Which knowledge should the outside world see?

Somewhere in your knowledge base is an article written for colleagues that a customer would find very useful. Somewhere else is one that a customer should never see.

Most organisations decide which is which by accident.

Opening knowledge to people who are not signed in, such as customers, students, suppliers or the public, is one of the cheapest ways to reduce contact. People help themselves. Search engines find your answers. Fewer calls, fewer emails. It is also one of the easiest ways to embarrass yourself, because internal articles are written with an internal honesty: workarounds, known faults, names of systems, the occasional blunt comment about a supplier.

Start from the audience, not the article

The instinct is to go through articles one by one and ask "can this be public?". With hundreds of articles that becomes a slog, and the answer drifts depending on who is doing the checking.

It works better the other way round. Decide first who the outside world is and what they come to you for. A student wants to reset a password and find the opening hours. A customer wants to track an order and understand a charge. Then write or adapt knowledge for those needs, in their language.

Keep a clear line

A few rules help:

• Public by decision, never by default. New articles start internal until someone chooses otherwise.
• One named owner for public knowledge, who answers for what the world sees.
• No internal detail in public articles: no system names, no staff names, no workarounds that rely on inside access.
• Review public articles more often, because the cost of being wrong is higher.

Remember who else is reading

Public knowledge is no longer read only by people. AI assistants and search tools read it too, and repeat it with confidence. An unclear public article does not just confuse one reader. It can be summarised, quoted and passed on.

Questions to settle before you open the doors

• Who, outside the organisation, do we most want to help themselves?
• Who decides that an article goes public?
• What would a customer feel misled to discover in an article we left open?

That last question borrows Ian Hughes's test from What Stays the Same, "What would this person feel misled to discover later?" It is a good one to ask of anything you publish.

Next step:

Join the Knowledge and self-service conversation on ESM's Exchange and share how you draw the line: https://exchange.esm.institute

Tags: knowledge management, service management, self-service, ESM