Information is power. That’s why it’s so crucial for organizations to make the most of the implicit, institutional knowledge and expert know-how within their organization. In this article, we’ll explore why knowledge management is important for the enterprise, what challenges knowledge management software helps solve, and how to assess the relative strengths and weaknesses of knowledge management systems.
What is the role of knowledge management in enterprise organizations?
Knowledge management systems are built to help organizations collect, store, and access information. Beyond the straightforward purpose of cataloguing important information, there are many other reasons why enterprise organizations would invest in a robust knowledge management platform:
- To allow employees to self-serve answers to their questions without needing to interrupt others or wait for a response.
- To increase productivity by making it faster and easier for employees to find the information they need.
- To make asynchronous collaboration across teams easier and more efficient.
- To improve employee training and onboarding by codifying best practices and empowering new hires to bring themselves up to speed.
What is the knowledge base?
The foundation of your knowledge management system is your knowledge base. A knowledge base is a centralized digital library that contains all the information your employees need to do their jobs. That includes a broad spectrum of knowledge types and sources, from simple how-to guides to highly technical documentation.
Enterprise organizations need knowledge bases that do more than just store data. Knowledge bases must organize critical information and surface it effortlessly when it’s needed. They bring your organization’s collective wisdom and insight together in one place from which users can self-serve solutions to their thorniest work problems. Knowledge bases must be self-sustaining, too, with mechanisms for constant assessments and updates built in to ensure the knowledge remains fully up-to-date.
Human validation—voting, accepted answers, clearly identified subject matter experts—is another crucial factor to consider in evaluating knowledge bases and knowledge management systems. A trustworthy, reliable knowledge base that employees can confidently turn to for answers to their questions requires that information be vetted and validated by human experts.
What is knowledge management software?
Knowledge management platforms like our own Stack Internal are designed to allow organizations to capture and preserve knowledge organically, facilitate communication and collaboration across teams, and make important information easily accessible to anyone who needs it.
When done correctly, knowledge management is time-consuming and work-intensive. Knowledge management platforms automate the processes of capturing, preserving, surfacing, and sharing knowledge as much as possible, making it easy and natural for employees to contribute to your knowledge base and turn to it for reliable answers.
What are the key features to consider in enterprise knowledge management software?
What should a good enterprise knowledge management software look like? Here are some features you should keep a look out for:
Compare best enterprise knowledge management software
It’s time to do some comparison shopping. In this section, we’ll provide an overview of our knowledge management platform, Stack Internal, and highlight some of its standout features for the enterprise.
Stack Internal
Stack Internal is built to streamline collaboration and knowledge discovery within organizations. It enables a natural exchange of information, giving people easy access to information they need while minimizing disruptions. Teams use our platform to collaborate privately and securely, boosting productivity and problem-solving by giving users access to relevant knowledge. It helps remote and hybrid teams onboard faster and collaborate more productively, encouraging continuous learning and skill improvement.
Here are some key features of Stack Internal:
- Community-centered collaboration: Our platform is built to allow team members to share knowledge, ask questions, and provide answers in a secure, private environment.
- Powerful search and knowledge discovery, right in your employees’ workflows: Stack Internal leverages the same advanced search capabilities as our public platform. Users can quickly find answers, tag relevant topics, and uncover valuable insights from the collective knowledge within their organization. Our search and discovery tools work on and off the platform, thanks to integrations with developers’ favorite tools that surface knowledge where they’re already working.
- Familiar, trustworthy platform: Stack Overflow’s public platform is trusted by developers around the world, many of whom habitually work with one tab open to Stack Overflow. This exceptional level of familiarity flattens the learning curve and helps drive adoption.
- Recognized by G2 for Ease of Admin: Stack Internal streamlines setup, maintenance, and scaling, ultimately saving time and reducing costs.
Stack Internal customers include companies of all sizes, across all industries. Explore more testimonials on G2 to see how organizations are leveraging Stack Internal.
I like the familiar interface. As an active contributor to the public-facing Stack Overflow and multiple Stack Exchange communities, I felt right at home using Stack Overflow for Teams.Gerald F., senior product manager, design system
Stack Internal vs Confluence
Confluence is an open workspace platform that allows teams to create, manage, and collaborate on a wide range of projects, from product launches to marketing campaigns. Confluence offers dedicated, organized spaces and integrates with the Atlassian suite.
Here’s where Stack Internal stands out in comparison with Confluence:
Learning and collaboration functionality
- Stack Internal enables cross-team collaboration by allowing open access for all users, regardless of their title, role, or department. But if you need to keep specific projects or sensitive information within a limited group, Teams enterprise offers Private teams functionality.
- Our knowledge base is both proactive and reactive: Content is added proactively based on an anticipated need and reactively based on an immediate need.
- Built-in community and usage insights help identify, reward, and recognize skill-based experts within the organization.
- Metrics help uncover opportunities for reskilling/upskilling to support key technologies and business initiatives.
- Knowledge reuse is a key metric and driver for productivity and efficiency. This metric assesses the reusability of knowledge already in the system.
- Stack Internal features such as search, tags, comments, and notifications enable organic collaboration.
Integrations and ease of use
- Stack Overflow allows users to avoid vendor lock-in. Our platform works alongside Confluence and other Atlassian tools the customer has already invested in, so developers can keep using the tools that work for them.
