You are always riding high on the wave of expectations when it comes to delivering your services. Going through the same set of queries and support documents, again and again, can be frustrating. Your employees could be losing an important amount of time in their workplace with such repetitive tasks. 

Enter the savior! 

All of this could be solved with the help of easy documented content. 

To avoid employee engagement crisis and give them long-term growth, setting up an internal knowledge management system is an easy solution.

A knowledge management system is any kind of IT system that stores and retrieves knowledge to improve understanding, collaboration, and process its alignment. It spikes up the workforce productivity, brings in responsibility and accountability for the work. 

A narrower and more precise definition would be around its purpose - A knowledge management system is the one used to help people utilize the knowledge to better achieve tasks. It can be used by employees, clients, and customers. 

Getting into the Terminology

Wikipedia explains Knowledge management as “...the process of creating, sharing, using and managing the knowledge and information of an organization. It refers to a multidisciplinary approach to achieving organisational objectives by making the best use of knowledge.”

Rightly said, in fact, a KMS can exist within the organizations or as small as an internal team, and the main purpose is to be the center of your knowledge database to achieve better results. 

A knowledge management system can take many forms, but there are usually some common characteristics. These include:

• FAQ content
• Forum or community feature
• How to articles and tutorials
• Education, academies, and training programs
• Certificates
• Case studies
• Webinars

Achieving  Enhanced Results with a KMS

Business can bear huge financial loses when ignoring the need for a knowledge sharing system. That’s right, according to one report, almost $31.5 billion a year are lost by Fortune 500 businesses by failing to share the knowledge.  

A situation where the employees lose out on productive hours at the workplace is uncalled for.  A well-structured and information-rich internal knowledge base can somber situations. 

Fortune 500 businesses lose around $31.5 billion a year by failing to share knowledge

Not only does a KMS helps the teams collaborate with information hunting, but it can also boost productivity, help achieve the team goals, instead of constantly answering the same questions in your support ticketing system.

Housing an unparalleled internal knowledge base that’s high on quality and rich in features will give wings to your endeavors of enhancing cross-functioning teams.

The Combo of Four will Save Your Day 

Everything is possible but only if the quality is ensured. When building a compelling knowledge platform ensure these five elements are part of it. 

• Robustness at its Core - Cluttered information is of no use. Once the structure is chalked out, the information needs to be presented in a manner that it requires least updates in the future. The information and placement of the same needs to be future-proof. 
  
  Find ways to organize it well. A section on the FAQs must be included. The layout needs to give a clean appearance to your knowledge base and smooth search experience for its user, be it the employees or customer.
   
• A Knowledge Centre - The internal knowledge management system must include all the information needed to avoid confusion and misunderstanding. Give your readers a breather and try to be as specific as you can. Putting everything, without gauging its suitability will make the platform cluttered. 
   
• Be Open to Feedback - Listen to the needs of the user. Being open to the feedback will always let you integrate the needs of your user and create the best of the product. Create a section where people can give feedback. Be open to both positive as well as negative feedback and make relevant changes in your knowledge base to enhance its performance. 
   
• Use the Right Framework - While embarking on the path to create an internal knowledge center, one thing you shouldn’t forget is the importance of the right software. The right software will give the shape to your content and hence bring forth your brand image. 

The right framework needs to be scalable with easy access and usability for the immediate stakeholders. 

Why Drupal for Your Knowledge Management Base? 

As organizations are now realizing the importance of a centralized knowledge base, the market is filled with ample software and tools. The choice ranges from a basic FAQ software to a holistic enterprise solution.

“Knowledge management is difficult and sometimes confusing”

Drupal, which is a framework can be an easy solution for a knowledge management system. But why should you move to Drupal?

Drupal Modules and Distributions for a Knowledge Management System

• Vardoc 

Vardoc is a knowledge base system, a wiki system, and a document management system designed to host a massive amount of content in a structured and easy-to-find format. Vardoc helps you build a connected organization, product, or knowledge area to allow everyone involved to find the answers they seek and contribute their expertise in the knowledge base.

Think of it as a wiki site of your product, user manuals, or organizational processes. With the easy structure, collaborative tools, and friendly design.

• Raisin picker

No, this is not a Drupal module or distribution. Instead, this is a knowledge management tool built with Drupal 8

Raisin Picker helps knowledge workers to manage information that is relevant, to retrieve what is needed, to find what you are looking for. It helps implement several concepts to organize and structure your knowledge.

It uses (tree-structured) tags to categorize the content while letting you rate content on a numeric scale to indicate its relevance.

How much will Drupal cost me?

Cost is often a major factor when choosing some new technology. How much should Drupal cost you if you are using it as a basic framework for a website or any new technology?

Since Drupal is an open-source framework, there is no licensing fee to use. Installing or using Drupal will cost you nothing. The other benefit of being open source is you’re not locked into building a website using a proprietary platform. There are thousands of developers contributing to the Drupal community every day, which means that new features and improvements are launched frequently and you don’t need to wait for someone else’s roadmap in order to implement them.

Does it provide community features?

Community portals provide not only a domain your prospects are looking for but also help the product and community grow alike. The benefits of well-designed, modern community portals are numerous.

Drupal has a remarkable collection of tools that enable smooth collaboration, and help eliminate spam content for both open and closed communities.

Like any community framework should offer, Drupal offers easy-to-use and merge. It is easy to customize and add modules to get a new functionality for the community framework.

Third party software integration? 

Outside of Drupal, there are plenty of great technologies that can be an astounding asset to your website.

Drupal integrates seamlessly with a variety of marketing technologies and business applications. This allows you to leverage the merits of the best set of tools out there outside of Drupal.

Drupal’s API-first approach helps in connecting content to other sites and applications thereby making content more vibrant and powerful.

If you are someone who wants to flex with the awesome third-party tools, Drupal gives you the liberty to do that with enough flexibility.

How is the Community Support for Drupal? 

Drupal community is huge. There are around one hundred thousand people across the globe who are actively contributing towards the development and betterment of it. 

With such an active support, any Drupal feature, update, is under high scrutiny from its member. Peer-to-peer collaboration for various projects ensures people from different ethnicity, country, with vast knowledge and skill set rapidly build it. The community’s ethos of teamwork and volunteerism drive digital innovation and it keeps on working towards the integration of Drupal with new, trending futuristic technologies.

Conclusion

An efficient knowledge system framework like Drupal can help you scale your employee engagement, and customer support and success efforts. 

At OpenSense Labs, we take care of your organization’s growing needs. A shift to Drupal can be a huge organizational win. Contact us at [email protected] to build an effective knowledge base.