Challenges using a headless CMS like Contentful to manage a KB

Though Contentful offers extensive content management capabilities, when it comes to managing a knowledge base, it also brings a lot of practical challenges.

Contentful is not built to focus on knowledge base management, providing a first-in-class experience; rather it focuses on the content and depends on various other services to represent the content.

Software like Document360 is purpose-built for knowledge base management and complements your content management team to manage your content effectively. The following factors may help you understand why you should consider Document360 compared to a headless CMS like Contentful.

Getting started is not easy

Contentful is a complex platform that serves a lot of content management purposes. Once you subscribe to a Contentful account, you land inside a portal that demands a lot of learning and understanding of the platform’s concepts like spaces and organizations, content models, etc. You may consider exploring such platform concepts if your organization has complex content management requirements. If you must help your content management team focus on knowledge base management, then these are overheads.

Document360, a Software-as-a-Service provides a first-in-class experience in knowledge base management. It focuses on Knowledge-based concepts and allows your team to get accustomed to the tool in no time.

Setting up to manage the KB is tedious

Getting started with Contentful to build a knowledge base is not easy. You must configure a lot of items before you even get to try authoring an article.

Knowledge base app

As Contentful is a headless CMS, it does not have a proper portal to manage the knowledge base, out of the box. You must install a knowledge base app that is still in the early-access program of Contentful. Installing this app will heavily configure the Contentful account space in which it is installed. It will create new content types, new entries, and new assets, all of which are necessary for getting started.

Netlify account

Through the knowledge base app, Contentful will just help you to get started with content authoring. For you to host the content, you must have an account with Netlify for custom previews and deployments. Netlify is the only option to choose to host your site.

You must manage all your site hosting to publish your content through Netlify.

GitHub account and Gatsby website structure

Contentful does not provide a publishing structure for your knowledge base. It uses a standard Gatsby website structure in GitHub to deploy your content. For this purpose, you must manage and customize a cloned repository to suit your requirements.

Once you set up accounts on all these platforms, there are a lot of steps to configure and integrate them like 

1. • Setting up API keys to establish a connection between Contentful and Netlify to allow content transfer and deployment.
   • Connect your GitHub account to deploy your website.
   • Configure content preview and manual deployments.

The setup is not just a one-time activity; it may need constant changing, auditing, and management. Your content team may find all these overwhelming.

Document360, on the other hand, is extremely simple to get started. As you sign up, you land your first article to be authored, and in less than a minute, you can see your article published and accessible to your end readers. Document360 covers all the requirements to structure your content, hosting, and whatnot. You simply use Document360 as another authoring tool at your service, not just limited to text editor but feature-rich, to provide efficient knowledge base management. Your content team will find themselves very native to the application.

Expertise required

Knowledge-based management is emerging as a new paradigm in online content management. There are a lot of new practices and internet nuances to be followed. Your content management team must upskill themselves to present the content about your product and services very effectively to serve your end customers and employees. With Contentful, either your content team or you will have to assign a separate team to understand and manage various other tools and their features in addition to managing the content. All these tools, including Contentful itself, Netlify, and GitHub come with their own complexities. You are always dependent on the skillset required for these.

Document360 does not require any such technical staff. It is built with content writers’ experience as a primary focus, and it is easy to adopt and use. It can be used by any technical writer who has used documentation tools like Microsoft Word or Google Docs.

Pricing and total cost of ownership

Just subscribing to Contentful alone is not sufficient to manage the knowledge base. You need to factor in the direct cost of subscribing to other tools like Netlify, GitHub, etc. It does not stop there. The indirect cost of technical staff to manage these tools, maintenance, and any configuration changes. Also, challenges in one tool may have an impact on the other; you may end up coordinating with too many teams from different vendors for support and resolution. All these add to the operational cost.

Document360 is a SaaS product with different pricing plans to suit your needs. No additional skill sets are required, hence no extra cost for any technical support teams. You connect with one Document360 support team for all the assistance you may need. It is super easy.

User experience

Contentful, as a headless CMS focuses more on how you configure models for data creation and management. It has very little or no emphasis on how you present the content to the end users. It depends on other plugins, tools, and frameworks for this purpose. Hence, your content management team must switch between multiple tools frequently, making their day-to-day activity tedious. To author and manage knowledge base content, the portal provided by installing the knowledge base app is not intuitive for the purpose.

Reader site access

As you author content in Contentful, you need to review your changes in the live site where readers access your published content. Though Contentful provides preview capabilities, you may not be able to view the changes in your content as soon as you publish. It is a multiple-step and time-consuming process.

• • You first publish the changes and build the website.
  • It initiates the deployment process in Netlify and takes time to reflect on the live site.
  • The live site in Contentful follows the basic design structure of the Gatsby template. You may have to make more customizations to represent your content.

The following is the standard template in which the content of your knowledge base is represented.

You do not find necessary navigations like a category hierarchy listing to navigate to other articles or a table of contents to navigate within the article. All these need more configuration and customizations.

Document360 is very swift in deployments; within a click of a button to publish the content, your changes are reflected in the live site.

Content structure and information architecture

In Contentful, before you start authoring any content, you will have to configure content models that define what your content should be made of – for example: if it is an article, title, description, article body, what other elements it can hold, etc. You will not find it easy to define content hierarchy i.e., you do not see the proper content structure and the information architecture of the articles within their respective folders or categories.

The content listing is very flat. To build the relationship between the content is very challenging.

Content management is restricted to basic capabilities like adding an article to a category. As the volume of content grows, the hierarchy and structure of the content organization get complex. This is where the challenge arises.

Document360 provides better UX in terms of content organization and management. It is feature-rich with advanced content management capabilities like 

• • Categorization of content
  • Replication of articles within categories
  • Content reuse with templates, variables, and snippets, glossary
  • SEO management

Editor

Though Contentful has good editor capabilities, the user interface, and the experience it provides are not the absolute best for the editors. If you want to author articles with large content and elements, you will find it challenging to follow the form-like experience. The editor’s capabilities are also limited.

Document360 provides one of the best editor experiences with advanced block editor capabilities and formatting utilities. Technical writers also want markdown and HTML-based editing experience as well, Document360 provides such editor capabilities.

Article redirection rules

As we manage web content, the articles get referred to hundreds of external sites over time. One cannot avoid a scenario where the article URL may require a change after some time based on the change in context. In such cases, the backlinks to this article from other sites may result in broken links. It is not possible to fix this in a headless CMS like Contentful.

Document360 provides an article URL redirect feature that would be helpful when you change a specific article’s URL, and the same article URL has been referenced in different articles in your knowledge base.

