledge management, collaboration, and innovation at your organization. We’ll also focus on how to keep your knowledge current and relevant as new tools and technologies emerge, best practices are refined, and team members come and go.
Why a relevant, up-to-date knowledge base is important
A knowledge base is the foundation for creating a thriving knowledge management practice. Put plainly, it’s a centralized digital library that contains all of the information your employees need to do their job.
Knowledge bases contain information, documents, and FAQs aimed at solving problems, answering questions, and offering guidance. They include a wide range of knowledge types and sources, from simple how-to guides to highly technical documentation.
Ideally, your knowledge platform doesn’t just store data; it organizes it and makes it easily accessible to anyone who needs it. It brings the collective wisdom of your organization and its employees together in a single place. From there, users can self-serve knowledge, quickly finding solutions to their problems and getting back to more challenging and creative work.
Because technology is constantly changing, your knowledge repository needs to change, too. A healthy, robust knowledge base must be continually updated, so the knowledge it contains remains fresh.
Benefits of a healthy knowledge base
A healthy knowledge base delivers plenty of benefits for both individuals and teams:
- Faster time-to-solution: Our global Stack Overflow Developer Survey found that professional developers spend a lot of time looking for answers to their questions. Specifically, more than 60% of respondents spend 30 minutes or more a day searching for solutions, with one in four devs spending at least 60 minutes looking for answers. A healthy knowledge-sharing and management ecosystem can significantly reduce this time, giving your teams more time for innovation. The faster your time-to-solution, the more empowered employees will be to unblock themselves and help colleagues and customers work through issues when they arise. The efficiency and productivity gains follow from there.
- Knowledge reuse: Expert knowledge must be reusable to have any enduring business value. Instead of subject matter experts repeatedly answering the same questions, a knowledge base makes this information accessible to everyone. Searching for and sharing knowledge eats up a lot of your employees’ time. Our annual developer survey found that 75% of professional developers find themselves answering questions they’ve answered before, while close to half (47%) spend 30 minutes or more a day answering questions. Knowledge reuse allows your most experienced and knowledgeable employees to spend more time contributing to new projects.
- Customer service: An external knowledge base is a boon for customer service. Customers generally prefer self-service over contacting customer support, so an easy-to-use knowledge base can significantly improve customer satisfaction. Internal knowledge bases allow customer success teams to move faster, too. Support agents in different time zones, for example, don’t have to wait for colleagues to come online if they can find the solution on their own.
- Better collaboration and knowledge sharing: A well-designed internal knowledge system facilitates better communication and collaboration among team members. From new hires to seasoned subject matter experts, everyone has a centralized hub for knowledge sharing. Every employee becomes a potential support agent, taggable on a question when their expertise is needed. An up-to-date knowledge base lifts much of the burden from subject matter experts (SMEs) and helps break down silos between teams. For 30% of developers, according to our Stack Overflow Developer Survey, knowledge silos impact their productivity 10 times a week or even more often—that’s an average of twice a day for a five-day workweek.
- Training and onboarding: For new employees, an internal knowledge base can serve as an orientation manual. As new hires get oriented, they can self-serve answers to their questions, empowering them to bring themselves up to speed and reducing the burden on SMEs and managers.
Outdated knowledge presents challenges
Knowledge shouldn’t be stagnant. A healthy knowledge base must be continually refreshed and updated. When information falls out of date and isn’t promptly refreshed, employees lose trust in the knowledge repository. They learn that they can’t rely on it as a source of up-to-the-minute information. And the moment your team stops trusting your knowledge base is the moment it becomes redundant.
When the information in a knowledge base grows stale, teams find unproductive, piecemeal ways to get information, like interrupting a coworker or spending hours struggling to solve an issue for which a solution already exists. As users stop coming back to the platform to add new knowledge, everything becomes further outdated, and the lack of trust becomes an even bigger, self-perpetuating problem.
How to assess the state of your knowledge base
Keeping your knowledge base healthy—that is, comprehensive, accurate, and up-to-date—requires a great deal of manual effort and expert time or a knowledge management platform that can identify and surface information in need of an update.
Here are some things to consider in making your assessment:
- Is the tacit or implicit knowledge (that is, knowledge that is tough to extract/express, gained through experience rather than instruction) within your organization stored where current and future employees can access it?
- Would that implicit knowledge be preserved if current team members moved on to other roles, or would it be lost?
- How old is the content in your knowledge base? How recently has it been refreshed?
- Are people still turning to your knowledge base for answers, or are they finding workarounds because it isn’t complete, reliable, or fully updated?
- What process do you have for subject matter experts and stakeholders to review and refresh your knowledge?
- Do you have regular audits or a quality control process in place?
- How do you categorize content within your knowledge base? Can users tag content to make sure it’s easily surfaceable for the next person who needs it?
- How do you alert SMEs when their input is needed?
Using Content Health to keep your knowledge base relevant
At Stack Overflow, we naturally use Stack Overflow for Teams as our knowledge repository and knowledge-sharing platform. And because even the most comprehensive and well-organized systems need some spring cleaning from time to time, we rely on the Content Health feature to identify and surface knowledge that might be incomplete or past its expiration date.
As we mentioned above, maintaining a healthy knowledge base requires regular reviews and validation of information by SMEs to ensure accuracy and relevance. Collaboration between team members and SMEs is crucial for identifying outdated content and integrating new knowledge; Content Health makes this process as seamless and organic as possible.
SMEs and content moderators can take action by reviewing, updating, or retiring knowledge that Content Health flags, rather than manually scouring the knowledge repository for necessary updates. Content Health flags content worth revisiting through customizable criteria such as creation date, last updated date, frequency of use, and tagged topics. A feature like Content Health keeps shared knowledge relevant so that your knowledge stays healthy and continues to deliver value for your organization.
A source of truth
Your knowledge base is a vital source of truth, providing up-to-date and relevant information to users when they need it. Keeping your knowledge base up-to-date and dynamic is crucial for fostering innovation, improving collaboration and communication within and across teams, and increasing your organizational efficiency.