This content was created by Christopher Parsons. This content was uploaded by Christopher Parsons. This is a YouTube video titled "How Bora Shifted from 'Human Intranets' to a Real Knowledge Platform" created on September 21, 2025. It features a discussion between two speakers about the challenges and strategies of codifying and managing knowledge within an organization, focusing on the transition from relying on individual expertise to creating a structured knowledge platform.
Chapters
You.
I'm curious about codifying knowledge. If we could start to talk about, like, how you have approached. Like, we talked a little bit about, like how teams put some information in, but they're also getting a lot out of it. But obviously things just continue to change. And like something Chris and I have talked about before is like this idea that, I mean, there's actually two things. There's. There's this idea that experts don't know what they know. And I think it's kind of difficult sometimes to get them to sit down and write a bunch of stuff. And Chris has shared kind of examples of doing interviews to help get knowledge into these things. I'm curious how you guys are going about that from your point of view, because the other idea that I wanted to bring up here is like, some information should have an expiration date. And then it's like, how do we make sure that the stuff that has expired no longer comes up when people are looking for it? It's like bad, bad, bad. That's not good anymore. That's old. It's expired. Right. It was time to get rid of that. And I'm curious how you guys handle that because. So there's constantly new stuff coming in, but there's also kind of like getting rid of the old stuff that doesn't apply anymore.
Yeah. So I guess the two questions, the first one is that we have a lot of experts in the office that's like kind of a Bora culture piece, is that we have deep expertise in the areas that we have expertise. We have people who are really interested in digging in, into technical detail. And I mentioned our in house spec writer before. He wrote and then curates all the pages related to our assembly systems. For instance, we have some really experienced interior designers, more particularly, who wrote the page on all interior finishes. Right. On the floor coverings, on wall coverings, on ceiling coverings. And she had always been the source of knowledge for that information, but you never had a platform to document it before. So it was almost like a relief when we brought Chako onto the scene because she had the same experience that I had. And Mike, our spec writer, had the same experience that I had, but with a different set of knowledge. And I must feel like you guys.
Were the Internet in some ways. Like, people came to you.
We were the Internet. Like there were clear knowledge bases. But again, people had. We had to answer the same questions over and over again. Even someone like, like the HR manager. Right. She was the knowledge base on all this stuff. But it wasn't clear where she put all that stuff. And I think that's maybe a more typical use of an intranet is organizing things like, like how does payroll work, how does your benefits work, how do out of office kind of processes or PTO work. But we just did the same thing with our design process because that's kind of the expertise that we valued in the firm. Now there's other people that were harder to pull information from and there's a lot of nuanced information that does live with experts. And I think we got maybe 80% of the knowledge initially because people were so excited to offload it. And there's another 20% that's going to be a flaw going forward. And we just got to make sure that we're capturing maybe like relationships, soft skills, a lot of other important things that people with a lot of experience have. But again, as you mentioned, don't necessarily know that they're that that that is an expertise that they have become so adorable to them.
