The Role of Knowledge Base in the Digital Transformation Journey

Many organisations around the world are ramping up their digital transformation projects. This pandemic is a significant factor in the
acceleration of many digital transformation projects as more customers are accessing services digitally. Organisations should not only digitise their
operations, but they also need to use digital technologies to re-engineer their existing business process to meet their customer expectations. Digital
transformation projects provide an opportunity to redesign their business model to sustain in this highly competitive business atmosphere.

Organisations are adopting the latest digital technologies to solve their customer pain points. For example, in order to scale their customer
support operations, organisations are looking at chatbots. Another example, in order to help operational staff, make data-driven decisions, organisations are adopting artificial intelligence. Organisations are also adopting Robotic Process Automation technologies to automate many of their complex tasks between many enterprise applications.

As organisations are doing their digital transformation projects, there is a need to document all project-related artefacts. These artefacts include business process maps, technical documents, manuals, standard operating procedures, product notes, change management processes, and so on. It is very important for organisations to democratise access to these artefacts and retain corporate knowledge. A knowledge base platform is a great tool to create, share and manage technical documents, handbooks, API guides, case studies, and use-cases. In addition to these artefacts, product and service delivery documentation can also be stored for both internal and external customers.

Business process maps

Business process maps are indispensable in understating the steps involved in delivering value. Stakeholders and their dependencies are also
captured in business process maps to identify process bottlenecks. These
artefacts need to be accessed by a wide range of stakeholders of your digital transformation projects to gain their trust for business process innovation. A good knowledge base platform will help your project team to maintain these artefacts and capture discussion around those artefacts. If the knowledge base supports the versioning of these artefacts, it further strengthens the value proposition of your knowledge base. Change management processes can also be captured to ensure a smooth transition from the old process to new practices.

Technical documentation

It is important to store technical documents relating to your technology implementation in terms of architecture diagrams, implementation
plans, code blocks, frameworks, and data management. Storing these technical documents in a centralised knowledge repository will maximise shared understanding of your project knowledge. A good knowledge base platform should provide the right tools to store these technical documentation artefacts. In addition to storing, the knowledge base platform should have good security and access control mechanisms in accessing those artefacts by relevant stakeholders.

Compliance documents

Regulatory and compliance documents are essential in ensuring compliance with relevant government regulations and laws. These
documents dictate practices for every staff in an organisation to follow,
training materials, certification programs, and frameworks. Knowledge base platform needs to offer functionalities to create FAQs, standard operating procedures, and guides to help their staff comply with a regulatory framework. Knowledge base platform needs to provide the highest level of data security in storing and accessing these compliance documents.

Product documentation

All product-related documentation provides your customers with troubleshooting. This also helps in the quick adoption of your product features. A good knowledge base platform must provide advanced capabilities in areas of

• Authoring – provide rich editors to draft and publish content

• Drive – to store and manage documents, media files, and so on

• Integration – to integrate with other enterprise apps

• Re-useable components – to reuse texts and standards

• Categorisation – to organise content

• Search – to help find relevant articles using keywords

Service delivery standards

To gain customer trust, service delivery standards and benchmarks need to be published in time. These service delivery standards can be published via a good knowledge base that can be accessed publicly. Since some of these artefacts are kept in many enterprise applications, a good integration tool such as Zapier can integrate with your knowledge base. These integration tools can help you to exchange data between your enterprise apps and your public knowledge base.

Change management

Change management is one of the underlooked aspects of many digital transformation projects. The change management process helps your staff to understand and adopt new business processes. Without change management, most of your digital transformation projects would fail. Having a good buy-in from your staff would help with a smooth transition into new ways of doing things. Knowledge base platforms can document all practices that need to be adopted. Stakeholders will be able to access change management training materials in a knowledge base. Few key functionalities in a good knowledge base that need to provide to aid change management are

• Easy interface to create FAQs

• Host training materials

• Provide controlled access to artefacts

Conclusion

As organisation accelerates their digital transformation projects, it is essential to capture and store relevant documentation in a centralised repository. A good knowledge base platform can act as a central knowledge repository and provide rich functionalities to help project stakeholders. Corporate knowledge capture and retention are crucial for organisation to compete in this “digital-first” world! Let’s go and procure a good knowledge base platform!