Knowledge Management and Community 🧠

We have an Enablement team that leads most KM areas for both internal and external. They manager two main forms of content: 

• Documentation
• Course-based learning via Skilljar or any LMS (both ad hoc learning and on the path to certification)

Community sits within the same part of the organization, Customer Success, and is well aligned with that team. We’ve partnered on using the Insided Search API to make our community a true federated search across content that sits on many different platforms: Insided, our documentation CMS, our LMS, and our marketplace.  

While that team leads the formal KM, there’s a great deal of knowledge in other parts of our business, as well as our customer base. As such, we’re position Community as a way to source and share knowledge through other processes. We’ve launched new forums for more thought leadership and sharing of lessons learned, use cases, and best practices. It’s a nice informal and inbound complement to our formal KB. 

The Enablement team is monitoring what comes in via community and will consider formalizing some of that content into our documentation and/or learning paths. If a community-sourced post covers something that really should be in our formal knowledge base, we want to address that gap. They’ll work with the person who posted, research, validate, and “level it up” to whatever extent necessary. 

But, otherwise, it supplements their formal KM with community-sourced insights. And because of how we use federated search, and position community as the one-stop shop to search across different resources/content types, it’s all accessible in one place for the user. 

(Note: because of how we manage our KB on a documentation CMS and training/certification CMS, we are not using Insided’s KB module for any of our knowledge management)