Knowledge capture: how to start small
Knowledge capture takes what people know and only ever tell each other verbally, and puts it somewhere a new starter and a system can both read. The sources are support threads, handover notes, supplier quirks and the answers senior staff repeat weekly. It is the least glamorous pattern and often the highest leverage.
( The Detail )
What the pattern does
The decision it improves is anything that currently waits on one person. When the answers exist in writing, work can be handed to a junior, an assistant or an AI tool without a quality drop, and the organisation stops paying an interruption cost every time a routine question comes up.
Looked at from this angle
The small version is one question, one source, one reader, produced on a fixed rhythm. It should be possible to abandon it after a month without much waste, which is precisely what makes it safe to try. Scope that survives contact with a busy week is the only scope worth planning around.
Keep the first version manual wherever automation would slow you down. A person exporting a file and running one step is a legitimate prototype, and it teaches you what an automated version would have to handle. Automate once the shape has stopped changing, and not before then.
How to approach it
Begin with the decision rather than the tool. Name the recurring judgement this affects, the information it depends on, and the person accountable for acting on the result. That framing keeps the first build small enough to inspect and useful enough to matter.
Keep a human review point in the loop until the quality and the failure modes are understood. A system that shows its working - what it drew on, where it is uncertain, and what it deliberately left alone - is one a business can keep running after the initial build.
( Next Step )
Start small enough to review, but on a workflow important enough to show whether a better system is worth building.