Knowledge base done right
In Brief
Each financial company starts to codify the processes and proprietary knowledge sooner or later. The longer company exists, the bigger the data stockpile becomes. And thus the cost of lost opportunities with knowledge being covered in dust.With the first waves of digitalisation corporations approached the issue in the manner that seemed reasonable back then — file storage, which is obvious while GUI was not invented and the only way to communicate with the machine is command prompt.Further this road knowledge base designers (not that it had been a profession, though anyone who is responsible for knowledge base creation became such a designer by definition) stick to the mental model of keeping documents stored as files, approaching a base in a way one would organize a collection of documents - directory with files. Inertia of this thinking is so strong that until now huge companies with sufficient budgets are sticking to the file storage paradigm. The phenomenon is that widespread that I’ve seen it in companies of all industries: PWC, BNP Paribas, Audi, Capital Group, and many more (the interesting nuance is that most of those companies’ project offices and dev teams use Confluence or its analogues for their work). And everywhere I've seen similar shortcomings.
Issues caused by ftp-alike approach
- The search does not work at full capacity. That should be it. The very reason to have this interface is to find what’s necessary. While stored PDFs could be searched to some extent, it is not enough. Thus, companies are starting to invest a lot of time and effort into tagging and adding descriptions. Obviously, those solutions are not capable of mitigating the lack of proper search.
- Version control and instant updates are not available. Users fed up with poor search behavior soon start to store documents locally. They miss important updates and do not get collateral value that could be found while reaching files online.
- Collaboration barriers. Any corporate leader advocates collaboration and team play, but their tools are building a Chinese Wall between potential collaborators—they have to connect offline and send drafts via messengers.
- integration / interlinking barriers. Locally downloaded files obstruct the natural discovery flow within the information net that otherwise converts information into knowledge.
- Higher risk of duplicates. Issues with the search cause authors to recreate existing research pieces instead of adding to existing ones.
The solution
The solution on the abstract level would be the same as for all the issues of similar nature. The nature of the issue is the wrong interface type was applied. The knowledge base should not be approached as an FTP folder; it has to be done as a company wiki.
There are a lot of open-source and plug-and-play solutions available. If privacy, control, and unique features are priorities, then a custom wiki could be built relatively easily.
In the end, the straightforward and obvious choice could save numerous productivity hours and avoid the non-calculable loss of forgetting lessons learned. The lesson learned with a knowledge base is that it should be done using a wiki design approach.
Summary
Financial companies often use outdated file storage systems for their knowledge bases, leading to inefficient search capabilities, lack of version control, collaboration barriers, integration issues, and duplicate work. This approach, rooted in early digitalization methods, persists despite more advanced tools being available. The article suggests adopting a wiki-based approach for better knowledge management. Wikis offer robust search functionalities, version control, and enhanced collaboration, ultimately improving productivity and preserving valuable knowledge.
