The ability to efficiently manage and retrieve information is crucial for businesses of all sizes. For large, globally distributed teams — where vast amounts of data, code and insights are generated on a daily basis — having a centralized knowledge base is an absolute necessity.
But such information hubs are hard to get right. And for good reasons. It’s not just enough to fill a knowledge base to the brim with documents and call it a day.
Enterprises can only concretely harness the productivity benefits of a knowledge base if its content is kept current, consistent, accurate and easily accessible.
Read on to find out why effective engineering teams maintain knowledge bases to preserve and share their collective technical insights.
The issue with fragmented information
Picture this — you’re adding a new feature to your codebase and have a question. You frantically search for the answer, only to discover it doesn’t exist or it’s scattered across multiple sources.
You spend hours piecing together information and investigating adjacencies in the code to hopefully discover an answer. In the end, you realize the information you’re looking for is irrelevant after all. Simply because your colleague merged a change last week and didn’t tell anyone about it.
That’s a lot of wasted time and energy that could have been better spent on building and innovating.
Lack of a single, well-curated repository of organizational knowledge forces people to spend countless hours searching and hitting dead ends. Cue ensuing frustration and inefficiency across the board.
Enter, knowledge bases. Your company’s library of knowledge — or wiki — provides (at least, should provide) a single source of truth that you can tap into for answers at any time.
These portals provide consolidated information about any aspect of your company’s codebase. Teams can quickly get up to speed with project technicalities without wasting time searching across a variety of portals.
Consequently, internal wikis break down knowledge silos, foster collaboration and boosts overall organizational efficiency.
The pain of putting together useful wikis
Building an effective knowledge base involves a trade-off similar to organizing your workspace. The more time you spend upfront sorting and labelling everything, the easier it is to find what you need later. However, if you simply “store” stuff by setting it down randomly, you’ll spend more time searching for something every time you need it.
Investing time and effort in carefully organizing a knowledge hub while building it up makes it vastly easier for your entire organization to retrieve valuable information when needed, saving time and reducing frustration when it is most crucial.
Many businesses have their technical information scattered across various platforms—wikis, local drives, Notion pages, in-code comments, Slack messages, and sometimes just in an individual’s head.
No surprise that this results in disjointed knowledge silos. Crucial information gets stored in isolated pockets in the org, making it incredibly difficult for team members to find what they need, when they need it.
Businesses usually face two major challenges when creating and maintaining wikis on their own, with no automation whatsoever —
- Aggregating all information centrally
- Documentation is of little value if it’s scattered across multiple locations, forcing individuals to spend hours hunting down the information they need. This work is tedious, time-consuming and regularly requires chasing down individual colleagues to submit their contributions to the knowledge base.
- Documentation is of little value if it’s scattered across multiple locations, forcing individuals to spend hours hunting down the information they need. This work is tedious, time-consuming and regularly requires chasing down individual colleagues to submit their contributions to the knowledge base.
- Ensuring accuracy and freshness of information
- Even if teams manage to consistently gather all their documentation in one place, it won’t be of much value if it’s riddled with errors or is outdated. Keeping your wiki fresh with the most up-to-date information as it relates to your codebase and infrastructure is a pre-requisite for the information to be of any use.
Automating your team’s knowledge management
A knowledge base that has drifted away from the ground truth is no longer reliable. The usefulness of team wikis hinges on regular updates and maintenance.
When organizations allocate time to periodically collect and organize information in a centralized knowledge hub, it becomes a powerful tool. Google Cloud’s State of DevOps 2022 reports that quality documentation provides a solid 15x boost to development capability.
But that upfront investment of time doesn’t come cheap. Which is why technical debt is a universal phenomenon across companies big and small.
Crafting a cohesive technical wiki from scattered and absent documentation is a big leap. Maintaining and updating it is even harder when you consider how frequently the codebase of an active project changes.
To transform sporadic documentation into a dependable corpus of knowledge, you need a tool that considers the needs of the individuals using it and the requirements of your enterprise.
Use Komment to build tech wikis from scratch
As a disruptor in AI-first knowledge management, Komment specializes in building enterprise-grade technical hubs that empower teams to effectively harness the collective intelligence of their organization.
Knowledge bases produced by Komment build themselves up over time.
Integrating effortlessly into CI/CD toolchains, Komment keeps your technical wikis automatically up-to-date and synchronized with code changes. All without any manual actions.
As a result, teams that use Komment save hundreds of hours each month otherwise spent collating, managing and (especially) finding information about their organization’s technical work.
The collective tribal knowledge built over time in your organization is a hard-earned asset. Where is the sense in losing it each time your company undergoes staff changes?
Head on over to app.komment.ai and start building your team’s technical wiki today!