Workflow management

Suppose you have any internal processes for the content team to follow, from drafting content until it gets published to ensure it is well-reviewed and approved.

Contentful workflows are not straightforward. You will have to install an app for this purpose, and it will demand further configuration and management.

Document360 workflows are native to the application, which helps to create various stages or checkpoints and track an article/category page from the initial draft (New article) to a published one.

Article status and review reminders help in setting and representing the status of an article and help teams keep their articles up to date by alerting team members when an article is ready for review.

Users and Security

A single person does not usually manage a knowledge base or content. There may be at least two or more people working on this. Large enterprises have different teams with proper team structures to manage the content. This necessitates user management and security.

Contentful provides the roles and user access management, but this is not in the context of knowledge base management. It is provided from the context of Contentful spaces and organizations.

Document360 on the other hand, has meticulously developed user management and security capabilities focused on knowledge base management. Some of the key capabilities expected by your content management team are listed below.

Team collaboration

Often, one or more authors will work on a single article. They may co-author the article, review it, make corrections, etc. Document360 provides in-article discussion capabilities to collaborate with co-authors to discuss the portion of the content with references.

Content Access

You should restrict access to your content management team members only to certain categories and not all. This granular level of content access restriction is not possible with Contentful. Document360 allows you to configure this at the user level and to create roles and assign access policies.

Secure access through Readers & Groups configuration

Though you can set the access level for an article, whether it is public or private, in Contentful, it is not possible. You cannot review and manage the access. Document360 allows you to manage reader roles, and content permissions, and audit the same. You may also want to restrict access or allow self-registration for email from certain domains and IP-based restrictions.

Public or private or mixed access knowledge base

Contentful does not provide the capability to configure permissions for your end users to access your knowledge base in a restricted manner. You may want all or some part of the content in a knowledge base to be public and the rest restricted to logged-in readers. Sometimes, you may want the entire knowledge base to be private such content to be accessed by logged-in readers only.

Document360 offers custom secure access to the knowledge base. You can have a limited knowledge base for internal users like employees and an open one for your customers.

API Docs

As a knowledge base, you may not only be restricted to providing general content but also API-related information about your products and services. Contentful does not provide API documentation capabilities.

The API documentation feature in Document360 provides a complete solution for creating and managing API references. With this feature, you can create high-quality API documentation that helps your users understand and consume APIs effectively.

AI Capabilities

Almost All products and services are now considering AI features. Headless CMS platforms are also experimenting with AI tools. Contentful, as such, has not released any AI features related to the knowledge base.

Document360 has already released a few AI capabilities that will complement the content writers with identifying the right title for the content, preparing precise summaries from the long content, recommending relevant tags to related articles, and helping generate proper SEO descriptions.

These features are seeing faster adoption with our existing customers.

The above-discussed features are just a few to compare Document360 directly with headless CMS like Contentful.

Overview of Author-it

Author-it provides flexibility when creating your documentation. As a CCMS, technical and non-technical users can author documentation in components that can be reused across the system. This means content is handled at a more granular level than documents – for example, as sentences, images and words.

With single sourcing, you are able to update content once and reuse it across multiple outputs, saving you time when building and maintaining documentation. As a result, Author-it can be used for large-scale documentation projects, eliminating the need for copy-paste which is an error-prone process.

Content is stored in a relational database that enables easy reuse of content, tracking when content is reused and preventing users from deleting important content. Content reuse means that terms you use are consistent across the documentation and also help with translation.

When authoring your content, you can easily insert a component so you can make sure that documentation is the same across different publications. Author-IT was designed to allow you to publish to different formats including print and digital, such as PDF, product manuals and HTML, without the hassle of manually updating content every time it changes.

Pros of Author-it

Makes Content Review Easy

Review content and make changes within Author-it platform rather than relying on a third party toolsl. You can make suggestions and leave comments, with the content owner having the power to accept or reject changes for ultimate control.

In-built Translation

People using Author-it are often interested in translation of their documentation. Content is localized by the word, not the document, so you can use Author-it to translate your content into desired languages. You have direct access to view, manage and publish translated content in the same interface. It’s easy to export translation-ready content to service providers or translators.

Automated Content Reuse

Author-it has the ability to offer authoring assistance by suggesting reusable content as you type. This means authors can discover relevant components as they compose content since every word is indexed within the CCMS. Content reuse ensures that you don’t accidentally rewrite content that already exists because Author-it triggers suggestions.

Importing Documents

Author-it’s Import Wizard allows you to import content from other sources using transformation rules and transformation profiles. Popular formats are supported including Microsoft Word and FrameMaker which means you can migrate from legacy systems.

Workflows

Author-it enables complex workflows with multiple authors being able to access content without over-writing a source file. Role-based authoring helps you to collaboratively produce documentation while having clearly defined responsibilities.

Single-sourcing

The big advantage of a solution like Author-it is the ability to create multiple outputs from a single source. This means you can reuse content, changing it once and reflecting the updates in every location that content is used. When you are working on large-scale documentation projects, this capability becomes invaluable.

Multi-channel Publishing

Author-it allows you to publish content across a variety of document types without having to manually format your content for each channel. For example, you could create content once in Author-it and reuse it across PDF, knowledge base, HTML and SCORM. When the source code is updated, its reflected across your outputs.

Variant Management

Author-it uses variant management to help you customize documentation for different teams, roles and locations. You can update an object to make important changes and this will be reflected across the documentation.

Cons of Author-it

Might be More than you Need

Author-it comes with a lot of features that you might not need if you only want to create a knowledge base for your users. With the ability to create structured or unstructured documentation and benefit from Author-it’s relational database, some users may simply be looking to create a straightforward knowledge base.

Steep Learning Curve

Users report that Author-it takes a long time to set up and learn, which results in delays in producing user-ready documentation. This also makes it hard to spread usage across teams and could prevent important collaborators from adopting the software. While a powerful solution, Author-it’s learning curve makes it an undesirable option for some fast-paced teams.

Prohibitive Cost

Smaller teams might find it hard to justify investing in Author-it due to its relatively high cost. Pricing starts at 1250 USD per month and this is only for two seats using the software. If you are a growing team with relatively modest needs in your current stage, Author-it might not be for you.

Difficult to Preview PDFs Before Publishing

Many users report that they can’t view PDF documents before they are published, which presents problems when it comes to formatting. This limitation undermines Author-it’s ability to publish to multiple formats, and requires exporting your documentation every time you want to see the PDF.

Need another platform for hosting the online knowledge base

Even though Author-it produces HTML files, you need another hosting platform that runs a webserver to serve the online version of your knowledge base. It adds another layer of complexity to your documentation tech stack and additional cost.

