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A simple guide to creating a knowledge base
(and keeping it running)
What is Knowledge Management?
We’ve been through the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and the Iron Age. The history books may well refer to this current era as the Information Age. After all, since the 1990s we’ve had a whole science dedicated to knowledge management.
The collective knowledge in any organization is an asset, and should be recorded and maintained like any other. A knowledge base is a specialised database for collecting, storing and retrieving that knowledge as individual articles. It’s a repository of related experiences – problems and solutions, causes and fixes.
How I Got Into it.
I started in operational support
fresh off the Internet helpdesk. (This was the late 90s, when the Internet was still pretty new to most people.) I could deal with frustrated customers, dialup modems and login problems. But I suddenly had much more to deal with: a birds-eye view of the network, administration accounts on servers, responsibility for corporate customers, and an on-call phone.
I was in the deep end. And I had to learn to swim - fast.
Whenever I’m struggling with
lots of new information I start writing it down. Writing it all in my own words gives me a document I know I can understand and refer to when I have a query. It forces me to make sense of the information I’ve been given, like a student who summarises notes after class.
By Aprill Allen