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BY LEE GIMPEL | ILLUSTRATION BY TRAY

Illustration by Tray Butler

Bottle up your employees' tips, tricks and practices and save your business time-and money-in the long run.

Knowledge, as they say, is power. For businesses, the ability to store and access other people's knowledge is even more powerful-and money-saving.

If one of your employees knows the best way to fix a persistent problem, you want his or her strategy at your fingertips, rather than having to reinvent the wheel. But wanting to harness the awesome power of organizationwide know-how and actually doing it are two very diff erent things.

A good knowledge base-a database that compiles information beyond facts and figures, such as interpretations and procedures-takes a lot of work before and aft er you launch it. Most companies have considerable material to start with, including employee handbooks, and scads of documents, proposals, emails and intranet pages that reside on individuals' machines or in various nooks within a network. Th ey just don't know how to use it.

Simon Yelsky, vice president of product management at knowledge-base provider RightAnswers, says it's best to create bitesized knowledge chunks, rather than posting a 10-page document. When you launch the knowledge base, it should be seeded with content; users must believe that visiting it is worth their time. And like a website, it needs a supervisor to create content, improve usability and keep information fresh.

As with many initiatives, the tech part is (relatively) easy. The bigger challenge is getting employees to understand its importance. Ideally, they will recognize the inherent value in sharing what they know. But some may see using a knowledge base as a waste of time. In addition, they may think, "If the company possesses my knowledge, why do they need me?" So before throwing resources at one, realize it might not be welcome.

Some companies utilize a reward system to support their knowledge base. Typically, users are tracked, and contributors can accrue points-which may translate to real dollars or simply getting a star by their name in the system-based on their input. Be careful rewarding quantity over quality, however: A single contribution that is clear, cogent and frequently used is more valuable than dozens of poorly conceived entries. And shoddy entries can actually decrease the likelihood that employees will use the system.

Finally, a knowledge base may take many forms aside from the typical Qand-A style of self-service tech support. Increasingly, says Yelsky, companies are adopting blogs, wikis and other collaborative technologies. So if you're looking to preserve knowledge, don't assume it has to be in a certain format; the technology one chooses should match the knowledge- not the other way around.

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