Technique 3.4: New Articles are Created on Demand

The Difference Between Capture and Create

Capture is what we’re doing with the requestor’s context in every interaction.  We capture context in the moment, and use it to search to find existing knowledge. When we find knowledge, we reuse it, and improve it if we need to. We only create an article if we discover one doesn’t exist after searching early and often.

Create is what we’re doing when we need to turn our captured notes into a new article. 

For shared understanding and expectation setting, it is important that we talk about Capture and Create as two different things. A common misunderstanding at the beginning of a KCS journey is that every case going forward requires time for a brand new article to be created. While our Create rates might be high at the start, they will normalize over time. However, we are never done capturing context. Organizations who don’t emphasize the importance of consistently capturing and using the requestor’s context for searching and improving often end up struggling with findability: their knowledge base fills up with articles that are not findable or usable by requestors.

Emerging technology is making it easier to capture requestor context in a structured case workflow and generate a new draft article from case notes when required. Note that this is helpful for creating new articles, but does not replace the process by which we improve existing articles.