Like most organizations, we depend on IT staff to keep our systems running, minimize the risk of downtime and data loss, install software and upgrades, and fix problems. We also turn to them for guidance on technology trends that can impact our costs and revenues. But a good relationship with IT just doesn't happen; it has to be cultivated. For an example of what can happen when you let the weeds grow, see "Why IT and users hate each other."

Some business units — e.g. corporate libraries, R&D labs, and medical facilities — assign a full-time person to make sure the user/IT relationship is productive not adversarial. Barrett Jones, a library systems analyst at the IMF-World Bank Library, fills this role. In "Getting the most from your IT relationship" he offers some practical tips in the areas of communication, education, vendor support, and strategy. In this article, we tell how we use a Knowledge Base system to help the IT liaison be more effective.

What is a Knowledge Base?
A general definition of Knowledge Base is:

"... a centralized repository for information: a public library, a database of related information about a particular subject, and whatis.com could all be considered to be examples of knowledge bases ..." (source: searchcrm.com)

In our case, a Knowledge Base is a relational database containing information about people who have computer problems, technical people who have solutions, customer service questions and answers, vendor contact and licensing information, user and technical documentation, and links to articles from trade and business publications. It also contains information about products — who makes them, who uses them, and who writes about them. Because the computer industry is so volatile, we also use the Knowledge Base to track changes in company and product names.

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Product section of the Knowledge Base shows manufacturer, users, categories, and related documents.

Our Knowledge Base system serves two purposes. First, it's a one-stop-shop for all computer-related information, saving countless hours in research, troubleshooting, and development. Second, it's an education and communication tool. We use it to retrieve the make, model, and serial number of devices when making tech support calls. When a problem happens, we check the Knowledge Base to see whether the problem happened before and, if so, how it was resolved. We use it when we are researching topics for procedure manuals, courses, and newsletters. Because a key part of the IT liaison role is translating from business unit lingo to technical lingo (and vice versa), the Knowledge Base contains a thesaurus of terms with definitions and links to associated publications.

Populating the Knowledge Base
For the Knowledge Base system to be useful as an IT liaison tool, the data in it must be comprehensive and up-to-date. Data entry has been integrated into the daily routine of IT liaison personnel and support staff using a three stage process. In stage 1, we use Web browser bookmarks and e-mail folders to temporarily store links and messages of interest. We type notes of all phone calls and some face-to-face meetings directly into the Knowledge Base. We also record the case number for each tech support call and summarize the outcome in a Knowledge Base record.

In stage 2, we clean out our bookmark and e-mail folders. We copy the text of e-mail messages we want to save into the Knowledge Base and link them to a person or vendor. We create a Knowledge Base record for each bookmarked Web site and often save a copy of the page to a local archive on hard disk. The Knowledge Base contains the original URL and a URL that points to our local copy.

In stage 3, we assign index terms from the Knowledge Base thesaurus to articles we write for the Montague Institute Review and those we abstract for the Knowledge Base Editor's Digest.

Searching the Knowledge Base
The time we invest in maintaining the Knowledge Base pays off in faster retrieval. It's more efficient than a full text search engine like Google or Ultraseek for several reasons:

1. Aggregation. Data from many different sources — e-mail programs, Web sites, spreadsheets, notes — are aggregated in one place.

2. Relevancy. The search universe is relatively small and tailored to the needs of a specific business unit.

3. User-friendly. It's possible to search the full text of any field in the Knowledge Base without having to know how to know SQL or a proprietary search language.

4. Combined and special queries. It's possible to search fields in combination (e.g. find all the problem reports associated with Ultraseek after January 1, 2006 or find all problem reports after January 1, 2006 except those for Ultraseek). You can even do specialized searches, such as:

• find duplicate records based on one or more field values;
• use a thesaurus term to conduct a Google or Ultraseek search of documents in a local archive;
• search the Knowledge Base on a partial field value, an exact match, or a phrase.

The Knowledge Base as insurance policy
One of the most vexing problems for the IT liaison is how to select technology to meet the changing needs of the business unit. Do you buy "best of breed" off-the-shelf software, acquire everything from one vendor, or build custom applications in-house? With best of breed software, you have to spend time and money integrating applications. With one vendor, you minimize the compatibility problem but you're stuck with the vendor's upgrade schedule and license fees. With custom-built applications, you risk high project failure rates, implementation delays, and out-of-control costs.

In general, our Knowledge Base system has insulated us from much of the turbulence and cost involved with rapid technical change. Because it contains the master copy of our key metadata, we rarely need to worry about extracting and migrating metadata from proprietary or custom-built programs. We've also found that as relational databases become more sophisticated and standardized, there's less need to buy or build special-purpose applications. We can simply add new data structures, behaviors, screens, and reports to the Knowledge Base.

Conclusion
Unrealistic expectations, incompatible priorities, differences in terminology, lack of resources, and other factors can turn the IT/business unit relationship into a costly nightmare. Dedicated IT liaison staff supported by a knowledge base can go a long way to helping a business unit meets its everyday and specialized computing needs.

Created on April 3, 2006 l Updated on March 9, 2010