Capture at the moment of resolution
The explanation is complete and precise while the person giving it still has the problem in their head, and it decays from that moment.
Resolution Agent
Knowledge from a Slack thread
Support teams solve real problems in Slack every day and almost none of it becomes reusable. This is Ascendo recognising that a thread resolved something and drafting an article from it — ready for review rather than written from scratch, captured in the channel where the work actually happened.
- A resolved thread becomes a draft article
- Captured where the work happened, not afterwards
- A person reviews before anything is published
- The knowledge base grows from work already done
The answer was given, in a thread, and that was the end of it
Slack is where a lot of technical organisations actually solve things. Somebody asks, somebody who knows replies, the problem goes away, and the thread scrolls out of reach.
Everyone agrees it should have been written up. Nobody does, because writing it up is a separate task afterwards for a person who has already moved on. The result is a knowledge base whose gaps sit exactly where the interesting problems are.
From thread to reviewable article
The second step is what stops this filling your knowledge base with conversation.
- Step 1
Recognise that something was resolved
Not every thread contains an answer. Only the ones where a problem was genuinely solved get picked up.
- Step 2
Separate the answer from the conversation
A thread is mostly not the answer. What gets extracted is what was wrong and what fixed it, not a transcript.
- Step 3
Draft it into shape
Structured the way your knowledge base expects, so what lands in review is something to edit rather than a raw excerpt.
- Step 4
A person approves it
It goes for review before publication. Editing a specific draft takes minutes; a blank page does not.
Why capture has to happen in the channel
Every step that asks somebody to go elsewhere is a step where capture stops.
It happens where the work already is
Nobody has to open a knowledge tool, remember a template or leave the channel. Each of those is a place where the process stops, and one of them always does.
The base grows from real demand
What gets written up is what came up, so coverage follows the problems your team really has rather than a content plan drawn up a year ago.
Why the usual approaches fall short
The last one is the tempting shortcut, and it is the worst of them.
Asking people to document afterwards
Competes with the queue and loses. Coverage is thinnest on the hard problems.
Searching Slack history
The thread is still there and nobody finds it. Search returns messages, not answers.
A quarterly documentation sprint
Written from memory weeks later. Right in outline, wrong in the details that mattered.
Publishing threads automatically
Fills the knowledge base with conversation, which makes the good articles harder to find.
What things are called
Draft is the load-bearing word here.
- Add to knowledge
- The Slack flow that captures a solution from a conversation into the knowledge base.
- Draft
- A generated article awaiting human review. Not a publication.
- Resolution extraction
- Separating what actually fixed the problem from the discussion around it.
- Knowledge Intelligence
- The agent that generates, structures and maintains articles.
- Capture at source
- Recording knowledge in the channel where the work happened rather than afterwards in a separate tool.
Frequently Asked Questions
No. Everything goes to a person as a draft for review before publication. Automatic publication would fill your knowledge base with unverified content, which costs more than the empty space it was filling.
Knowledge Agent
Look at last month’s threads
Pick a channel where your team solves things. We will show you the articles that could have come out of it without anybody being asked to write one.
Talk to us