Operations

The questions your own team asks, and who they interrupt to ask them

In most organisations the fastest way to find out something is to ask the person who knows, and that is precisely the problem: the cost lands on whoever is most knowledgeable, it is invisible because nobody records interruptions, and the answer never gets written down because asking worked. The documentation is not missing - it is unused, which is a different problem with a different fix.

The cost is concentrated, not spread

Internal questions do not distribute evenly. They converge on three or four people - the one who knows the billing system, the one who remembers why the process changed, the one who has been there longest - and those people are usually also the ones with the least interruptible work. Before buying anything, ask them to note for one week what they were asked and by whom. The list is almost always shorter and more repetitive than anyone expects.

Search failing is a finding, not a user error

People ask a colleague because searching did not work, and searching did not work for findable reasons: the document uses the official term and the person searched the everyday one, the answer is in a slide deck attached to an email, or three documents disagree and none is dated. An assistant that reads the same documents will fail in the same places, which is useful - its failures are a precise audit of which documents are unusable.

Decide what is allowed to be answered this way

This is the part that cannot be skipped. Salary bands, disciplinary matters, anything in a personnel file, commercially sensitive terms and anything an individual told HR in confidence must not be in the same pool as the expenses policy and the VPN instructions. The decision is about which documents are in scope and who may ask, and it is an access-control decision rather than a software setting. Make it before the first document is loaded, not after somebody asks an interesting question.

The unanswered log is the documentation backlog

What the assistant could not answer, ordered by how often it was asked, is the first genuinely prioritised documentation list most organisations have ever had - and it is prioritised by real demand rather than by whoever volunteered to write. Organisations routinely find the exercise was worth more as a knowledge audit than as automation.

Frequently asked questions

What is an internal knowledge assistant for?
Answering the questions your own staff ask repeatedly and that already have a documented answer - policies, processes, how to do a recurring task. It is not a replacement for documentation; it is a way to make existing documentation reachable, and a way to find out which parts of it are unusable.
How do we keep sensitive material out of it?
By deciding which documents are in scope before anything is loaded, and by treating that as access control rather than a setting. Personnel files, salary data, disciplinary records and anything given in confidence belong outside the pool entirely - not restricted within it. If a vendor cannot show you how scope is enforced, that is the answer.
What if our documents contradict each other?
Then the assistant will surface the contradiction, which is uncomfortable and valuable. Insist that answers cite their source so a disagreement is visible rather than silently resolved in favour of whichever document was retrieved first. Undated, conflicting documents are the most common finding of this whole exercise.
Will it work if our knowledge is in people's heads?
Not for the part that is only in heads - software cannot retrieve what was never written, and any vendor implying otherwise is selling you a problem. What it will do is produce a precise list of what is only in heads, which is the thing you need before you can fix it.
How do we know whether it helped?
Measure the thing you were trying to change: ask the three or four most-interrupted people to log questions for a week before and a week after. Usage counts tell you the tool was used; interruption counts tell you whether it mattered.

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