Hey everyone!
Some teams like to restrict Author-level access to SMEs only, but are then faced with a challenge of closing knowledge gaps for end-users.  Frequently these teams have a system for end-users to request new knowledge.  I’d love to learn about some of the ways your team is approaching knowledge requests. How does your team request new Cards be created?

Here are a couple ways I’ve seen:

1. Use Ask an Expert with specific Expert Groups assigned for specific content areas

2. Create a “Drafts/Sandbox/Knowledge Requests” Collection that grants broad Author access to the team.  Populate the Collection with Board Groups and Boards broken down by department and/or content areas.  Educate the team on how to submit (could create Cards in Guru and/or create Cards from Slack/MS Teams to help better capture informal knowledge sharing). Establish a review cadence with SMEs to review submitted content before using Card Manager to transfer approved and finalized Cards into the appropriate Collection.

3. Create a requests channel in Slack/MS Teams and use the Guru integration to create Cards or use Zapier/Workato integrations to automatically create Cards or push requests into a work management system like Monday.com or Asana.

There are LOTS of different ways your team can go about requesting knowledge in Guru.  I’ve found that having a well-documented process really helps, and here are some best practices:

1. Instruct end-users on the correct process and document it in a Card.

2. Educate SMEs on the process, their responsibilities, and establish a review cadence.

3. Evaluate your process after a few weeks - where can it be improved? what are the challenges?

4. Compare requests against ‘Searches Producing No Results’ in Guru’s Analytics to better understand the gulf between what users are actually searching for and what they’re taking the time to formally request.

Excited to hear about your knowledge request stories! What’s worked? What hasn’t? What are you looking to try?

I know @Alyssa Huat at Thras.io has come up with a cool knowledge request flow, would love to hear any insights you’re comfortable sharing! @tburbank would love to hear more about your team’s approach to building a request/review process!