5 apps to champion Knowledge Management and why they didn’t play out for an architecture company

And what we did about it

Knowledge Management is important in the success of your company. As Forbes says in this article:

It facilitates decision-making capabilities, builds learning organizations by making learning routine, and stimulates cultural change and innovation.

Behemoth companies have famously invested in KM solutions and their projects are now taught in the best business schools. See CEMEX Way.

If you are a growing startup or a team with remote collaborators and this concept does not ring a bell it’s time to get on with it! Little time invested in knowledge sharing may go a long way if done right.

A bit of context.

Earlier this year the company I work for was struggling. BIMmx, a small architect of record company of 1 year, had been withstanding steady growth and developing loads of new systems to contain ongoing projects. Communicating new solutions within the team was getting harder by the day.

After an interesting thought and design process we arrived at a decision. Finding or developing a central management system for managing company knowledge was necessary to enhance information flow within the team. Read more about this process here.

This is not your typical list post.

The following analysis serves a specific purpose: reviewing existing tools to find out if they could solve our KM needs. By sharing this I wish to convey thoughts we had while considering alternatives to later develop a solution.

These are the features deemed important for our solution and the ones considered in the evaluation.

UX

Considers usability and function. How quickly could a new user onboard the platform? Is the solution clear enough that someone without context understands it?

Flexibility

Know-how exists in several formats. Some popular ones for an architecture office are .dwg, .rvt, and .skp files (all generally in large files). A flexible platform would allow management of any kind of file formats: video, GIF, file, spreadsheet, link, and more.

Organization

In the KM platform, are documents organized by file type? By service? By department? By date of creation? Having the possibility to manage know-how by several layers helps users in the retrieval of data.

Scalability

How likely is it that this tool scales into something else? APIs, integrations, and internal tools are great to keep developing the system.

Maintenance

How is data updated? Is bulk-changing it possible? All documents will be in a constant feedback loop so being able to edit, save, and keep track of changes is essential.

Feasibility

Economic and engineering aspects of the solutions come in this part. Would everyone need a new account to use this? Could this platform work connsidering our current team?

The contenders.

Next up are the top 5 solutions considered and why they didn’t work out for us.

Trello

A collaboration tool that organizes your projects into boards, Trello allows for kan-ban style task-management.

With its friendly UI users can, at one glance, know what’s being worked on, who’s working on what, and where something is in a process. Regarding KM, Trello is commonly used to assist in onboarding processes. A good example is shown in their New Hire Onboarding Board.

• UX (5): excellent. Trello is popular for being easy to use and onboard. It has a friendly interface and clear lists and cards structure.
• Flexibility (5): all file formats are accepted in Trello (or at least all I tried: .dwg, .pdf, .rvt, .txt). Links to web apps may either be written down as part of a description or shared as a file contained in a shortcut.
• Organization (3): there are two scenarios for this.
  - One board: keeping all documentation in one board would allow users to navigate it in search of documents. The downside is that packing every solution in a board would make lists long and hard to scroll.
  - Multiple boards: users would jump from board to board in search of documents. The search baris helpful in this case as it queries across boards. A potential problem is that if users decide to use Trello for something else (besides KM), searches could become complex.
• Scalability (4): Trello has excellent power-ups that could later improve the UX in this platform. Some worth mentioning are: Unito, Card Aging, and Voting. These could certainly provide a better user experience.
• Maintenance (3): editing descriptions, tags, files in a card is easy. Real trouble comes when one wishes to bulk-edit data. Using Multiselect for Trellois the only method I found that could help during mass changes. Now, for maintenance in the two possible scenarios:
  - One board: easier changes and upgrades to the board.
  - Multiple boards: hard for the administrator having many places to maintain (unless a linking solution like Unito is used).

Bloomfire

Bloomfire centralizes your company’s information in an intuitive searchable platform allowing knowledge democratization. Its simple interface transmits a familiar feeling to users because of its design based on popular social media platforms.

• UX (5): easy to use and onboard given the “Google-like search, Amazon-like filters and Pinterest-like visuals” offered.
• Flexibility (5): there is no need to worry about which file you can or can’t upload, Bloomfire allows more than 50 different file formats.
• Organization (5): by searching for a keyword or phrase a user is able to find existing information as cards. Content, tags, files, and even comments from Q&A features searchable.
• Scalability (5): Bloomfire is already enough of a tool for KM. It also integrates with apps like Slack, Zendesk and Chrome to make us of it from other platforms.
• Maintenance (4): Bloomfire helps by tagging information with AI and searchable content from videos. Posts may be reviewed for approval, archived when outdated, and edited when already posted. Finally, the app generates engagement analytics to help managers understand team dynamics.
• Feasibility (1): I hate this is the case but after looking at pricing schemes we found out Bloomfire was too expensive. At a $899(usd)/50users per month rate (on the basic plan) this app is more than our project needs and may be too robust for our company. Great discovery, though. The implementation of this platform could probably make sense for us 2–3 years from now.

Shared Drives

Google Drive is a file storage and synchronization service developed by Google and of the most popular cloud based file management apps. Shared Drives is the simplest method we considered to use as a KM platform. Folder hierarchy and naming convention logic has been around for decades and although this paradigm is not the best available, it still works.

