Highly valued employees are typically the ones with a large amount of domain expertise who rarely need to search for information, however often times these employees leave a large gap when they eventually move on from the role or company. As much as we’d like to have a Knowledge Transfer meeting and retain everything, it’s simply not possible. You can’t replace experience with training.

I have been able to help a few workforces thus far by creating a knowledge management structure for them, so that knowledge can be accessed just-in-time by employees as needed. My current company utilizes Confluence Wiki, so I have been able to create in-depth knowledge centers. These are not the same as a link/document farm that you might find with Sharepoint, these are user-centric information repositories.

To create one of these, working with subject matter experts (SMEs) is imperative. You begin by working with SME stakeholders to generate user stories to understand all of the reasons that someone is coming to this knowledge center. These will serve two purposes, to help you decide what content is truly needed, and how you will organize it.

My company recently acquired a government contract, and because of that the need for our solutions to be Accessible dramatically increased. We found 3 primary reasons our employees would look for Accessibility information, and sub-reasons under those. This led to creating a user-centric splash page.

Once you select a main category such as ‘making a solution accessible’ we separated specific content by task instead of role, as we found via our SMEs that some roles perform different tasks than others depending on their team layout. Keeping design principles top of mind, we made sure to keep the pages as clean and easy to navigate as possible. We have received large amounts of feedback that this, compared to the previous link farm, allows employees to quickly access the relevant information and gives them confidence that they are looking at the right material. This has led to massive wins in our Return on Expectations (ROE) measures, as well as satisfaction and confidence measures.

As an additional example, I have included a sample of what I have created to support our Usability initiative. The four categories were devised, and then explained below the section headers. This has received acclaim as it quickly allows associates to get the information they need and helps to close a Human Performance gap with leveraging our User Experience team.

Questions? Comments? I’d love to hear what you think.