Documentation for a system – any system – is about helping people to learn about and use the system without the need to ask someone else for help. It’s about knowledge management and sharing for existing and new users. Users might be end users (e.g. the public), members, administrators (e.g. site owners), and support technicians (e.g. website developers or consultants).
The traditional challenge with documentation:
- It can be time consuming, expensive and non-user-friendly (i.e. not fun!) to create and maintain – and therefore overlooked/underfunded, initially and ongoing.
- It can get very out-of-date very quickly, and therefore of diminishing use, relevance or interest to would-be users.
- People don’t know where it is when they need it.
- The information might be there, but can be hard to find (e.g. poorly structured, weak search engine) – i.e. non-user-friendly.
Perfect world: your software systems are incredibly easy to use for all users, and all help/documentation is built into the software and always up-to-date.
The reality is typically quite different. Some systems – especially large, highly customised ones – are unavoidably sophisticated with difficult-to-avoid jargon, and lacking in “built-in” help. There’s no getting around the fact that someone being introduced to the system for the first time – e.g. in an administrative role – will need some help and support in the form of documentation and/or training in order to be able to use the system quickly and effectively.
Here’s the good news: the Internet provides the perfect medium to address (or at least improve) many of these documentation challenges. At the core of this good news is collaboration. The Internet permits multiple persons – with the right permissions – to contribute to and collaborate on the documentation of systems, even the same documents at the same time from multiple locations. Traditionally (from an IT perspective) company intranets were the answer to internal knowledge management – and they still can be, especially when all the users of a system are internal to an organisation. But internally maintained company intranets tend to be expensive to buy and maintain, not that good, slow to gain new features, and hard to access remotely.
The relatively recent explosion of Software as a Service (Saas) – also known as hosted applications or “on-demand” software – has brought highly effective, dynamic, user-friendly knowledge management software to the masses. Always on, no software to install, easy to use, low cost, almost constantly improving/evolving, mobile friendly… The responsibility for keeping documentation (including Q & A’s) up-to-date can now be distributed between multiple users and groups.
There are a multitude of online knowledge management systems, where the knowledge management component is either the primary feature, or as an “add-on” to another primary feature such Project, Sales, or Customer Relationship (CRM) Management. Other opportunities include more generic services or software such as Google Sites or “Wiki” software. (fyi: Itomic uses Google Sites).
Although we don’t use these systems at Itomic at time of writing (so this is not an endorsement!), these appear to be successful and popular: Yammer (purchased by Microsoft), Bloomfire (up and coming), Confluence.
At Itomic we recommend that our clients “own” the responsibility for deciding how they wish to keep systems documentation (reasonably) up-to-date. And we recommend that the most efficient, cost-effective way of doing this is by using collaborate, online software.
With so many systems out there, and with many of them evolving rapidly, you should consider taking professional advice when evaluating which one is best for your organisation, now and in the foreseeable future.