Documentation and internal knowledge
An employee asks a question in their own words and gets an answer with a reference to a specific document and passage. The search covers contracts, procedures and technical documentation, and permissions decide what they see.
We agree the range of sources and the access rules with the people responsible for the documents and for data security.
A question asked in one place, with no need to know the folder structure or file names.
A search across the sources agreed during the audit and permitted for the person asking.
An answer referencing the document and passage, plus a flag on any wording that needs review.
The documentation usually exists. The trouble starts when someone tries to find the right passage.
Documentation
Procedures sit on the drive and on the intranet. It is quicker to ask a colleague than to search the folders.
Dependency
Two or three employees know the answer to the harder questions. Nobody has written it down, and their time off holds up everyone else.
Versions
The email attachment, the file on the drive and the printout in the folder say different things, and the employee does not know which one applies.
Fragmentation
Contracts in one place, technical documentation in another, decisions inside email threads. Every source has its own search.
Currency
Documents share no common review date, so a withdrawn instruction is sometimes used alongside the new one.
Access
Some resources are open to the whole company, others are locked in one person's mailbox. Nobody keeps a shared list of the rules.
Every answer names its source, so the employee can verify it without involving an expert.
Step 1
The employee asks in their own words, inside the tool they already use every day.
Step 2
The system checks permissions and narrows the search to the sources that are allowed.
Step 3
It searches contracts, procedures and technical documentation across the agreed repositories.
Step 4
It gives the content together with a reference to the document, the passage and the version date.
Step 5
Missing coverage or contradictory wording goes onto a list for the document owner to review.
We agree the rules with the people responsible for the documents today and with whoever oversees data security.
Sources
We name the folders, the systems and the file types that go into the search.
Reference
The answer gives the document, the passage and the date, so the employee can check it at source.
Permissions
An employee receives content only from documents they can already access in your systems.
Currency
The newer version takes precedence, and withdrawn documents stay outside the search.
Contradictions
The system marks the places where two documents answer the same question differently.
Gaps
Unanswered questions go onto a list of topics worth writing up first.
We set the baseline before go-live, based on the questions that currently reach a handful of people in the company.
Experts
The number of questions that still need an answer from one of the few people who know the topic.
Onboarding
From day one to the point where a new starter finds answers without asking the team.
Hit rate
Queries for which the search found no coverage in the company's documents.
Source
The share of answers that name a document and passage anyone can verify.
Documents
How many places have been flagged for correction and how quickly document owners close them.
Topics
A breakdown of the most frequent topics, showing which procedure to write up first.
We set the technical scope alongside the material needed to name the sources, the access rules and how the solution will be signed off.
01Solution
02Assessment
Answers about document security, permissions, the state of your documentation and how far the answers can be trusted.
No. We start the search on the material your company has today. Contradictory and withdrawn wording appears in a report, so you can tidy up in the order that your employees' questions suggest.
Contact
In the first conversation we go through your sources of knowledge, the access rules and the questions that currently reach a handful of people. On that basis we set the scope of the audit.
We list the places where your company keeps contracts, procedures and technical documentation.
We establish who may see each document and who decides on permissions.
We choose the questions we will use to test the quality of the answers before you decide on a rollout.