GURU - Why aren't you using it yet?
February 15, 2018

GURU - Why aren't you using it yet?

Anonymous | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Guru

We recently implemented GURU as a company-wide solution and hub of internal knowledge. Previously, we had been using Google Drive to organize internal documentation (which is a complete mess and I do not recommend trying to organize things using Google Drive). A huge piece of feedback that new hires had been providing is that our internal knowledge is a bit scattered and not organized well. We reached a point just in 2017 where this reached a fever pitch and it needed to be addressed.
  • Organization - This is really a two-fold strength. Yes, GURU provides organization for overall knowledge, but the tool itself is also extremely flexible with how that organization can be attained. We, at present, have 6 distinct collections of knowledge for everyone in the company to access with nearly 1200 cards of specialized knowledge which are easy to access and locate. There are still more cards to create and I have no fear that it will clutter and mucky-up GURU to a point where it becomes unwieldy. GURU is designed in such a way to make that difficult to do.
  • Chrome Extension - The mere existence of a Chrome extension is bewilderingly amazing. Rather than needing to launch a separate tab in Chrome, the extension offers a mini search bar with top results in about 2 seconds. This makes using GURU too easy. I do not want to increase the amount of tabs I have open in Chrome (Chrome is memory intensive) and I do not have to with this extension.
  • Automatic Verification System - It is pretty fantastic that with this high level of organization comes a huge responsibility to ensure the accuracy and correctness of the body of knowledge. The good news is that its automated at your discretion. We have many cards set up to require re-verification every quarter (things change fast in our world) which is extremely helpful. Otherwise, new employees might learn from incorrect information and existing employees may have incorrect information reinforced. With the verification system, we don't have to worry about that
  • Difficulty transferring bodies of existing knowledge onto GURU - At first we simply copy-pasted entire Google Drive documents into GURU cards, but that's super cumbersome, especially because the formatting never transfers perfectly. This increases the amount of time it takes to implement GURU fully.
  • It still feels like we are "setting things up" - Its been about 4 months since we first began implementing GURU and it still feels like there is more work to be done to "set things up." How much time should card verifies spend verifying cards? Who is responsible for which collection of knowledge? Who should and who should not have the ability to create new GURU cards? And so forth.
  • No best practices on organizational theory - A hot topic issue for our support team is how to organize customer support related knowledge. This has made implementation for our support team a bit more difficult.
  • The main business objective this solves is the ease of access for internal knowledge. This is nothing but a positive in my book. I cannot think of any negative business impact this has created for the company.
Honestly, Google Drive does not stack up against GURU, but it is what we were previously using to organize internal knowledge. If your organization is at 50+ people, you need an actual tool to help organize internal knowledge. Everyone will be thankful that its not just a google document somewhere in Google Drive.
GURU is well suited, in my opinion, as a tool for moderately sized companies to organize internal collections of knowledge. I think a larger organization (500+ employees) would have a specifically difficult time deploying and utilizing GURU for how long it can take to transfer information, how to organize it, and who has the ability to verify and create new cards. I think it is working very well in our organization as we are well on our way for full implementation.