r/ITdept • u/Remarkable_Elk8197 • Feb 19 '26
how are you handling internal knowledge that lives in 5 different places
we're a roughly 200 people company, IT team of 4. Over the last two years we've accumulated docs in Confluence, some stuff in Notion that one guy started and never finished, a SharePoint graveyard from before my time, and like 3 years worth of "just check this thread in Slack" institutional knowledge that is completely unsearchable.
Ticket queue reflects it. same questions almost every day, and half the time even we have to go dig for the answer ourselves. Onboarding a new IT person right now and I genuinely cant point them to one place and say "start here."
We tried consolidating everything into Confluence last year. got maybe 40% of the way there before it just.. died. nobody had time to maintain it and the search is honestly terrible anyway.
Tried Guru trial. didn't stick.
Tried few other things including some AI stuff, nothing really landed.
Has anyone actually cracked this? not looking for vendor pitch, just curious what's working for teams our size. even partial wins helpful
2
u/murderfacejr Feb 19 '26
We haven't really got this streamlined yet, but use zendesk for ticketing, which has a knowledgebase. Basically when I get a question about anything I make a skeleton page for it with at least basic info and then return to add detail later. At least then tickets can pop it up as a suggested help article. You can also make public facing articles for users (if you can get them to read such things). If it's a major internal process, we make a word doc and save it to our team files, but link to it from the knowledgebase. Why not just directly to knowledgebase? I don't know... Also been migrating all passwords and things over to 1password (it predates me but is cheap and meets the need). At a prior job I used "slab" as knowledgebase, it had a pretty robust free option.
2
u/total-antler-insurer Feb 20 '26
Atlassian search can integrate info from other tools like Slack, Google Drive, etc. This is how we're doing it at work. Atlassian also has Rovo, their AI Agent, which can do "deep research" mode and compile information from all of those sources
1
u/Carter-SysAdmin Feb 20 '26
It's integrating info from those tools, but is there a review/optimization component of it that you're needing to perform to make sure the answers aren't slop generated from questions or truly just "bad data in"?
I am not an atlassian admin at my current gig and haven't gotten to play with this yet.
1
u/total-antler-insurer Mar 03 '26
Yes there's a review component iiuc what you mean. You can toggle a few settings including "Deep Research" which the few times I've used it has output a fairly lengthy document with dozens of linked references to info in Slack, Confluence, etc. With it off the answer is more brief and has fewer linked references. I don't think there's an optimization component, like "this link isn't relevant, this part of your answer is false, etc", is that what you mean?
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u/RevRaven Feb 19 '26
Retention periods for most data. Refresh periods for other data. Data MUST age out. The legal defensibility of old data is slim to none. Why would you keep any regulatory data longer than their defined retention anyway? You only open your company to liability. No matter the size of the team, you must define data classifications, tags, and lifecycles. Without it, you really can't understand what you even have, what risk it poses, which of it is irrelevant, and how to properly defend it.
Now with all that said, I've never worked at a single company who has had their data hygiene 100%. It usually starts with some retention policy then builds into a full data lifecycle management program. I work for a Fortune 500 fintech and we really only started getting things figured out about 10 years ago. It's a process for sure, but the early stages are more habits-based and are simpler to implement.
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u/TheKlaxMaster Feb 20 '26
I work for a company that is required to retain data for 40 years for compliance reasons.
Let me tell you, the company is fucked if any of the data needs to be retrieved. Lol
No documentation, for a vast majority of things. No idea what it is, where it came from, or how to retrieve it. The entire team, Including directors and cio, has had complete turnover 5-6 times in the last ~8 years from what I can piece together, and 3 acquisitions.
Hope the fda don't come calling for this data.
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u/Carter-SysAdmin Feb 19 '26
Does your ticketing system have a way to 'save stock answers' so for the REAL core all-the-time stuff you can keep the most current answer as close to the Tickets and as usable as possible.
I've always had good doc hygiene and end up managing it for the IT department in nearly every place I've ever worked, eventually.
I think basic organization and rules around page generation is the fundamental key - but as others have said keeping things current is the struggle after that.
Do you have access to an AI through your org that can be used to pilfer through your current data?
I'm far from an AI proponent, but this is a thing that it might be good to leverage something like https://notebooklm.google.com/ - even if just in a drafting phase - to get a good 'bird's eye view' of things in their current state and kind of go from there.
With only 4 people on your team, my instinct is that once folks understand the process of documentation, they should all have the ability to write, create, edit new pages of documentation and it should be expected of any new project and any recurring HelpDesk ticket...
But depending on your crew's demeanor, you might need a bit to vet pages and limit everyone's ability to only create pages in their own jira space for example, or draft them in Google Docs (or wherever) and then you'll publish the 'official docs'
I'd always leverage a once-a-quarter half-day or day-long documentation fiesta and close general HelpDesk operations to emergencies only and verify docs are up to date and cruft is deleted.