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?"

Comments

Search

[deodato]

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.

The answer is not software.

[TheOriginalRevdoc]

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?"

Departmental Gmail account

[therblig]

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.