Overview of Document360

Document360 is software that allows you to create a knowledge base for your users. This knowledge base might be either public and self-service for customers or an internal private knowledge base for employees. You can even create a knowledge base that is a mixture of the two types, and Document360 allows you to easily authenticate users.

Users pick Document360 because it is suitable for both technical and non-technical teams. Geared towards creating content in Markdown, developers find using Document360 comes naturally and non-developers can use the WYSIWYG editor if they prefer. This means all kinds of users can find value in Document360.

With Document360, you don’t waste time wrestling with the software, and instead get up to speed with producing documentation right away. Document360 is easy to learn and does one thing well, and one thing only – help you create a user-friendly knowledge base.

Pros of Document360

Suitable for the Enterprise

Although small to medium-sized businesses gain lots of value from Document360, the software is highly suitable for the enterprise in terms of scalability and security. For example, Document360 is GDPR-compliant and SOC2-certified, so you will be able to meet European data privacy laws and be able to guarantee that your data is protected.

Localization

Document360 offers robust options for localizing your content which means you can cater to audiences in different languages. You can use Document360 to build a multilingual knowledge base using AI-machine translation built into the portal, or use it to connect to third-party support for human translation.

Markdown and WYSIWYG Editor

With Document360, you have a choice over how you author your content. You can either use the WYSIWYG editor to preview content as you write it, or the Markdown editor to write in a simple markup language that is popularly used by technical teams. Switch between the two methods by toggling the editor.

Advanced Analytics

You can view exactly who is reading and interacting with your documentation using advanced analytics. Document360 gives you access to information about the user as well as their behavior on the knowledge base. This enables you to proactively develop your documentation and meet user needs.

Private Hosting

With private hosting, it’s possible to host your knowledge base on your own private cloud server, in your preferred geolocation, which gives you complete control over your data and peace of mind over security. This means you have all the flexibility of cloud hosting combined with the security of your own private network.

Versioning

With Document360, you never have to worry about losing your previous work. Versioning means that you can view past versions and roll back changes, as well as identify who has made the updates. This keeps your documentation more secure and enables better teamwork on content.

Workflows

Team members need to collaborate on workflows when drafting, reviewing and publishing your documentation which is fully supported in Document360. Assign your users roles and track your content in the publishing process to avoid relying on third-party tools like Microsoft Word to create content.

Importing Documents

In Document360, our team will help you import legacy documentation ready to populate your new knowledge base. This prevents you having to start from scratch when building your knowledge base and Document360 also supports a variety of formats.

Cons of Document360

No Single-sourcing

With Document360, it is not possible to reuse your content as components. Documentation only exists in one place and is linked to a particular knowledge base. It’s not currently possible to share content between knowledge bases. In this regard, Document360 is not a CCMS like Author-it, and has been created for a slightly different purpose.

No Mobile App

Document360 doesn’t currently offer a mobile app for its platform so you must use Document360 through your desktop, which may be restrictive for some users. This limitation makes it hard to edit your knowledge base on-the-go, but rest assured that the user’s experience of your user-facing knowledge is always responsive.

What is the Common Space They Share?

Both Document360 and Author-it are tools designed for creating documentation. They are aimed at technical writers and other authors who need to create help content and ensure it is structured in such a way for maximum usability. More than just a website, a knowledge base is architected for presenting information and includes powerful search.

Both these tools are designed to support authoring workflows, meaning that you can leave behind the days of sending Word documents back and forth and exchanging feedback through emails. Document360 and Author-it are end-to-tools that allow you to draft, review and publish content all in one system.

With Document360 and Author-it, you can migrate content from legacy tools so you won’t have to start from scratch. Document360 in particular allows you to migrate your existing knowledge base so you can keep all your SEO traffic even while switching to a new tool.

Detailed Feature Comparison

Features	Author-it	Document360
Hosting	No private hosting	Yes
Knowledge base (public or private)	Internal	Internal and Public
Searchability	Yes	Yes
Security	Yes	Yes
Workflow	Yes	Yes
Localization	Yes	Yes
Collaboration	Yes	Yes
Customization	Limited	Fully Customizable
Editor	Yes	Markdown and  WYSIWYG
Organizing content	Yes	Yes
Import/ Export	Yes	Yes
Integrations	Yes	Yes
Audience (enterprise or mid-size)	Midsize and enterprise	Small,midsize, enterprises and Large enterprises

What is documentation version control?

Document version control is an essential feature in a documentation tool that helps systematically manage different versions or iterations of a document as it undergoes changes, updates, and edits over time. It involves tracking and organizing these versions in a structured manner to ensure accuracy, maintain a clear audit trail, and facilitate collaboration among teams working on the same document.

All these document versions will have different file names to ensure proper identification of the current iteration of the document. This feature is helpful for technical writers and product managers who want to ensure adequate document workflow management across the lifecycle of their technical specification document.

Multiple stages of the Documentation lifecycle include document creation, review, approval, storage, and retrieval. Tracking and managing how your document evolves comes with significant advantages. This includes making your documents straightforward and precise. Even minor modifications can be impactful. It all starts with the right documentation tool. This helps create a great audit trail that you can constantly monitor. It encourages transparency and accountability within your organization.

Why is Document Version Control Important?

Document version control helps to prevent confusion. Imagine multiple team members working on a document simultaneously, and no one can tell whose version is the latest or contribute without losing another person’s edit.

This will lead to chaos in the document workflow process and reduce efficiency. However, document version control is essential as an efficient tracking tool that helps multiple team members contribute to a document without the risk of overwriting or losing the content.

It ensures transparency and accountability during the content creation process. With logs showing the history of changes, everyone can take responsibility for their contribution.

This fosters a culture of collaboration that’s necessary for growth within the workplace. Document versioning can minimize the chances of human error during technical documentation, eliminating as bottlenecks that can lead to delays and miscommunication among team members.

Benefits of Documentation Version control

Document versioning has impressive benefits. This helps to minimize errors. You can also keep track of important changes, which helps collaboration.

Maintain data integrity

Data integrity is a critical aspect of any organization. You need to ensure that the information that passes through every department is up-to-date, accurate, and reliable before passing it on to users.

Therefore, one of the best ways to maintain this data integrity is to track the document for changes and fork in the information that need to be shared after reviewing. With this, you can carry every team member along, as they are all accountable to each other.

This is crucial in maintaining the security and accuracy of daily documentation processes. With version control, unauthorized or accidental edits are minimized, enhancing the accuracy and reliability of documents.

Minimize errors

As mentioned earlier, there will be chaos when everyone edits a document without a process to keep track of these changes and revert to old versions where necessary. Where there’s poor documentation, version control, low productivity, and numerous human errors will inevitably be the order of the day.

