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Knowledge Management for an IT Department?
Laurentiu asks: "In every IT department out there there's a wealth of heterogenous information floating around: code snippets, HOWTOs, FAQs, docs, spreadsheets, post-it notes etc. Asking Joe where he put that file won't work forever. So what is, in your experience, a good way to manage this knowledge? And what software would you recommend for such a task?"
I reckon the people suggesting Google are on the right track. For better or worse, search is how people navigate heterogenous information these days and I think you are wasting time if you try and work out some highfallutin classification system.
Doesn't have to be Google though - there are a pile of tools (htdig etc) that you can use to crawl your kb and provide a basic search ui.
What a fantastic idea - Acrobat running constantly on EVERY desktop. You put in the purchase order for n units of extra desktop memory while I get adobe on the phone to see what they're offering for souls these days . . .
Ideal solution: hire a good librarian. (Or "knowledge manager", as they prefer to be known.)
Google, Wiki, Notes and similar machinery are all well and good, but if you just let everybody stuff documents into the system, you'll end up with a large, undifferentiated heap of files in a dozen or more different formats. Ever tried searching for an Excel workbook with Wiki? A Visio file? An obscure CAD package file? An old CD-ROM of critical documentation in a proprietary format?
Managing documents is quite hard to do - fairly close to programming in terms of the skills needed. It doesn't happen on its own. It requires a cluey person who understands the business and the documents, who can classify and index the material as it comes in, and record where it is so that it can be found.
At the very least, it's a process that requires considerable thought, planning, and management. It needs to be viewed in that light - not "which search engine should I use?"
We set up a departmental Gmail account. Then, if someone comes across something useful, they can send it to the Gmail account. We obviously don't keep sensitive information on there, but it is good for almost everything else. The nice thing about the Gmail account is that it is easily searched, people at any location can get to it, and the only effort required is actually adding the information to it. If someone is anal-retentive enough to want to organize it, he is free to use labels, but so far, the searching has been adequate for everyone.
I struggled for days and days and all I got was this lousy sig.
Why should I produce good documentation anyway? So it's easier for you to fire me? What's in it for me?
I document the bare minimum and keep the rest in my head. My crib notes are so cryptic they might as well be Swahili to anyone else.
Oh, but the boss is insisting I write some documentation. No problem.
Theoretically you could use the linked article to help you write good documentation, but I've never seen it happen.
If you really want to capture the state of your IT department, you need to lock everyone in a room with a gigantic whiteboard and start diagraming your systems. Get someone to take notes or digicam pictures or something. Encourage questions and heckling.
Edit those notes into something useable and let everyone criticize them. Once everyone is happy, do it again for the next system.
The above takes way too much time, so no-one ever has a complete picture of what/where/why/when.