Re: Building a documentation knowledgebase

["Mark Baker" <listsub -at- analecta -dot- com>]

Gene Kim-Eng wrote:

> Personally, I think there's been entirely too much emphasis in recent
years
> on promoting business initiatives by convincing people they should be
willing
> to join in because it will benefit them.  In some cases, management just
> needs to wave its big stick and say, "Henceforth, thou shalt do this or
else."

I can't imagine anything less likely to produce a usable knowledge base than
frog-marching people to compliance. Some activities can be forced on people,
undoubtedly, but when it comes to populating a knowledge base and providing
good metadata to make the thing usable, dumb conformance is never going to
yield good results. It is simply too easy to meet the nominal requirements
with shoddy data.

> the fact that management is willing to start down *any*
> road to a corporate kb is half the battle won...

Only if one supposes that a corporate knowledge base is in fact a
universally desirable thing. I don't. I think that in many cases the costs
outweigh the benefits and that improving local repositories would probably
yield better results in many cases.

> So while I might have
> been willing to make a different suggestion to management had I been asked
> in the early stages, now that management has issued its directive, what I
> would do is get on board the train, push that common template like it's
the
> best idea I've ever heard and start whispering in someone's ear my
thoughts
> for the *next* step in the process.

But a knowledge base is not a "next step" after the adoption of a common
template. The two things are completely orthogonal. And neither one is
necessarily beneficial to the company.

Mark Baker
Analecta Communications