This is because there’s no way to track document versions and know the latest ones. With this, there’s a higher chance of circulating the wrong document with errors. You can’t predict how devastating the consequences can be. Imagine putting your employees and organization at risk.

However, documentation version control will help to keep this in check internally as everyone can identify the updated document and work together to ensure its accuracy before sending it out. Minimizing errors will eliminate time wasting and delays during documentation.

Tracks Changes

Tracking changes during documentation can be a literal lifesaver. Many people can relate to the error of saving the wrong version of a document and searching for an older version to correct this. Without a means to track changes and recover older versions, hours of work would go down the drain, and it would be a painful process starting all over again.

You can maintain a comprehensive document history within your organization through documentation version control. Every contributor to the document can track and trace changes and who made them without any disruption.

Document Access control and compliance

Keeping track of document history could also have security implications for every documentation process. A massive benefit of documentation version control is that the workflow process will comply with industry safety standards.

Several organizations deal with sensitive information that could be at risk of cybersecurity threats. Incorporating document version control software can provide extra layers of security through access control, user authentication, and encryption.

Therefore, there will be tighter security with an audit trail of all revisions to keep everyone abreast of documentation updates.

Optimize workflows

When versioning is implemented within the documentation portal, will optimize workflows, which leads to better productivity and operational efficiency. This is because it’s much easier for several people to collaborate efficiently on a document, make inputs, and review where necessary without any confusion or chaos.

Every contributor to the document can be tracked, and their changes can be noted within a few minutes. Therefore, version control makes it easier for multiple stakeholders to incorporate feedback without the loss of data through accidental deletion or overwriting.

It’s always great to have a comprehensive outlook on how your document evolves. With this, you can track and organize how your document is modified at each point. Knowing what goes on with your documentation always helps you customize workflows better. You can adjust this to fit your organizational objectives. You can also create a central repository to be accessed by diverse stakeholders.

Best practices for documentation version control

Increase your chances of success by implementing the best practices for documentation version control. Check out these ways to use technical documentation for communication.

Standardize document naming conventions.

Standardizing document naming conventions are crucial for maintaining clarity and consistency within your documentation processes. This will apply to new and old versions of all documents within the organization.

A file naming system boosts clarity, transparency, and organization. Therefore, you need to choose one consistent across several departments, and leaves little room for confusion. An ideal file name for your document should include:

• The version number.
• Brief information about the content.
• The date of the latest revision.

You can add a version control table for each document that records this information, including the author and a summary of changes. This way, it’s easy for anyone to retrieve and identify various documents.

Set permissions and access controls

You can’t rule out the chances of accessing sensitive data during documentation. If you deal with sensitive data, then you need access controls. This reduces the chances of leaking data that could ruin your company’s image.

Incorporate this through permissions and access controls. Apply these security measures so only authorized persons can view and edit these documents anytime. This reduces the incidence of errors through edits from unqualified persons.

Formalize versioning protocols

Where there are no rules and regulations guiding operations, the chances of workflow disruptions are significantly higher. Some documents require versioning protocols that keep track of document lifecycles, structured filing frameworks, and retention policies.
The document lifecycle encompasses every version of the document, regardless of the amount of changes made. The filing schema is the central record-keeping system that defines how the contents are grouped, irrespective of their jurisdiction.
Formalizing these version protocols sets a baseline that guides the rules of engagement. Create an official document versioning control policy that clearly states the standards guiding how everyone uses these documents.

Training

Proper training helps users understand how to use the tool correctly. This reduces the likelihood of errors caused by misunderstandings, incorrect operations, or misuse of features.

Training ensures that all users follow consistent practices when using the tool. This consistency leads to uniformity in document formats, version control, and collaboration methods.

It’s best to train all staff members on documentation tool, explore all feature and versioning processes. this minimizes the chances of human errors and makes the documentation workflow as seamless as possible.

Implement the right version control software

While you can incorporate best practices such as standardizing document naming conventions, setting permissions and access controls, formalizing versioning protocols, and training your staff, these efforts may be unsuccessful if carried out on inappropriate documentation software.

Selecting the right documentation software for your organization is a crucial aspect of this process because it will incorporate features that make this efficient and seamless. The right software will include features such as editor, viewing access, direct collaboration, version control, analytics, categorization, customization and permission control…

These are only a few internal features that will improve documentation version control for technical writers, product managers, and several other professionals within diverse organizations.

Popular Documentation Software

These popular documentation softwares have set themselves apart as reliable software for managing documentation seamlessly.

What is Knowledge Management in Education?

In any institution, not just Education, knowledge management is:
“…the process of capturing, distributing, and effectively using knowledge.” – Tom Davenport (1994)

This means, that within education, instead of treating knowledge as an ephemeral and mysterious process, individuals actively seek to document their knowledge for reuse and sharing with others. This means finding out what knowledge the institution holds, finding a way to write it down or record it, and enabling others to benefit from this knowledge.

The university establishes a digital platform where students can access a centralized repository of study materials, including lecture notes, slides, practice questions, and recommended readings. This ensures that all relevant resources are easily accessible in one place. While educational professionals may struggle to justify spending their limited time on managing knowledge, doing so is essential if they want to improve student outcomes and remain competitive in the sector. The relative age of some universities can also present challenges, as well-established and prestigious universities are often very competitive with old ways of doing things.

“Knowledge management brings together three core organizational resources – people, processes and technologies – to enable the organization to use and share information more effectively.” – Knowledge Management in Education: Defining the Landscape.

While Knowledge Management has become well-established in the business world, it has only recently gained interest in educational institutions and university research centers.

Factors Driving the Trend of KM Adoption in Education

Emphasis on Tacit Knowledge Transfer for Students and Mentors

Universities often emphasize tacit knowledge transfer in various contexts to enhance learning and skill development. Students gain tacit knowledge by directly engaging with equipment, conducting experiments, and problem-solving in real-world scenarios.

Also, many universities offer internships, practicums, or co-op programs that allow students to work in professional settings related to their fields. This practical experience helps students develop tacit knowledge by applying classroom concepts to real-world challenges.

The valuable skills, abilities, and experiences of professors and researchers should be shared to benefit the institution and field of study as a whole.

Promotion of Faster Innovation in Research

Knowledge management systems in universities can assist research funding agencies in assessing the impact and outcomes of research projects conducted within academic institutions. The institution establishes a comprehensive repository that houses research papers, articles, conference proceedings, and other scholarly works.

Researchers can access existing research to build upon, fostering innovation and preventing redundant efforts. A dedicated section of the knowledge management system serves as an innovation incubator. Researchers can pitch ideas, share preliminary findings, and collaborate on emerging research topics, encouraging a culture of exploration and experimentation.

