Knowledge problems rarely announce themselves. They show up as small, daily friction that everyone has learned to live with.
It tends to look something like this:
- New hires spend weeks asking around for things that should take minutes to find.
- The same question gets a different answer depending on who you ask.
- One or two long-tenured people have become the unofficial search engine, and everyone is a little nervous about what happens when they leave.
- Files live in SharePoint, Teams, Google Drive, Slack, email, and someone's desktop, with no shared logic connecting them.
- You rolled out Copilot or another AI tool, and the answers are confidently wrong, out of date, or include things certain people shouldn't see.
- Teams keep rebuilding work that already exists because nobody knew it was there.
That's knowledge management territory. We help organizations sort out where knowledge lives, who's responsible for it, and how people find and trust it, in ways a small team can actually keep up with.
What we actually do
Every engagement is shaped by what's actually going wrong, but the work usually includes some mix of:
- Finding out how knowledge really moves. We talk to the people doing the work, not just the people who bought the systems, and look at where things live and how people actually find them.
- Designing a structure people will use. Information architecture, naming, and organization that match how your staff think, built in the tools you already have whenever possible.
- Clarifying ownership. Who's responsible for which content, how often it gets reviewed, and what gets archived or deleted. Enough governance to keep things current, without a new bureaucracy.
- Capturing what's in people's heads. Onboarding, handoffs, retirements, and the procedures nobody ever wrote down.
- Getting your information ready for AI. Sources of truth, stale content, and permissions, sorted out before an AI tool starts confidently summarizing all of it.
- Fixing (or retiring) the intranet nobody uses.
- Staying on as advisors while your team carries out the plan.
What we don't do: we don't sell knowledge management software, we won't recommend a new platform when the one you have will do, and we won't hand you a 200-page taxonomy that nobody will maintain. More documentation is rarely the answer.
Who you'd be working with
This is the work our team was trained for. Everyone at FireOak has a degree in library and information science or years of work in information-heavy organizations. That's a long way of saying we have strong opinions about folder structures, and we try to keep them proportional.
Abby Clobridge leads our knowledge management engagements: strategy, information architecture, governance, and getting information ready for AI.
Matt Clobridge often joins when the answer lives in the systems themselves: how Microsoft 365, SharePoint, and Teams are set up, who can see what, and why search returns what it does.
When a project calls for it, we bring in other members of our team. The people on your first call are the people who do the work.
What this has looked like
Most of our work is covered by NDAs, so no names, but here are a few examples:
A nonprofit weighing AI tools had policies scattered across systems and critical knowledge sitting with individual employees. Leadership wanted to know whether their information was ready for AI before investing in it. We interviewed staff, reviewed their information architecture and governance, and built a phased, multi-year roadmap focused on ownership, content lifecycle, and searchability first, then AI tools.
A philanthropic nonprofit needed a knowledge strategy that would hold up as it grew. We developed and launched a three-year plan that included a new intranet, better onboarding and offboarding, and standard procedures for capturing knowledge as part of everyday work.
A global technology company had institutional knowledge that was hard to find and harder to keep current, so teams duplicated work and contradicted each other. We redesigned their knowledge architecture, taxonomy, templates, and publishing processes, and put governance in place for content quality and ownership. Years later, it's still working and still evolving.
How it usually starts
- You tell us what's going on. A few sentences in the form below is plenty.
- We talk. Usually about 45 minutes. We'll ask a lot of questions and tell you honestly whether this looks like something we can help with.
- We start with a current-state assessment. We talk with staff, look at where things live and how people find them, and come back with high-level recommendations and a few quick wins you can act on right away. When staff are available for interviews and reviews, this usually takes six to eight weeks.
- Then strategy, then a roadmap. Together we decide what you want knowledge management to accomplish, then turn that into a practical implementation roadmap. End to end, the whole process usually runs four to six months. Some clients take the roadmap and run with it. Others keep us on as advisors while they put it in place. Sometimes we stay to help with specific pieces of the work; that's entirely your call.
Fair warning: sometimes the most useful recommendation is to delete things. Sometimes the platform is fine and what's missing is someone who owns the content. We'll tell you which.
If knowledge is one piece of a bigger technology picture, our fractional CIO work may be a better fit, and we can talk through both.
Questions people usually ask first
Do we need to buy new software?
Usually not. Most organizations already have more tools than they use well. We start with what you have and recommend something new only when it clearly earns its place.
We're a small organization. Is knowledge management overkill?
Not if people are struggling to find things. A 30-person team needs a much simpler approach than a global enterprise, and we size the work accordingly.
Should we sort out our knowledge before rolling out AI tools?
Ideally, yes, or at least alongside it. AI tools draw on whatever they can reach, including the outdated, the duplicated, and the overshared. A little cleanup first makes the results far more reliable.
More answers are in our Knowledge Management FAQ. If you're new to the discipline, start with What Is Knowledge Management?
Tell us what's going on
A few sentences about your situation is plenty. We read every message ourselves and reply within one to two business days. If you're writing on a Saturday night, you're in good company.
Prefer email? Write to us at [email protected].