- Stack Internal breaks down silos. Users don't have to know the specific expert to get their questions answered; they can tag user groups and subject matter experts to get their questions in front of a wide net of knowledgeable users organized by department or specific project.
- G2 comparison reports rate Confluence’s ease of use, ease of setup, and quality of support particularly low compared to Stack Internal.
Stack Internal vs Guru
Guru is a collaborative knowledge management platform that includes AI-powered search, intranet, and knowledge base/wiki features in one platform.
Here’s where Stack Internal stands out in comparison with Guru:
Learning and collaboration functionality
- Our platform organizes knowledge into a Q&A structure that facilitates organic communication and helps keep knowledge fresh by encouraging updates from the wider community.
- A gamified reward structure encourages participation and puts a spotlight on high-performing contributors.
- Guru offers many ways of adding content to the knowledge base, but that amounts to a focus on information quantity over quality. Stack Overflow emphasizes quality through voting, accepted answers, and the Content Health feature.
- Guru is oriented around users proactively sharing information, not asking questions that drive knowledge-sharing in an organic, sustainable way.
Integrations and ease of use
- Stack Internal is built on a developer-focused platform with millions of regular users around the world, which means higher rates of adoption and usage. Over time, this yields a superior investment for Stack Internal customers.
- Unlike Guru, Stack Overflow offers self-hosted options.
- In G2 reviews, Guru users report difficulty keeping existing knowledge fresh and up-to-date.
Stack Internal vs Bloomfire
Bloomfire is an AI-driven knowledge management platform that leverages GenAI to improve team productivity with features like advanced search, content authoring tools, and scalable architecture.
Here’s where Stack Internal stands out in comparison with Bloomfire:
Learning and collaboration functionality
- Our platform organizes knowledge into a Q&A structure that facilitates organic communication and helps keep knowledge fresh by encouraging updates from the wider community.
- Bloomfire’s Q&A feature focuses more on finding knowledge than on creating/sharing knowledge.
- Stack Internal features long-form content (Articles) built into our platform in a format that can be easily edited and maintained.
- Our Content Health feature automatically identifies likely out-of-date knowledge within Stack Internal to ensure accuracy over time.
Integrations and ease of use
- Stack Internal is built on a developer-focused platform with millions of regular users around the world, which means higher rates of adoption/usage and a superior investment for Stack Internal customers.
- G2 comparison reports rate Bloomfire's ease of setup low in comparison to Stack Internal.
Stack Internal vs Glean
Glean is a unified search tool that surfaces information from a company’s apps. Since Glean acts as a search layer on top of all the apps a company uses, Stack Internal is a complementary solution. We help companies build a central knowledge base; Glean’s enterprise search can be used to surface that knowledge. Stack Overflow is already a trusted developer resource that helps devs stay in their workflows. We provide context-rich solutions to developer questions, while Glean surfaces existing information in separate platforms.
Here’s where Stack Internal stands out in comparison with Glean:
Learning and collaboration functionality
- Stack Internal offers a Best Answer feature to give users the most correct and up-to-date information. Question authors can mark an answer as the accepted answer. This helps users trust the platform to provide accurate information relevant to their needs. Community-sourced content, subject matter expert identification, voting, and reputation points build trust in your system and knowledge base while contributing to community building.
- Our Content Health feature helps organizations keep their knowledge base accurate and relevant over time.
- Stack Internal is designed to unlock and democratize knowledge silos by building a central knowledge base available to all users. While Glean is focused on knowledge-finding, we’re focused on knowledge-sharing and knowledge-building.
- Because of Stack Overflow’s excellent reputation among developers and technologists, our platform is well-suited to foster adoption and community-building through gamification and rewards.
Integrations and ease of use
- Stack Internal enables a bi-directional flow of knowledge between the Teams platform and developers’ preferred tools.
- Stack Internal surfaces knowledge right where developers are already working, pushing information into their systems and encouraging organic knowledge-sharing.
How to choose the best knowledge management system?
Choosing the right enterprise knowledge management system is an important decision that can plant the seeds for a culture of knowledge-sharing and reuse at your organization. In choosing the best knowledge management platform for your company, it’s important to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of each option, along with the specific business goals you’re aiming to meet. Consider factors like ease of use and adoption. The best knowledge management software in the world won’t add a lot of value if your employees don’t use it.
Explore the features that make Stack Internal the first choice of organizations like Bloomberg, Dropbox, and Expensify.
Using Stack Internal has allowed us to reduce the number of questions and support tickets that come to our product team and SME's by increasing the ability for people to self-service and answer their own questions. They can quickly and easily search for similar questions allowing them to solve their own problems before submitting a question.Anna C., Senior technical product manager
FAQ
The main benefits include increasing employee productivity by allowing them to self-service answers, improving asynchronous collaboration across teams, and enhancing employee training and onboarding processes.
Human validation is crucial for ensuring information is trustworthy and reliable. This involves mechanisms like voting on answers, marking accepted answers, and clearly designating subject matter experts (SMEs) to vet the accuracy and quality of the content.
Primary functions of an enterprise knowledge base are to organize critical information, surface it effortlessly, and be self-sustaining with mechanisms for continuous assessment and updates.