Knowledge management with an intranet: how to turn your intranet into a knowledge source everyone uses

Almost half of digital workers struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs, according to research by Gartner. In most cases, that information does exist. It is just in the wrong place, in an old version or in the head of one colleague. Knowledge management solves this, and an intranet is the logical place for it, provided that every topic has an owner and that colleagues without a desk can access it too. Further down, you will find a scorecard to see where your organisation stands today.

What is knowledge management?

Knowledge management is the way an organisation captures knowledge, keeps it up to date and makes it easy to find, so that employees find the right information at the moment they need it.

That sounds simple. In practice, knowledge is spread across mailboxes, shared folders, chat conversations and above all: people’s heads.

There are two types of knowledge. Explicit knowledge is written down: procedures, policy documents, manuals, forms. Tacit knowledge lives in people’s experience. How to handle a difficult customer, why a process works this way and not another, who to go to for an exception.

Good knowledge management makes explicit knowledge easy to find and keeps it up to date, and captures as much tacit knowledge as possible before it walks out the door.

It has little to do with document storage. A folder with five thousand files where nobody knows which version is valid is more of a problem than a solution.

Why does knowledge get lost in organisations?

Knowledge is rarely lost because of one big mistake. Usually, there is simply no fixed place for it and no owner.

A procedure is updated, but the old version stays in three folders. A colleague who knew everything about invoicing for fifteen years retires, and only in the first week after that does the team notice how much was never written down.

The more tools an organisation uses, the bigger that risk. According to the same Gartner study, the number of applications an employee uses rose from six in 2019 to eleven in 2022. Every extra tool is another place where a document can be stored, and so another place where someone has to search.

We wrote about this fragmentation before: the hidden cost of digital fragmentation.

How do you prevent knowledge loss when employees leave?

Plan the handover from the moment the departure is announced, and record everything in the place where colleagues will look for it later.

A study by Panopto and YouGov shows how big that risk is: on average, 42% of the knowledge an employee needs for their job is unique to that person and is not shared with any colleague. When that person leaves, that part leaves with them.

A departure is therefore the moment when knowledge loss is most visible, and at the same time the moment when you can do the most about it.

1. Start at the announcement, not on the last day. Schedule a few handover sessions right away.
2. Ask about exceptions, not about the standard process. The standard process is usually written down somewhere. What is missing are the “yes, but for that customer we do it differently” situations.
3. Record it with the right team or process. A handover document in someone’s personal folder is impossible to find within a month. A page on the intranet is not.
4. Appoint a new owner. Knowledge without an owner becomes outdated.

How do you know if this works? One month after the departure, ask the successor which questions they would still have liked to ask the colleague who left. Every question is something that was missing from the handover.

How do you keep policies and procedures up to date?

There is exactly one valid version, everyone knows where to find it, and someone is responsible for the content.

In practice, that requires three things:

• A fixed place. Not “on the intranet or in the shared folder or in the email from HR”, but one place that is easy to find.
• An owner per document. Someone who knows the content and knows when it needs to be reviewed.
• A review date. Show on every policy document when it was last checked and when the next check is planned. A reader can then see right away whether the content is still correct.

AZ Damiaan shows what this looks like in practice. For its JCI accreditation, the hospital had to make all hospital-wide procedures available in one central place. New procedures start from a uniform template and go through an approval process with automatic review. That way, the version employees find is also the version that applies.

How do you know if this works? Choose five frequently used procedures and look them up the way an employee would. If you find more than one version, or if there is no date, you know where to start.

How do you find the colleague who knows the answer?

A large part of the knowledge in an organisation is not in any document. Anyone looking for that knowledge first has to find the right person.

The same Panopto study calculated that knowledge workers lose 5.3 hours per week waiting for information from colleagues or working out again something that already exists.

A who’s who directory with profiles helps here, especially if those profiles show more than a name and job title. Also include expertise, languages and current projects. Then you can search for colleagues by what they know, not only by who they are.

At Dstny, this is how they solved the questions about the organisation chart: all employees are listed in the who’s who directory, with a photo, job title and department.

Please note: a directory with empty profiles does not help anyone find a colleague. That is why filling in your profile should be a fixed step when a new employee starts.

Teams or intranet: where does knowledge belong?

Use Teams to arrive at an answer together, and the intranet to keep that answer.

In Teams, you work together: you ask a question, discuss and decide. But a chat conversation is not an archive. Six months later, nobody scrolls through a hundred messages to find out which agreement was finally made.

As soon as a decision, a way of working or an answer comes out of a conversation that others will need later, it moves to the intranet. That way, Teams remains the place for discussion, without having to become an archive.

A rule of thumb: if the same question is asked in Teams for the second time, the answer belongs on the intranet. Whoever sees the question the third time answers it with a link.

How do you make knowledge accessible for employees without a desk?

Knowledge must be accessible on mobile, short enough to read between two tasks, and easy to find with the words employees use themselves.

Much knowledge management is set up for people with a laptop. In healthcare, construction, manufacturing, retail or cleaning, a large share of the staff works without a fixed workplace, and they are often the ones who need an answer the fastest.

