Knowledge Management and IT Hub
Knowledge is an operational resource.
ISS cannot provide consistent support if important information exists only in the experience or memory of individual employees.
Knowledge management is the practice of capturing, organizing, maintaining, sharing, and improving information so that the people who need it can find and use it.
IT Hub is the primary searchable knowledge platform for ISS.
The Goal of Knowledge Management
Knowledge management helps ISS turn individual experience into organizational capability.
When an employee learns:
- How to resolve a recurring issue
- How a service works
- How to perform a maintenance activity
- How to configure a system
- How to support a customer
- How to recover from a known failure
- How a College process interacts with technology
that knowledge may have value beyond the person who discovered it.
The objective is to make useful knowledge available to the appropriate people at the time they need it.
IT Hub
IT Hub should be the primary location for information that benefits from being:
- Searchable
- Reusable
- Maintained
- Linked to related knowledge
- Available to more than one employee
- Presented as instructions, procedures, standards, or reference information
IT Hub may contain both internal ISS documentation and information intended for broader College audiences.
The intended audience should determine how the article is written and who can access it.
What Belongs in IT Hub
Good candidates for IT Hub include:
Operating Procedures
Repeatable instructions for operating, administering, maintaining, or supporting services.
Troubleshooting Knowledge
Known symptoms, causes, diagnostic steps, workarounds, and resolutions that may help resolve future incidents.
Support Articles
Information that helps the Help Desk or other ISS employees resolve requests without relying on one technical specialist.
Customer-Facing Instructions
Instructions that students, faculty, or employees can safely use to resolve common issues or understand available services.
Standards and Expectations
Department standards, procedures, expectations, and resources such as this manual.
Service Documentation
Information about services, service offerings, responsibilities, support expectations, dependencies, and other reusable knowledge.
IT Hub and SharePoint Serve Different Purposes
As a general rule:
IT Hub is for knowledge.
For example, an IT Hub article may explain a procedure while linking to a spreadsheet, diagram, template, report, or source file stored in SharePoint.
This allows employees to search IT Hub to discover what they need without requiring them to understand a complicated folder structure.
Create One Authoritative Source
Whenever practical, information should have one authoritative location.
Avoid maintaining multiple copies of the same procedure in:
Multiple copies quickly become different versions of the truth.
When information already exists in an authoritative location, link to it rather than reproducing it unnecessarily.
This is especially important when another College department owns the information.
For example, when Human Resources, Purchasing, Emergency Management, Marketing, or another College area maintains an official procedure, ISS documentation should link to the authoritative College source rather than creating an unofficial replacement.
When Knowledge Should Be Created or Updated
Knowledge should be considered whenever:
- A new service is introduced.
- A new service offering is introduced.
- A project changes how a service works.
- A significant change affects support procedures.
- An incident reveals missing documentation.
- The same support question occurs repeatedly.
- An employee discovers a useful troubleshooting process.
- A vendor or product changes.
- A procedure changes.
- An article is discovered to be incomplete or inaccurate.
- A Technical Lead realizes others could not support the service without additional information.
Documentation should grow from actual work.
Make Knowledge Useful
A knowledge article should help someone accomplish something or understand something.
Good articles should be:
- Clearly titled.
- Searchable using words employees or customers are likely to use.
- Written for the intended audience.
- Organized logically.
- Specific enough to be useful.
- Updated when the process changes.
- Linked to related information when appropriate.
An article does not need to be long to be useful.
Sometimes the best knowledge article is a short answer to a question that is asked repeatedly.
Write for the Audience
Technical documentation intended for ISS may contain information that would confuse or be inappropriate for a general College audience.
Likewise, a customer-facing article should not require customers to understand ISS's internal organization.
Before publishing an article, consider:
- Who needs this information?
- What do they need to accomplish?
- What technical knowledge can reasonably be assumed?
- Does the article expose sensitive or unnecessary internal information?
- Should the article be available only to ISS or to a broader audience?
Follow current IT Hub guidance for article permissions and audience access.
Knowledge Ownership
The Service Owner is ultimately responsible for ensuring that adequate knowledge exists to operate and support the service.
Technical Leads are responsible for helping maintain accurate technical and operational knowledge for the services and service offerings they support.
Backups should use and contribute to the same documentation.
Documentation should not become the private responsibility of one employee.
Review and Retire Knowledge
Old documentation can be worse than missing documentation because employees may trust information that is no longer correct.
Articles should be reviewed and updated when:
- Technology changes.
- Processes change.
- Responsibility changes.
- A project changes the service.
- An incident reveals inaccurate information.
- A reader identifies an error.
- A service is replaced or retired.
Information that is no longer valid should be updated, archived, redirected, or removed as appropriate.
Knowledge Supports Cross-Training
Documentation does not replace experience, but it makes experience transferable.
Technical Leads and Backups should use documentation as part of cross-training.
A good test of important service documentation is whether another qualified team member could use it to understand the environment and perform common support or maintenance tasks safely.
Connection to Our Values
Inclusiveness Matters because useful knowledge allows more people to participate and contribute rather than concentrating information with a few individuals.
Communication Matters because knowledge must be understandable and discoverable.
Integrity Matters because information should be accurate, current, and authoritative.
Excellence Matters because mature services are supported by repeatable processes and shared knowledge.
People Matter because the ultimate purpose of knowledge management is to help employees help one another and serve the College more effectively.