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Technical Analyst

Ot_k6g3o6

Hi,

I'm from Australia. I work for Open Arms - Veterans & Families Counselling. We are in the process of setting up a Knowledge base for our Service Desk and for our clinicians.

I'm interested in learning about best practices for how to set up and maintain an effective knowledge base. At the same time, I'm happy to share what knowledge I've gained in the process.

Best regards,

Ot Ratsaphong

Comments

Marianne Miller

Ot,

what a great mission you are working for! The knowledge base you are trying to build will potentially be broad and diverse. You could plan this forever, but you can probably get started with a narrow focu and expand as you gain momentum. Remember, the best way to eat an elephant is one bite at a time.

First off, are you using a specific knowledge base tool? The tool you choose may help to drive how you set it up, but there are definitely a few things you will want to take into consideration.

1. FAQ - what kinds of questions/issues are people asking? How are you capturing this?

2. What are the categories of questions and answers you are organizing?

3. What content types are you planning to include (now and future)

4. Where do you find your answers or document existing resources? What content do you already have and what do you need to create?

5. Who is available to write the content you are providing? Is it one person? or a team? if you could set up a template (at least to start) to ensure you get the basic info requirements filled out, you'll start with some consistency.

6. Are you planning to offer self-service items and if so, how will that be accessible?

These are a few ideas that may get your started, but bt will be important to continuous turned your clients current needs and make sure that our knowledge base stays current and relevant. You may want to set expirations on certain content types, and review them to make sure they still apply or need to be replaced. Set up metrics to track what people want to know and how you are serving that need. Sounds like a fun project and I wish you the best!!

Fernando Bordallo

Piggy-backing of Marianne's great answer, there is little to add. The consideration list she has presented is indeed great advice. If I were to add anything it would be to build the categories skeleton (space) that is easily navigable for those who will curate and maintain the content. More often than not, as our knowledge base grows, articles tend to scatter into places that 'don't make much sense'.

Attempt to set a long-term base for your high-level structure, keeping the sections/areas/categories as ample as possible.

@Ot given you started this a while back, do you have any learnings you'd like to share in as you look back at your journey to this day?

Ot_k6g3o6

@Marianne Miller Thank you for your advice and questions to think about. I apologise for not replying earlier. I have only just received notification of your reply and @Fernando’s reply.

i can’t believe it’s been almost 6 months since I last posted.

I have since built a demo “Clinical Practice Policy Document Library”, which contains policy, procedure, instruction documents as well as template documents. These documents (in the form of pages) will be accessible by our internal and external clinicians. Each page has links to child and parent pages, and a table of contents to help ease navigation. I have also added keyword labels to improve search for topics by key phrases.

a recent demo to our National Manager was positively received. She really like the keyword search facility.
We waiting for the production server to built, after which we will migrate the rest of the content from the demo site.

The next step is to consider how to maintain the site. The focus will be to ensure that the “Library” (Knowledge base) is up to date and relevant clinicians to enable them to provide the best care possible to our clients (the veterans and their families).