Keeping standards high and maintaining prestige are two important goals for any established university.

Integration of Software Tools

Knowledge management can be divided into the twin arms of technological systems and information systems. Technological systems such as software solutions must be integrated if they are to facilitate the free flow of information among the faculty, and KM experts within the organization are seeking compatible systems.

Ultimately, it must be the experience of using the software tools that drives the adoption of knowledge management technologies. Even the best system in the world is useless if staff are failing to use it, and robust integrations are helpful in ensuring that your systems deliver value to their institutions.

When you choose a SaaS knowledge base solution like Document360, you can benefit from powerful integrations that work without the intervention of technical specialists.

Empowering Universities and Institutions with KM

Now we’re going to take a look at some of the many benefits of knowledge management that help to empower universities and other higher education institutions.

Enhancing Collaboration

What is the first thing that becomes easier when you invest in sharing knowledge?
Knowledge management systems in universities provide a centralized platform where teaching materials, lecture notes, assignments, and additional resources can be stored and accessed by both faculty and students. Collaborative tools within the knowledge management system enable instant communication between faculty and students. This facilitates asking questions, seeking clarifications, and providing feedback.

Not less, It also enables students to share their expertise with peers, offering tutoring or mentoring in areas where they excel. Students can collaborate on group projects and engage in discussions using tools like discussion boards, chat, and knowledge bases, promoting teamwork and peer learning.

Effective Staff Training

Training is important, particularly when new teaching faculty join academia. Here, having a Knowledge management system in place ensures that training materials are standardized and consistently delivered to all staff members, ensuring a uniform understanding of processes and practices across departments.

If you onboard a new staff member and they have no idea how the organization works, they won’t be able to get up to speed as quickly. It’s not necessary for them to ask their colleagues for as much time out in order to get help, and tacit knowledge can be passed on through appropriate documentation.

Efficient Course Development

When developing courses for universities and other higher education institutions, it’s important to have access to a back catalog of course content to discover what has already been covered. Academics can pool their resources to draw in new students who are seeking exciting new topics of study, as well as covering the basics.

If you don’t record the content of past courses then it won’t be captured for posterity. Course development will lack direction and academics may also be developing new courses that overlap too much with one another, restricting the amount of ground you can cover during the academic year. Reviewing past courses can also potentially unearth potential new areas of research.

Research Enhancement

Research relies on recording data and studies and sharing that knowledge with others. Without access to studies completed in one easy portal, your new study will lack comprehensiveness. Universities are storehouses of knowledge enhancing many fields of human endeavor, which requires collaboration through research.

Imagine if researchers knew exactly what each other was up to through knowledge-sharing. Research could progress much more quickly, and cross-disciplinary studies could become more of a possibility. Research goes hand-in-hand with knowledge management, although it might not seem like it at first glance.

Efficient Administrative Operations

According to a McKinsey Global Institute report, effective knowledge management can reduce the time spent searching for information by up to 35%. This is a huge gain for higher education institutes, which are under increasing pressure to account for their expenditure and provide a valuable student experience.

Less time spent engaging in administrative activities means more resources can be spent delivering courses that benefit students who are enrolled. Mission-critical activities within the organization need to be prioritized over ever-expanding administrative duties that nevertheless keep the organization running.

Creating a Centralized Knowledge Hub

Without proper Knowledge Management, academia and universities lack a centralized hub for their knowledge. This means that vital information could reside in any number of places, requiring team members to search multiple repositories to find the answers they need. Worse, duplicate information could exist in different places, rendering the reliability of the information in doubt.

So centralizing your knowledge hub empowers universities to get more out of their knowledge, bringing disparate sources of knowledge together into one place where any staff member can access it. Knowledge becomes more reliable over time as experts verify its accuracy and promote the use of the knowledge hub across the institution.

Knowledge Preservation and Continuity

While it’s important to share knowledge in real-time, institutions will also want to preserve their knowledge for posterity. Knowledge management systems in universities help in capturing institutional memories. In addition to explicit knowledge, it facilitates the capture of tacit knowledge—informal insights, experiences, and expertise possessed by individuals. This knowledge, which is often difficult to transfer, is preserved and can benefit future staff members.

Your knowledge is a key asset, just like your people and technology. For learning institutions in particular, the preservation of knowledge underpins your survival and ensures that you can keep offering courses and programs that appeal to a wide range of students.

Enhancing Student Engagement and Communication

In situations where physical attendance is not possible, KM systems can host virtual classrooms, webinars, and online lectures, ensuring continuous learning. Many KM systems are accessible via mobile devices, allowing students to engage with learning materials and communicate with peers and instructors on the go.

Also, departments can coordinate events, workshops, and seminars more effectively through knowledge management tools, ensuring wider participation and communication. It’s the responsibility of higher education institutions to look after their student’s additional needs, using data, and information, to provide a better learning experience. Students expect more than ever that universities strive to meet their needs and provide a tangible return on investment.

Case Studies: Successful Implementation of KM in Education

Ajman University, a UAE-based private institution, successfully transformed its user support and IT helpdesk operations through the implementation of Document360, a knowledge management platform. In order to enhance user experiences, the university provided a 24/7 accessible knowledge base to address challenges with their previous document-based system, which lacked visual appeal, navigation ease, and additional features. They achieved this by offering an intuitive interface for technical writers to create and update articles quickly, interactive navigation, customization options for the design, and categorization of information, as well as the ability to attach rich media. An internal survey found a 30% reduction in weekly support calls as a result of this transition. Document360 was appreciated for its flexibility and effectiveness in supporting the university’s technical support operations.

Two US higher education institutions implemented a knowledge management position in their organization, which initially met with resistance. This resistance came from other members of the organization who considered themselves to already be the purveyors of knowledge and resented this intrusion. These knowledge management experts overcame the challenge by using existing organizational terms, such as ‘collegiality’, ‘collaboration’, and ‘teamwork’, to gain support for knowledge management.

One UK Russell group university, although a very old organization, embraces twenty-first-century management practices of knowledge management by redefining one of their executive positions to have responsibility for KM in both title and duties. This person’s role is to drive change across the university through KM, including through each of the devolved colleges led by different faculty heads. Better knowledge management is all part of changing the way that this university does business.

What is a knowledge base?

A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that helps your customers and employees find answers to their support questions by themselves.

Knowledge bases also have evolved to make the information ready-to-use available not only as web pages but also through different channels by integrating with chatbots and ticket deflectors by automatically providing relevant answers to the support tickets even before the support agents pick up the tickets.

