Almost every internal knowledge base dies the same way. Somebody sets the tool up with enthusiasm, writes forty articles in three weeks, and two months later the last change is dated forty days ago. Nobody deletes it. It simply stops being opened, and when somebody has a question the answer is once again a direct message to the person who knows.
This article is the method we have seen survive. It is not the most ambitious one. It is the one still alive a year later.
Before you start: do not tidy first
The natural instinct is to clean before uploading. Reorganize the folders, delete duplicates, rename everything to a convention. Nobody finishes that project, because it has no end and because the person doing it does not have that job.
The right order is the reverse: upload what is there, exactly as it is, and tidy afterwards with evidence of what people actually search for. A decent search engine finds things in messy material. What it cannot do is find what is not there.
There is one exception and it matters. Before uploading anything, look at what is inside the folder you are about to upload. At an importer we worked with, the shared administration folder had the purchase margin table by supplier in a 2021 subfolder nobody opened. It had been accessible to half the company for four years and nobody knew, because nobody searched. The new system’s first search surfaced it in third place. Obscurity is not a permission, but while nobody searches it works like one.
Step 1: pick a department, not the company
Starting with the whole company guarantees you will not finish. Pick the area where it hurts most today. Usually operations, sometimes legal, sometimes HR.
Signs that you picked the right department: somebody answers the same question more than once a week, a new hire’s onboarding depends on another person’s patience, and there is at least one process only one person knows how to run.
A clinic we worked with started with nursing rather than administration, because nursing was where the knowledge was most in people’s heads and least written down. It was the right call: within a month they had written down what had gone eleven years unwritten.
Step 2: four document types and nothing else
The temptation is to invent a taxonomy. There is no need. Almost all of a company’s useful knowledge fits into four types, and naming each one makes people aware of what they are writing.
Procedure. How something is done, step by step, so that somebody who has never done it can. “How to onboard a new supplier.”
Policy. What is allowed and what is not, and who decides. “Supplier advance payment policy.”
Reference. Data you look up rather than read through. Price lists, code tables, directories, responsibility matrices.
Decision. What was decided, when, by whom and why. Minutes, committee summaries, notes from a discussion that ended in something.
The fourth type is the one almost nobody documents and the one worth most. Half the arguments that repeat inside a company repeat because the reasoning from the first time was never written down, only the conclusion.
Step 3: a seven-line template
The longer the template, the fewer people write. This is the one that works, and it fits in your head.
Title: verb + object. "Onboard a new supplier"
Type: procedure | policy | reference | decision
Owner: who answers if this is wrong
In force since: date
Applies to: who uses it
Body: whatever it needs to be, no format rules
Related to: links to the two or three neighboring documentsThe two lines people skip are the ones holding everything else up.
Owner is what stops the document from dying. A document with no owner ages without anyone noticing. With an owner, there is at least somebody to ask.
Related to is what turns a pile of files into something you can walk through. When the supplier onboarding procedure links to the advance payment policy and that links to the minutes where it was approved, anyone arriving at one of the three finds the other two. In Ofivia those links are written with double brackets, wiki style, and the system builds the graph on its own, so you can also walk it backwards: which documents point at this one.
Step 4: filling it without stopping the operation
Three sources, in this order.
What is already written. Upload it as it is. Old manuals, decks, long emails that were really a procedure. Do not rewrite it yet.
What people ask. For two weeks, every time somebody answers a question over chat or email, have them paste the answer into a new document using the template. Unedited. A raw written answer is infinitely better than a perfect article that does not exist.
What only one person knows. This is where an AI agent earns its place, and it is the use that surprised us most by how well it works. Sit the person who knows down, have them talk for twenty minutes about how they do their job, and have the agent turn that transcript into a draft with the template filled in. The person spends ten minutes correcting what they would never have spent three hours writing. Resistance to documenting is almost never attitude: writing from nothing is expensive and correcting is not.
Step 5: the review that keeps it alive
A knowledge base with no expiration date turns into a cemetery with a search box. The minimum rule we have seen hold is a single one: every document has an owner and an effective date, and once a quarter the owner gets the list of theirs untouched for more than six months. Not to rewrite them. To do one of three things: confirm they still apply, correct them, or archive them.
Archiving is the option nobody uses and the one that cleans most. A procedure for a system the company stopped using in 2023 is not history: it is a trap for whoever joins next.
In companies where this works, the quarterly review takes between twenty and forty minutes per owner. In companies with no owners assigned, the knowledge base averages eighteen months old and nobody trusts it, which amounts to not having one.
How to tell at three months whether it is working
Four signs, in order of importance.
People search before they ask. You notice it in internal chat: fewer messages starting with “quick question”.
New documents are written by more than one person. If the same person writes everything, you built a personal blog.
Somebody corrected another person’s document. That is the sign the material is felt to belong to the company rather than to whoever wrote it.
And the one that measures itself: how long a new person takes to work unsupervised. If it was three weeks and it is now eight days, it has already paid for itself.
All of this needs a place where documents are real files rather than rows in a vendor’s database. In Ofivia’s vault each company gets its own folder with standard Markdown and the originals it uploaded, so the template above is a text file, the links are links, and the day you want to take it all away you take a folder that opens in any editor.