What is a Knowledge Council?
A Knowledge Council is a group of representatives from each of your teams that is using Guru. This Group will meet regularly to maintain Guru at the highest level and ensure it is serving the needs of each department.
Reasons to form a Knowledge Council
Company knowledge will scale more effectively
Prevent valuable knowledge from falling through the cracks
Strategic approach to optimizing content for discoverability and readability
Take cohesive and consistent action on valuable knowledge analytics
Help to build a team culture around knowledge
Replicate the knowledge habits of your best team members
Greatly helps to keep your verification score and Guru adoption high
Forming a Knowledge Council
Management chooses a group of people who will be in charge of the Knowledge Council.
Council forms organically from the people who use Guru the most or are most passionate about it.
💡 Tip
Choose representatives of different teams that are represented in Guru: e.g. one person from Sales, one from Support, etc.
Knowledge Council Responsibilities
Each council is different, with different perspectives and use cases represented, so the list of responsibilities is highly situational. Typical examples include:
Meeting regularly (i.e. monthly) to coordinate on Knowledge Management strategies and projects.
Create, monitor, and maintain governance standards (i.e. the set of roles, rules, and workflows that the whole team abides by when using Guru).
Verify Cards together.
Creating individual "Collection Champions" who can take ownership and accountability for their Collection's health and maintenance (i.e. Trust Scores, Adoption, Card Template creation, etc.).
Go through the maintenance checklist which can include: checking for and reviewing new/uncategorized Tags, Cards not on a Board, verification progress, Searches Producing/Not Producing Results, popular Cards, Templates, etc.
Post Guru "tips" in team communication tools.
Call out great knowledge contributors and consumers.
Examples of Governance Standards
Trust score no lower than 80% per collection
Average verification interval: quarterly or more frequently
> 90% Monthly Adoption
Cards that have been left unverified for 60 days will be archived
Cards with no views in the past 180 days will be archived
Verifiers must always be an individual SME or a small "[TEAM] Expert" Group
Cards must have at least one tag, no more than four tags
No card to be created without being added to at least one board, if exceptions apply, spell those out
Set the expectation among users that Guru is everyone’s first place search for knowledge
💡 Tip
Check out Guru's Knowledge Governance Deep Dive with Mavenlink to learn how other Guru teams are setting up an effective Knowledge Council!