Why do businesses need a knowledge base?

Help your customers and employees help themselves. Customer experience and happiness are of paramount importance for any business to the retain goodwill of its customers. It is very important to allow your customers to help themselves by providing them with immediate knowledge without reaching out to your support team directly through chat email or phone.

A very well-organized and documented knowledge base will provide immediate solutions to most of your customer queries.

If you appreciate the importance of helping your customers with online content about your products and services, then you can appreciate the need for an online Knowledge base.

Though there are a lot of platforms and tools available to manage content online, many organizations still intend to build knowledge base software by themselves to manage their content.

Check out how Panaya improved customer documentation with Document360

What is custom knowledge base software?

Custom knowledge base software is a specialized software application or system that is designed and developed to create, manage, and organize a unique repository of information, data, or knowledge tailored to the specific needs of an organization, project, or application. This software allows users to store, access, search, and retrieve information relevant to their domain, industry, or purpose.

Before building a custom knowledge base software, any organization should well assess the need to build it by themselves, the advantages, and the challenges they bring while building the software.

Advantages of a custom knowledge base software

Building a custom knowledge base software may be perceived to offer some advantages.

Software that is tailor-made to your needs

Custom software is designed to match your organization’s specific knowledge management requirements. The features can be built to connect to your existing workflows, data structures, and business processes.

Most of the ready-to-use knowledge base software, like Document360, that are available in the market have capabilities to integrate with numerous standard applications that you may be using already or expose APIs and webhooks that can be integrated into your existing workflows.

Reduced dependency on the external software vendor

The software is well under the control of your organization, and you are not dependent on any external vendors for the licenses, necessary feature inclusions, enhancements, upgrades, etc.

Some enterprise-grade software like Document360 already have a rich set of features and are ready to enhance or build a new set of features that align with the interests of a large set of customers. Managing licenses for the software is now made easy through various subscription models. They offer dedicated technical support, training, and documentation to assist organizations in setting up and using their software effectively.

Build only the features that are required for your needs

More often, you may not use all the features that come with the ready-to-use available software. You may be paying for the features that you may not use, or you may have to upgrade to a different license for some of the features you need that are available only in a different pricing model.

You may not find one software that suits all your needs. The features may be available in different products, and it doesn’t serve a purpose to buy multiple software.

This is a trade-off you may need to make, if one of the ready-to-use available software meets most of your requirements, is it valuable enough to completely build a new solution on your own? Instead, just subscribe to the ready-to-use available software and get started.

Long-term cost savings

While initial development costs may be higher than using ready-to-use software, custom solutions can offer long-term cost savings by reducing the need for costly workarounds or frequent software changes.

In reality, the operational cost and managing a team to maintain this software in the long term proves to be very costly.

Drawbacks of using a custom knowledge base software

Building custom knowledge base software can be complex and challenging. While it offers several advantages, it also comes with specific challenges that organizations must.

Software development lifecycle

Requirements gathering, program management and delivery, and defining and documenting the specific knowledge management needs of your organization can be challenging.

You may have to start from scratch to capture requirements, technology, and right development tools, and on-time delivery. As you build it, you may find it challenging if things are not delivered on time. Misunderstood or unclear requirements can lead to a system that doesn’t fully meet your needs.

By using pre-built solutions, organizations can significantly reduce the time it takes to implement a knowledge base. This can be critical when responding to time-sensitive needs.

User interface design and customization

Creating an intuitive and user-friendly interface can be challenging. Design considerations, user testing, and ongoing improvements are necessary to ensure usability.

While customization is an advantage, it can also be a challenge. Balancing flexibility with usability and maintaining consistency can be tricky.

Expertise in building software

Domain expertise

Knowledge-based practice is evolving as a domain. Acquiring the necessary domain expertise can be time-consuming and may involve collaboration with subject matter experts.

Technical expertise

Besides talent for your core products and services, identifying the right technical talent and managing them to build and maintain this custom software is an overhead.

Use of the right technology

Not all the capabilities required for building this software can be custom-built, you may have to consider using 3rd party services for different purposes like 

• • Advanced search capabilities to provide instant and relevant information.
  • Translation services to make your content available in multiple languages.
  • Data analytics services to assess content delivery and reader behavior.
  • Any AI-related capabilities

The development practices and the dependent tools or services you end up using can be wildly outdated and inappropriate for a modern knowledge management system. You may be using clunky search features or struggling with knowledge distributed over many repositories.

Application hosting and maintenance

It is not as simple as that to host a knowledge base software like a normal website. It has at least two major modules 

• • Portal for your content writers’ team to create and maintain content.
  • A site where the content is accessible to the end readers

Both these demand hosting and maintenance with a different set of requirements like

• • Content replication
  • High Availability
  • Backup and restore.
  • Disaster Recovery

Solutions like Document360 include built-in backup and disaster recovery features, ensuring that data is protected in case of unexpected events. It also offers a private hosting feature for large enterprises.

Application performance and scalability

Optimizing the performance of your custom knowledge base software, especially as data volume grows, can be challenging. This may involve fine-tuning database queries and system architecture.

Solutions like Document360 are designed to scale, allowing organizations to expand their knowledge bases as their needs grow. This scalability can accommodate increased data volumes and user loads.

Integrations to external systems

Integrating the custom knowledge base with other software systems and tools in your organization may require developing and maintaining APIs and connectors.

Document360 has numerous connectors to integrate with industry-leading solutions in the help center, customer support, customer relationship, customer experience, and team collaboration categories.

Data quality and management

Accuracy and reliability

Ensuring the accuracy and reliability of the information in the knowledge base is crucial. Data quality issues, such as errors, duplicates, and inconsistencies, can lead to incorrect or misleading information.

Knowledge bases require regular updates to stay current. Developing and maintaining processes for data monitoring, validation, and updating can be resource-intensive.

Your software should have the capability to assess the relevance and structuring of the data and recommendations for regular updates.

No information architecture

Creating a custom knowledge base software may lead to oversight of the Information Architecture beyond the initial setup. Users will hit your knowledge base and be overwhelmed by the sheer amount of unstructured information presented in quite a basic way. Having too much content, especially unstructured, means your knowledge base will be worse than useless.

Non-indexed contents

If you don’t build your software with proper indexing capabilities, search queries will be difficult, you won’t be able to easily browse the content, or ultimately find what you need. This limits the search capabilities still further.

Knowledge base capabilities

The software should be built capable enough to, not necessarily limited to 

• • Enable Information structure through categorization, replication, and accessible hierarchy.
  • Enable collaboration between the content writers, allowing multiple users to contribute, review, and update content. This fosters knowledge sharing and collective intelligence.
  • Define user permissions like draft writers, reviewers, and publishers.
  • Enable workflows to manage content creation till publishing.
  • Version control and management

The point of a knowledge base is not precisely to ‘share knowledge’, but rather to help users to accomplish tasks or solve problems related to your product that you have previously defined.

