By on April 19, 2018

Knowledge Management is a never-ending process; continuous development in your organisation means the knowledge base must be constantly updated with new information. It’s important to regularly measure the health of your knowledge base. How do you do this?

Keeping a healthy Knowledge Base

By continuously monitoring your Knowledge Base, you’ll discover which parts of your Knowledge Management process need more attention: make a monthly report of this.

Let’s take TOPdesk as an example. I work at Support here as a technical product consultant, and this is how we do these kind of assessments of the knowledge base.

Has your organisation not yet started with active knowledge management? Have a look at the blog written by my colleague Guilherme from our São Paulo office – the first 5 steps for effective knowledge management.

Considering getting started with knowledge management? Calculate how much time it would save your service desk.

Is your knowledge base actively used?

There is nothing more annoying than finding old or incorrect information when searching for an answer. That’s why it’s important that the knowledge base contains up-to-date information.

To ensure this, first make sure that all operators actively use the knowledge base (there’s a blog post with more detail on this here). In addition, you want the supporters to actively create new articles and change existing articles. We also zoom in on the level per group of operators / practitioners so that we know which colleagues should receive extra attention.

Measuring the health of your knowledge base

To find out whether the knowledge system is actively used, we perform a number of periodic measurements:

  • Number of new knowledge items compared to the total number of knowledge items and total number of reported reports. With this measurement, we check whether new knowledge is being added to the knowledge base.
  • Percentage of knowledge items updated in the last months. By comparing this measurement per month, you can see at a glance how up-to-date the knowledge system is.
  • Knowledge use percentage per subcategory. This measurement shows which subjects are underexposed in the knowledge system.
  • Percentage of incidents resolved with a new knowledge item compared to older knowledge items. This measurement indicates whether end users find are finding knowledge items. If your percentage is high, then new questions are mostly coming in about new issues. A low percentage tells us end users are not finding existing knowledge items, even though these are already available for a longer time.

Just getting started with targets for your department? These are the things to consider

Share knowledge better in your organisation

Want more inspiration on building better knowledge bases? Check out our infographic-style guide to creating better knowledge items or download our Knowledge Management e-book for tips and tricks and a way to calculate your time and cost savings.