• UX (2): app is easy to onboard but can get frustrating to use. Trying to get to a document a user would have to open several folders to sometimes find out that it does not even exist. A lack of visibility affects the navigating experience.
• Flexibility (5): allows for every file type. Bonus points awarded because Google Suite files (Docs, Sheets, and Slides) can be displayed with a shortcut access.
• Organization (2): multi-layered organization is not possible in Drive. A folder structure would mean priorities between different layers of data (e.g., departments, types of documents, dates, file formats, and so on) would need to be set to create sub-folders and arrange files. Having to remember a this rigid structure to get to a file is not ideal.
• Scalability (2): to take advantage of the search bar function a strict file naming convention could be set. This would allow for searches to be made from the main folder to get to a file. Other than that there is not a lot to be done to scale a folder structure. Maybe later this info could be translated to a Google Sheets tab and used as a CMS for a web app but it may be a long shot.
• Maintenance (4): without any tagging or description functionalities there is not a lot to maintain. To rearrange, copy-pasting files would get the job done. Also, for searches to work, following a file naming convention would be necessary.
• Feasibility (5): we already have Google Suites accounts so there is no need for further investment to get this app. Users are already familiar with it and publishing a folder structure would be enough to kickoff the project

Stack Overflow

A self-described open community for anyone that codes, Stack Overflow (SO) is the go-to site for sharing knowledge on coding. Its product, Teams, is a private platform for collaborators to ask questions and find answers. SO is great because it already has internal rules and schemes that encourage users to post questions, answers, and -in this process- build know-how.

• UX (4): this is a great platform to ask and find information. The interface can be a little intimidating at first but after a while its functionality (votes, answers, views, tags, etc.) is clear and precise.
• Flexibility (3): SO was designed to work for developers so sharing many file formats is not possible. The best workaround is to share hyperlinks to files that exist in the cloud.
• Organization (5): being able to search posts by tag, author, phrase, answers, score, and more is excellent for KM consulting.
• Scalability (5): I personally don’t think this needs escalating. SO feels robust enough to keep growing and growing.
• Maintenance (4): SO works as a self-sustained process with a rating system. Maintenance could only get tricky if there are not enough “knowledge champions” in the company. Questions and answers should be clear and concise for this to work so hopefully there are some Jon Skeets amongst your team.
• Feasibility: being a team of 15+ working side by side, fostering a culture of documenting solutions is hard. SO would be a better fit if we had a remote scheme or a larger team.

Blog

These Netflix and Airbnb Medium publications are excellent examples of know-how blogs. These platforms allow teams to publish new updates and know-how on tool development and internal solutions. Having a blog not only enhances communication within an organization but also serves as a platform to create community and following of your products and services.

• UX (4): a well written post can be a great experience. Images, GIFs, and videos in it can help explain complex ideas. It’s important to mention that producing a great post requires a lot of effort.
• Flexibility (1): usually text and some simple graphics make up a post. To share file attachments, URLs would have to be included in the narrative and this wouldn’t make for the best reading experience.
• Organization (5): with a search tool like the one in Medium every bit of data can be queried: titles, content, topic, etc. This is perfect for KM.
• Scalability (4): Medium is robust enough for this project. With its web and mobile app users can write, read, share -internally and externally-, search, bookmark, and more.
• Maintenance (2): rewrites and remakes would need to be done when updating solutions. This may is not convenient.
• Feasibility: Medium is a feasible solution because a single power user could be in charge of posting. Nevertheless, I think these posts work best for innovative content and not so much for every day matters. It would probably be awkward trying to explain how a new app feature affects a current workflow on a post and not with just a GIF, for example.

Shape

This platform by IDEO is marketed as “a visual, collaborative space to build, test, and refine your ideas”. Although the main purpose of the platform is not KM management but product testing, Shape does come with a collection named Knowledge Sharing. Let’s dive into Shape’s perks.

• UX (3): Shape features a grid layout design to place and arrange data. Text, files, URLs, videos, and more product design tools are available for building collections. Navigation is simple yet limited having a telescopic logic. Entering a collection one can keep diving deeper and deeper without limit (as with Shared Drives). This compromises user visibility.
• Flexibility (5): multiple file formats can be attached and displayed within a collection. URLs from web documents can be shared as well.
• Organization (3): file management follows a hierarchical logic. It is much better than having just folders and files, though, as data exists in a card format and these can be resized according to your needs. Tagging is possible too and files can be batch-tagged but only within a collection. Searches allow users to retrieve documents without having to follow the hierarchical structure.
• Scalability (3): APIs or extra power tools have not been developed for Shape (it’s a relatively new platform) so scaling is probably limited to the actual product.
• Maintenance (3): a hierarchy structure and not being able to batch edit files could limit edition capabilities.
• Feasibility: although fairly new, Space was a great contender for this project. It has the visual interface that users expect for a KM solution and allows for a very dynamic workflow. As with Trello and considering most users will use this platform for sporadic consulting, we thought the $5(usd)/user per month pricing was too much.

What we decided.

After doing this analysis we concluded on something unexpected: no solution was a great fit for us. We decided to explore building a custom platform using one of our favorite apps, Airtable. Read more on its design and operation in this post.

I’d like to conclude saying that any of the mentioned apps could be used for KM purposes. For this type of innovation projects, and specifically when evaluating new app implementations, it is important to have a real pulse of the team. The company culture, size, and moment can be a decisive factor to ensure success in organization-wide initiatives.