A nurse looking for a guideline during a night shift does not have time to click through folders. What helps there is often simpler than expected:

• Put the essentials at the top. Nobody on the work floor reads a twelve-page protocol. They will read the five most important steps, with the full version below.
• Bring the page to the place where it is needed. Put a QR code on the medication cart or the emergency kit that leads directly to the right procedure.
• Use the words of the work floor. Employees search for “fire alarm”, not for “evacuation procedure version 3”. Ask from time to time which words they use to search.

You can read more practical tips in how to reach your non-desk employees.

How do you know if this works? Compare intranet use among employees without a desk with intranet use at the office. If it is much lower, the knowledge does exist, but it does not reach that group.

How do you make sure employees actually use your knowledge source?

A knowledge source gets used when it is faster than calling a colleague. You achieve that with agreements and habits, not with a launch email.

Four things make the difference:

• Answer with a link. When HR, IT or a team leader gets a question whose answer is already on the intranet, they send the link instead of the answer. This way, colleagues learn where to look themselves next time.
• Put the intranet where people already work. As the start page in the browser, as an app in Teams or on the smartphone. Every extra click is a reason to call someone after all.
• Work with ambassadors per department. VNZ did not choose central management by a communication department, but four super users and one person responsible per department, who help colleagues find their way.
• Mix knowledge with what people like to read. At VNZ, the intranet also got a “social touch” with informal news next to the knowledge portal. Anyone who visits every day will also find the procedure faster.

You will find more ideas in 10 tips to boost intranet adoption.

What does AI change about knowledge management?

AI mainly changes how employees search: instead of guessing the right keyword, they ask a question in everyday language and get an answer based on the content that is already on the intranet.

This comes with an important condition. AI is only as good as the content it relies on. If there are three versions of the same procedure on your intranet, an AI assistant may just as well pick the wrong one. With AI, knowledge management becomes more important, not less.

Those who maintain the content also benefit. Shortening a long procedure into a readable summary goes faster with AI as a tool, and in multilingual organisations, automatic translation keeps all language versions aligned.

Two questions to ask before you choose an AI solution:

• Where is your data processed? Within your own Microsoft 365 environment, or by an external party?
• Does the AI respect access rights? Someone who is not allowed to open a document should not get an answer from it either.

You can read how we approach this on the page about Involv intranet AI.

Where does knowledge management usually go wrong?

Rarely because of the technology. Almost always because of choices made at the start.

1. Using news as an archive. Before Involv, everything at Kom op tegen Kanker was published as news articles, so colleagues constantly had to search through old news. News is temporary, knowledge is not. Give lasting information its own page and link to it from the news.

2. Letting the communication department write everything. Communication looks after structure and style, but does not know the content of a purchasing procedure. That belongs with the team that owns the knowledge.

3. Migrating everything at once. If you move all folders in one go, you also move all outdated documents. Start small and expand based on what users are missing.

4. Systems without a shared search function. Sometimes procedures have to stay in a separate quality system. That is why H.-Hartziekenhuis Lier connected its document management system to the intranet, with one search function across both.

5. Starting without maintenance agreements. A knowledge base that is complete at launch will no longer be complete a year later, unless someone keeps it up to date.

How does your knowledge management measure up?

Compare your organisation with the signals below before you change anything, and count the number of strong signals.

Be strict: a signal only counts as strong when it applies to the entire organisation, not to one department.

How do you read your score?

• 0 to 2 strong signals: start with ownership and keeping content up to date. As long as nobody is responsible for the content, a better structure or a new platform will not help much.
• 3 to 5 strong signals: the basics are in place. Tackle the weak rows one by one, starting with the one that generates the most questions.
• 6 or 7 strong signals: your knowledge management works. Focus on maintenance and on the groups you do not reach well yet.

How do you get started with knowledge management on your intranet?

You do not have to tackle everything at once. These six steps are enough to get started.

1. Map what is already there. Start with the topics that generate the most questions to HR, IT or the helpdesk.
2. Appoint owners. One named person per topic.
3. Choose a structure employees understand. Organising by theme or task (“I want to request leave”) usually works better than organising by the organisation chart.
4. Clean up before you migrate. Anything nobody has opened in the last two years deserves a critical look before it moves along.
5. Test the search. Ask five employees from different teams to each look up three things. Adjust whatever they cannot find.
6. Agree on a maintenance rhythm. For example, a check by each owner every quarter.

Knowledge management is not a project with an end date. It is maintenance.

Curious how your intranet can become a knowledge source that everyone uses?

Frequently asked questions

Sources

• Gartner (10 May 2023). Gartner Survey Reveals 47% of Digital Workers Struggle to Find the Information Needed to Effectively Perform Their Jobs. Survey of 4,861 full-time digital workers in organisations with 100 or more employees in the US, the UK, India and China, September to November 2022. Source of the 47% and of the increase from six to eleven applications per employee between 2019 and 2022.
• Panopto (17 July 2018). Inefficient Knowledge Sharing Costs Large Businesses $47 Million Per Year, press release for the Workplace Knowledge and Productivity Report. Online survey in partnership with YouGov among 1,001 US employees in organisations with at least 200 employees. Source of the 42% unique knowledge per employee and the 5.3 hours per week spent waiting for or recreating information.