Solutions like Document360 knowledge base software often come with features and functionalities that have been tested and refined by numerous users and organizations. This can provide confidence in the software’s capabilities.

Document360 is used by 1000+ organizations and a significant portion of them with enterprise licenses.

Security, privacy, and compliance

Protecting sensitive information within the knowledge base is critical. Developing robust security measures to prevent unauthorized access and data breaches is essential.

Knowledge bases should include access control features, enabling organizations to restrict access to sensitive information and protect data privacy and security.

Compliance with legal and ethical considerations, such as data privacy laws and intellectual property rights, is essential and may require legal expertise.

Solutions like Document360 knowledge base are designed with compliance in mind, helping organizations adhere to industry-specific regulations and standards.

Cost and Resource Management

Custom software development can be resource-intensive, both in terms of finances and personnel. Managing these resources effectively is crucial to staying on budget and meeting deadlines.

You may have to manage licenses for the development tools, hosting charges, multiple environments, upgrades, migrations, and deployments.

Ready-to-use solutions typically have lower initial costs compared to custom software. Organizations can save on development and implementation expenses, making it cost-effective.

Should I build a custom knowledge base software?

Your goal should be to help users accomplish tasks or solve problems related to your product that you have previously defined. It involves having an idea of the customer journey, and pain points with your product.

You must prioritize addressing your customer problems by focusing on your core products and services rather than spending time on building custom software.

Business leaders are interested in creating a Knowledge Base to share documentation with their customers, partners, vendors, and stakeholders that includes dynamic customization within one Platform.

That’s where a SaaS knowledge base comes in.

Unveiling HR Management: A Strategic Approach

Did you know that 58% of new hires who go under a structured onboarding program are more likely to stay with the organization even after completing three years?

As astounding as this sounds, a lot of organizations fail to reach this retention rate. Understand that onboarding is a crucial milestone for new employees. This is where they learn about the organization, their role, and how they will contribute to the existing process. If an organization fails to communicate these aspects during the onboarding stage, employees are likely to feel less interested and ultimately leave.

With a human resource management approach, you can streamline the onboarding process and ensure that there is less attrition and an improved retention rate. But that’s not all HRM helps your organization with.

HRM simplifies and streamlines the recruitment and hiring process for the organization. Other than that, it helps the HR department plan and execute a training program for new hires that educates them about their roles and responsibilities at the organization.

However, a strategic human resource management approach takes these efforts to the next level. SHRM helps you attract the right talent, hire promising candidates, streamline the development process, and even helps you create competency-based reward plans for employees.

The reason why it is gaining more base among HR leaders is because this approach helps the company bring together all the employees and help them work as one unit. That means every works towards one objective. And when everyone works towards one objective, the results are likely to be positive for the organization. The success rate increases drastically.

With the SHRM approach, you can monitor and analyze the performance of each employee. Moreover, SHRM helps your organization with:

• • Identifying the growing need for a new workforce at the office that meets the changing demands of the competitive market
  • Building short-term and long-term goals for organizational growth and success
  • Enhancing the existing work operations and processes to capture the best employee output
  • Ensuring that the company adheres to all the rules and regulations as per government laws
  • Identifying the ever-evolving technological shift in the market and bringing in the right set of tools that enhance employee productivity

Due to these and many other reasons, SHRM is becoming a crucial approach that organizations must adopt in the workplace.

The Significance of HR Knowledge Management

Crucial research from Deloitte states that:

75% of organizations agreed that creating and preserving knowledge across their evolving workforces was important for their success over the next 12 months. However, less than 10% felt their current knowledge management system was up to the job.

If you are not in that less than 10% of companies who feel their knowledge management system has documented everything for the employees, it is time you start now. With HRM in place, several processes and information must be documented for employees, managers, admin staff, and even for the HR team.
With a knowledge management system in place, you can ensure:

HRs become more productive

Your employees can have multiple questions about absenteeism policy, compensation and benefits, key performance indicators, roster management, and others. And these questions can occupy a significant amount of productive time from an HR’s routine.

But with the knowledge management system, you can ensure that questions around different policies and concerns are covered so that employees can refer to the self-service solution and get answers faster. As an outcome, you can ensure that HRs are taking part in admin activities and remain productive at work.

A holistic repository for all

With an HR knowledge management system, you ensure that all the information around employee hiring, employee onboarding, and lifecycle are documented in one place. Neither HRs nor employees have to delve into multiple sources to extract information. This all-in-one repository can help everyone find the required process data in one place.

Smooth optimization of current knowledge

Using the right HR knowledge management system from the start, you can ensure that all the articles around employee payroll policy and benefits stay updated regularly. Tools like Document360 will allow you to update and track all the changes made to the articles. You can also revert the changes if your company plans to avoid any policy updates. That means everyone in the organization gets access to the latest information on rules, regulations, and company policies.

Other than these benefits, there are other critical applications of HR knowledge management that one must know of. Let’s explore them in the following section.

Critical Applications of HR Knowledge Management

Tailored Access Control and Customized Permissions

Only some can access your HR knowledge management system at work. Only those with access control and permissions can change to the existing articles in the system.

Tools like Document360 help you provide customized permissions for team members who can edit or write knowledge repository articles.

With the Access Permission option, you can keep track of all the people who are able to make changes to the current repository. You can also track who all have portal roles and content roles. 

Enhancing Employee Onboarding

58% of organizations confirmed that their onboarding program is mostly focused on getting the paperwork done and giving a brief idea of the processes at work.

But we all know that an onboarding process encapsulates more than this.

From completing the paperwork to meeting all the other team members and managers in person, there is a lot more that one needs to cover during the onboarding period. Sometimes it can go on for days.

However, a knowledge management system can summarize and detail all the activities new hires must look forward to during their onboarding period. And if you have a knowledge management tool like Document360, it can become more detailed for all the users.

You can add a TOC that helps new hires systematically complete their onboarding. You can even add a video from the founder so that new hires get to understand the vision and mission statement of the company.

Including such minute details in the documentation ensures that the onboarding process gets enhanced yet simplified for new employees.

Curbing Redundant Efforts

No more answering the same questions multiple times when you have HR knowledge management in place. You can help your HRs avoid repeating themselves to different employees for the same worries. All employees must do is visit the self-service repository and search for answers to their concerns about company policies.

