Why Wikis and Knowledge Bases Often Fail Businesses: A Fresh Approach to Knowledge Management.
Wikis and intranets are great, until they're not. They promise to centralize information, make collaboration easier, and speed up work. But here's the catch: they often fail to deliver on these promises. Why? Because the pace of information creation today is relentless, and traditional tools can't keep up. AI might be the game-changer and the best part? It could cost you nothing to switch.
The Problem with Traditional Knowledge Management Solutions
Here’s a surprising fact: 1% of Wikipedia's editors write 77% of its content. And half of all editors stick around for only 5 weeks. Applied to a business with effective management rules, having an effective wiki strategy means having a specialized person to oversee it and manage a pool of contributors. It’s a knowledge management task that stands way outside the proficiency zone of most employees in an organization and, as such, is hard for any person to do well if they haven’t been trained or don’t have a natural knack for it.
Since few businesses can justify the cost of a full-time salary to run a wiki, most default to a voluntary contribution approach. This laissez-faire attitude often leads to disaster in everyday management, especially when something as crucial as knowledge management becomes “everyone’s responsibility” without clear oversight. If you ever called a potluck dinner without coordinating the food, you know what I’m talking about.
Obvious knowledge management tools are ineffective at today’s knowledge and information creation pace. AI can change that, and at zero switching costs.
Most wikis and knowledge bases start as a great thing: central knowledge repositories to get teams back to faster execution through a reliable source of truth. Knowledge emerges in a clearly defined and browsable repository for the first time in the organization, you can feel in the organization that momentum is created and work happens faster as information is being quickly added to the wiki, and its usefulness grows proportionally.
That is until a point where duplicates start appearing, information once true becomes false or obsolete, and terms change, making search results less relevant. As this drift happens, people start losing trust in the knowledge base and keep away from it.
Born out of something that started to fix one problem, the organization now has two problems…
The Cost of Ineffective Knowledge Management
In businesses, information often changes faster than the encyclopedic knowledge of the world. Information moves at the speed of projects and product iterations. Implementing wikis and knowledge bases assumes either a static vision of knowledge flows or a misinformed understanding of the needed work for them to yield exciting results, but it’s natural to still go and make use of such solutions. After all, information capital is the least well-managed asset in most organizations, save for some organizations whose top line depends on how well they can generate and retrieve collective knowledge.
Indeed, an extensive compendium of research shows that the one place businesses are hemorrhaging the most cash is through bad knowledge management.
A Finnish study showed that knowledge management practices account for a 17% variance in companies' financial performance between top and bottom performers. A review of all recent research in the field claims that “organizational competitiveness [depends] more on the aspect of intellectual capital than the aspect of labor”.
Imagine sitting on a gold mine but being unable to find the gold.
A New Approach: Trampoline.ai
If wikis and knowledge bases don’t work, what will?
At Trampoline.ai, we want to be accountable for businesses growth through their knowledge diffusion practices. Our solution integrates with existing solutions so your teams don’t have to use “yet another tool.” We are creating a unified and reliable source of truth by tapping into the tools your employees use daily to do their work. That’s where the knowledge is, duplicating it somewhere else make no sense to us. We save employees at least 4 hours of work every week by making any information accessible in a query as effective as Google’s.
If the knowledge isn’t accessible to an employee, our system asks someone who can help. We record the answer, which is integrated into Trampoline’s database to address further search. We eliminate most information maintenance tasks of through this simple loop. But of course, there is more. Employees can now generate new documents based on existing records and easily share collections of information with new employees or clients.
