Since its launch in July, the service.purdue.edu portal has become a powerful tool for sharing knowledge with Purdue IT’s customers and with each other.  

In October alone, there were 9,000 pageviews of the Purdue IT Knowledge Base and an average of more than 400 active users on the site each day.  

As exciting as those figures are, the truth is the Purdue IT knowledge base is far from being a widely utilized tool. It is even farther from capturing the vast amount of knowledge that is residing in our collective minds.  

In the coming months, the IT Service Management Office (ITSMO) will expand the opportunities for individuals and teams to participate in knowledge capture and sharing. In the meantime, there are steps all of us can take to help improve the knowledge base, provide better customer self-service, and help reduce the drain of redundant work by expanding and improving our source of knowledge.  

Two things you can do:  

• Search the knowledge base early and often. Can you find the information you are looking for? Can your customers? If not, perhaps your team needs to submit a new knowledge base article to the portal to help your customers or your team find the answers they are looking for. See “How do I submit knowledge base articles in TDX?” for more information.  
   
• Submit feedback. As you are searching the knowledge base, use the “Feedback” form at the bottom of every article to let us know if the article is helpful, wrong, or needs improvement. Provide as much information as you can: Did something not make sense? Did the article resolve your issue? Is something misspelled or is there an easier way to solve your problem? If the article was great – let us know that too.  

Knowledge management is a group project – the kind where we all benefit when we do it right. If you have thoughts on ways we can improve the knowledge base, we want to hear them. Send an email to Dave Stephens, the Purdue IT Knowledge manager, at steph103@purude.edu.