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I would like to know what Knowledge Management best practices that you follow in your organization?

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Hello, can you give us some background about your organization. This is an extremely, extremely broad question and is one that is difficult to answer with specifics that might apply to your unique situation. Please read the FAQ on what type of questions to ask here. We generally look for lots of detail in the question to give you the best possible answers. – jmort253♦ Mar 4 '12 at 19:56
Also, check out this question as well as other questions with the knowledge-management tag. – jmort253♦ Mar 4 '12 at 19:57
How to organize knowledge within a wiki? may also have the answers you're looking for. – jmort253♦ Mar 4 '12 at 20:09

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I've worked for several different organization and the "write a wiki page" was the solution for all the knowledge management related problems. I believe that a good set of wiki pages can solve every basic knowledge management problems. However, there are some things which should happen in order to have it:

  • all the pages should be editable by everybody
  • all the pages should be reviewed and maintained
  • teach the colleagues how to use wiki
  • set categories properly
  • the starting page should contain the information about the structure (where to find certain pages, how to create a new one - avoiding duplication)
  • everything should be on the wiki. Again, everything (even plans, events, ideas, design documents etc)
  • backup

If you follow this, you'll have a place where you can find everything you need for your work/job/assignment etc.

For example, I was working on a prototype, and instead of various documents we used a wiki page. The prototype was thrown away, but all the data we came up was there and our customer was able to find it after years and use it for a different purpose. Actually, he liked our wiki more than our other projects and applications.

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This would be so much better than using the word documents we use now – CaffGeek Mar 5 '12 at 17:36
@Chad - And if you like documents you could still use something like Google Docs. Our organization uses a mix of Wiki, Google Docs, Google Sites, and probably a few others I'm forgetting. – jmort253♦ Mar 6 '12 at 3:21
@jmort253, I hate the word documents. Too hard to diff. – CaffGeek Mar 6 '12 at 15:47
We use wiki. While it is a good idea, for our 400+ ppl organization this is not enough for success. This (unfortunately soon-to-be-deleted) question points it out that leadership is also, and more, important: stackoverflow.com/a/11063/611007 And I can confirm that: we lack good 'knowledge leadership' and the wiki is simply just not sufficient enough. While your answer has some guidelines about this, and we do most of them, I think it would help to go into much-much-much more depth about this. – naxa Apr 12 at 16:12
Three of the mentioned are not practiced fully at us: we do not put events up on wiki normally, because short meetings are better organized with Outlook what we use, and other events are emailed also in Outlook. The other one is the start page cannot describe the full wiki structure because A) there is just too way much information, B) the structure simply cannot keep up with the needed changes, and it is unclear who should develop the abstract structure. The third is that there are no organized trainings on wiki usage. I will recommend to improve these, but I think it won't be enough. – naxa Apr 12 at 16:24

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