Documentation tools like Document360 help users find answers to common questions with their search bar functionality. Users will find the search bar on the home page and across the repository articles. If they have subsequent questions, they can search for an answer using a relevant search term.

Users also get the option to conduct an advanced search if they are looking for some answers in particular. You can add filters like categories or tags to find more relevant information faster. This in return saves time for both the HR and employees.

Mitigating Errors

Want to ensure that no information gets miscommunicated to employees?

If it’s a yes, you need to focus on building clear documentation consistently. If you have any new updates, add them to the existing articles in the knowledge management system. Create new articles in advance if you plan to roll out new rules and regulations. This will help you educate employees at an organizational level and avoid explaining them one by one.

This approach will allow you to avoid mistakes while sharing information with employees and keep everyone on the same page regarding company policies and regulations.

Informed Decision-Making

From identifying possible issues with the current policies to potential risks that may lead to attrition, a knowledge management system can help you do it all. It is not just a repository that offers information to everyone in the company about various policies.

An HR knowledge management system also lets you understand how many employees have frequently accessed the repository to find answers. You can narrow down the common queries and accordingly create in-depth articles or revamp the existing ones to cater to such queries.

Standardizing Processes

Help all your employees find the same answer to the same question. Rather than creating multiple sources of information, it would be best to maintain one repository that offers answers to all the questions. This way there won’t be any discrepancies in knowledge distribution.

All you have to do is share the link to the internal wiki with the employees during the onboarding process. This will ensure that they always go back to the same source of information in case they have other questions.

Enhancing Employee Experience

Faster answers to questions result in satisfied employees.

Employees like it when the companies are transparent about their policies and offer detailed answers to their questions. From avoiding the wait time to ensuring they too have understood the policies from scratch, employees end up becoming more productive and build positive feelings for their workplace. This encourages them to stay engaged with the team and other organization activities.

Enhancing Knowledge Management in HRM

We’ve understood the growing yet crucial role of knowledge management in HRM. It is safe to say that we cannot rule out the implementation of knowledge management to further enhance the performance of the HRM process at your organization.

But how can one enhance the existing HRM knowledge management system to reap more benefits?

Here are four practices one can adopt to strengthen the role of knowledge management in HRM.

Ensure HR data is not siloed

Your first step towards building a solid knowledge management system is to ensure that the data never gets old. Your role doesn’t end once you create KMS for your employees. You need to ensure that it gets updated regularly in case new policies get introduced or there are new updates to the existing ones.

This way you can ensure that employees stay up-to-date on upcoming or recently introduced policies of the organization. This practice helps you build trust in employees towards the organization and increases loyalty.

Integrating Knowledge Capture into Talent Management

Captivate the expectations of team managers around all the positions to understand what roles and responsibilities do they see each team member performing once hired. This way the information is coming from a credited source. What’s more, the employees will also stay on the same page as their manager and accordingly perform their roles.

But that’s not all you can do in terms of knowledge capture.

As HRs, you can also capture all the latest information from employees and add them to the knowledge management system. In case the existing resource leaves the company, the new resource can go back to the data captured in the KMS and seamlessly start the work process where it was left off.

Optimizing Internal Communications for Knowledge Management

Another best practice you must adhere to is streamlining the communications for knowledge management. One, decide who will be responsible for building and maintaining the HR knowledge management system at your organization. This way, you can avoid any miscommunication and ensure the right data is added to the repository.

Two, ensure that all the authorized writers, editors, and admins have customized access to the knowledge repository. That means they can only perform certain tasks that are added under their role.

And three, ensure that they get to collaborate while building the repository to avoid confusion or miscommunication. Document360 serves as a collaboration tool with other team members working on the repository through private notes.

These private notes help you make sure that information is verified and added to the repository. What’s more, you can make private notes accessible in the WYSIWYG editor as well.

Cultivating a Knowledge Management Culture

Document every change whenever it takes place to ensure you build a knowledge management culture at the workplace. But to make this happen, you need to create a plan for knowledge management and how it needs to be executed.

Other than that, factors like channels should be sorted out. With the right channels, you can take the internal wiki live and decide how employees can find it whenever they have a question. You must also work on a workflow for the knowledge management system to ensure it doesn’t get outdated and can be updated whenever new information gets added.

With these four best practices, you can enhance knowledge management in HRM.

Implementing Actionable HR Knowledge Management

While the understanding of enhancing the existing HR knowledge management is clear, we have yet to assess how to implement an actionable KMS from scratch.

Here’s how you can go about it in quick and easy phases.

Phase 1: Ideation

Choose the themes you want to cover in your HR knowledge management. This can include covering questions from payroll, leave policy, and roles and responsibilities for various positions in the company to talent management and acquisition. You can also collect employee feedback to understand what possible queries they will most likely seek answers for. This will help you collate more topics to be added to the repository.

Phase 2: Creation & Publishing

Once you’ve identified the possible subjects you’ll give answers to, your next step would be to create and publish the knowledge management. First, you need to develop a detailed TOC where you have identified topics and sub-topics you plan to write articles.

It may look like this:

1. Leave Policy

• • Sick Leave
  • Paid Leave
  • Non-paid Leave
  • Floating Holidays
  • Marriage Leave
  • Maternity Leave
  • Paternity Leave
  • Bereavement Leave

2. Wellness & Employee Benefits

• • Bonus Structure
  • Health Care Benefits
  • Work From Home/Flexible Work Conditions
  • Stock Option Plans

And the list can go on. You can create different articles that will answer these questions rather than adding the information for all the sub-sections in one article. You can also add examples to help employees understand how these benefits or leave policies can be availed. A quick video from the HR team explaining each benefit will make the articles more engaging for employees.

Once ready, you can take your repository live using a knowledge management system like Document360.

Phase 3: Monitor Performance & Upgrade

This is an ongoing final phase of implementing an actionable HR knowledge management system for your business. This is where you need to track:

• • How many employees have used the repository?
  • Which articles are the most commonly read among employees?
  • Which articles have the highest bounce rate?
  • What is the average rating left by employees for each article?
  • How many terms qualify as highly searched keywords?

Tools like Document360 allow their users to add the feedback option to each article to see if readers found them useful or not.

Based on the feedback collected, you can identify possible areas where your knowledge management can be upgraded for a better experience. You can update your existing articles or use the highly searched terms in the search section to identify new topics that answer employee questions.

In these three phases, you can implement a successful HR knowledge management system for your organization.

Need to implement Knowledge management in Aviation

The aviation industry deals with a massive amount of data, and there’s a need to integrate knowledge management systems to manage this effectively. With the right Aeronautical knowledge management strategies, stakeholders can increase safety levels within this industry and ensure efficient knowledge transfer from experts.