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The Roles · Who supports it

Knowledge base manager

Held this role - at a vendor, for its support centre and engineering, 2000-2002

The person who turns what the organisation learned into something the next person can use. Every resolved case contains knowledge that exists in one engineer's head and one ticket nobody will read again; this role converts that into articles, keeps them current, and measures whether they are answering anything. It sits across support and engineering because the raw material comes from both.

What the day looks like

  • Reading closed cases for the ones that will recur, which is a judgement made from pattern rather than from volume.
  • Turning a resolution into an article somebody can follow without the engineer who wrote it.
  • Retiring and correcting: an article describing a release nobody runs is worse than an absent one.
  • Working the taxonomy, since an article that cannot be found has the same value as an article that was never written.
  • Measuring deflection — which articles answered a question before it became a case — and feeding that back into what gets written next.

What it answers for

  • Articles being accurate at the version they claim to cover.
  • The corpus being findable by somebody using the words they actually have.
  • Currency: the review cycle happening rather than being intended.

What it is measured on

  • Case deflection, and self-service resolution rates.
  • Articles published, reviewed and retired.
  • Search success, and the questions that returned nothing.

Who it receives from

Support engineers at every tier
Resolutions, and the reasoning behind them while it is still fresh.
Engineering
Defect explanations, workarounds and the release a fix landed in.
The search logs
What people asked for, including everything the corpus failed to answer.

Who it serves

Customers
An answer at the hour they have the question rather than at the hour a queue reaches them.
Support, at every tier
The same answer given consistently, and time returned by the cases that stopped arriving.
New engineers
The fastest route into how the product behaves in the field.

Who else has a stake

  • Every customer running the product, most of whom will meet the vendor only through these pages.
  • Product management, for whom the questions people search are demand signal.
  • The engineers whose expertise the corpus either preserves or loses.

What it takes

  • Technical depth sufficient to read a case and know what generalises.
  • Writing for a stranger under pressure, in their vocabulary rather than the product's.
  • The persistence to ask busy engineers for the write-up, repeatedly and pleasantly.
  • Comfort with an output whose success is a case that never opened.

What the job turns on

The knowledge exists at the moment the case closes and decays from that moment. An engineer asked a week later remembers the fix; asked a month later remembers that there was one. Capturing it inside that window is the whole discipline, and it competes directly with the next case in the queue — which is why the role has to belong to somebody rather than to everybody's good intentions.

Where it leads

Roles that lead here

The work itself

The Practice covers how this work is done — triage, escalation, evidence, handover — across the whole corpus.

Read The Practice