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Documentation is an important aspect of customer service for any company. Because it’s so important, a lot of companies spend a lot of time writing, editing, revising, and keeping up with documentation. Doing so is extremely important (critical for many companies). If a company does not have quality documentation that covers their products, support procedures, etc., their customer service will almost certainly suffer.

With that in mind, who (individual or department) at your company should the actual documentation? The answer seems to vary from company to company and company culture to company culture.

• Multiple people should be involved in the process. There should be a documentation guy that writes all of the documentation, procedures, tutorials, etc. for the company. The job should be done by multiple people.
• Involve multiple departments. Customer service might think something is important to include in documentation that engineering assumes everyone knows (or vice versa). Different departments have a different perspective. Documentation that is a result of only one perspective is a lot less useful than documentation that has been seen, edited, and written by people with different backgrounds and areas of expertise.
• Make it open. There are a number of great wiki products available (MediaWiki is free; Confluence and Socialtext are both great paid products) that are designed to make documenting things simple and easy. They are also designed to foster collaboration and teamwork. If your documentation is in something like a wiki where others can easily edit it, it’s a lot more likely to stay up-to-date and useful (and as a result, be used by employees). An open system also makes it simple for
• Ensure quality control. No matter how open your system is, you want to ensure quality as well. Some companies prefer to be a bit more restrictive than others (where a senior employee has to approve anything before it’s published), while others go back to edit articles retroactively. Regardless of what you decide to do, there has to be a process that ensures the articles are all accurate and high quality.

Documentation, interestingly enough, is a cultural thing as much as it is an operational thing. Companies that aren’t used to writing things down (usually because there has never been a good system in place for doing so) take longer to get in the groove of writing interesting solutions down. If knowledge share is a problem at your company, you should definitely be looking into writing things down for all to see.

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