When a case is escalated, a system goes down, or a new colleague needs to resolve something for the first time, you don't want to waste unnecessary time searching for the right information. Yet that is often exactly what happens.
In many IT organisations, the knowledge exists — but it's scattered. Procedures, escalation paths, and documentation are there, just not always where they're needed in day-to-day work. The result is that solutions take longer than necessary, and working methods vary depending on who's doing the job.
IT departments also hold vast amounts of tacit knowledge: routines, contingency plans, and system understanding that often reside with individual people or in documents that are difficult to find. This becomes most apparent when something goes wrong or when a new colleague needs to get up to speed.
IT service at Sölvesborg Municipality decided to do something about it.
They've built a centralised wiki portal in InfoCaption that covers everything from everyday routines and telephony solutions to contingency plans and ITIL processes. The portal is structured around how the IT team actually works. Each section matches a real need. There are guides for routines and telephony, information about service windows for planned maintenance, and a contingency section for urgent situations outside office hours. There is also documentation, customer overviews, security procedures, project management, and processes for onboarding and offboarding staff.
It's a broad scope — and that's the point. Rather than having different places for different types of information, there is now a single entry point for the entire IT team's knowledge base.
One thing that stands out is that they haven't only documented the straightforward and routine. If a colleague is ill or absent, someone else should be able to handle the case easily without the customer being affected. New staff and cover employees should be able to read up on routines via the portal and get up to speed more quickly. That's the kind of knowledge that otherwise resides with a handful of key individuals — and is missed most when it's needed most.
"Based on previous experience, I've seen that there is a great need for this type of landing page in IT operations. The wiki is a good tool for creating and facilitating effective learning, where knowledge is shared amongst colleagues," says Tobias Stiman, IT Manager at Sölvesborg Municipality.
With the portal in place, IT service has a living resource that grows alongside the organisation. New colleagues can get up to speed quickly, routines are kept up to date, and the team avoids reinventing the wheel time and again. That is precisely what a well-built knowledge portal should do.
Well done, Sölvesborg — and congratulations on the Guide of the Month, from all of us at InfoCaption!
Each month, we at InfoCaption name a Guide of the Month — a guide we want to highlight for the value it creates within the organisation. As a thank-you to the person or people who created the Guide of the Month, we donate SEK 1,000 each month to the organisation Hand in Hand Sweden, which combats poverty by creating more jobs in vulnerable countries. Hand in Hand works with the model of "help to self-help," which is in line with InfoCaption's own mission: "to make it easier for employees to help one another."