Federal agencies lose experience faster than they replace it. The U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO) found that 57 percent of recent departures from the Office of Personnel Management (OPM) involved employees with eleven or more years of service, representing a significant loss of institutional knowledge.
The problem is not simply that experienced people leave. Much of what they know was never captured in a form someone else can use. A proven fix may be scattered across emails, notes, service tickets, a partial runbook, and the memory of the person who solved the issue first.
Recent advances in AI make it possible to find and organize that knowledge more effectively. AI can analyze operational records at scale, identify recurring issues and successful resolution paths, and assemble that information into structured drafts for human review. Q Knowledge is DMI's AI solution for knowledge management. It helps organizations apply that approach by finding proven resolutions in operational records and turning them into documented procedures that teams can review and reuse.
THE HIDDEN COST OF RELEARNING
Most organizations already possess the knowledge they need. The challenge is that the knowledge often exists as activity rather than documentation. When a recurring issue appears, teams rarely start from zero. Someone has solved it before, but the resolution may be buried in closed incidents, change records, email threads, chat conversations, a partial runbook, or notes scattered across multiple systems. The information exists, but finding it takes time.
That time carries a cost. Experienced staff are interrupted by work they have already done, while new team members spend hours reconstructing resolution paths that should already be available. Escalations increase, onboarding slows, and routine issues consume effort that could otherwise be spent on higher-value work.
The impact becomes most visible when experienced employees leave. Informal knowledge that once filled gaps in the record disappears, leaving teams to relearn the same lessons through investigation and trial and error. The problem is not that organizations lack expertise. The problem is that expertise is often stored in operational history rather than reusable knowledge.
Finding the answer is only half the challenge. The harder part is capturing that answer in a way that others can find, trust, and use the next time the problem appears.
REVIEWED BY PEOPLE, READY TO REUSE
Q Knowledge helps organizations do exactly that. It analyzes operational records, identifies recurring incidents and effective resolution paths, and drafts consistently structured knowledge articles. A designated reviewer can revise, reject, or approve each article before it is published.
The same approach can support more than service desk records. Q Knowledge can identify recurring patterns in system administration, application operations and maintenance, and business operations, then draft FAQs, playbooks, and standard operating procedures.
Q Knowledge completes the initial analysis, drafting, and formatting before an expert reviews the article. This lets experienced staff validate guidance without taking on the full burden of creating it from scratch.
Controls remain in place throughout the process. Personally Identifiable Information (PII) is anonymized before processing, audit logs record each decision, and Single Sign-On with role-based access controls determines who can review and publish.
WHAT THIS LOOKS LIKE IN PRACTICE
Consider an application operations team maintaining a system that fails the same way every few release cycles, a background job that stops processing after an upstream dependency is updated. The fix has been worked out before, but the resolution procedures are scattered across closed change records, an incomplete runbook entry, and notes left by an engineer who has since moved teams. No one on the current rotation can see the full resolution path.
Q Knowledge analyzes those records together, identifies the recurring failure, and surfaces the steps that resolved it previously. It then creates a structured draft with sensitive information removed.
An engineering lead verifies the procedure, updates a step that changed after the latest dependency upgrade, and approves the article. When the job fails again after a later release, the on-call engineer can follow reviewed guidance instead of reconstructing the fix across multiple systems.
The answer already existed. The team simply lacked a practical way to find and reuse it.
KNOWLEDGE ACROSS OPERATIONS
The challenge is not unique to service desks. Any organization that relies on operational knowledge can face the same problem when expertise lives in historical records instead of reusable guidance. Application operations teams, system administrators, business operations groups, and federal program offices all accumulate valuable knowledge through day-to-day work. The challenge is making that knowledge easy to find and reuse before it disappears into old records or leaves with experienced employees.
Q Knowledge applies the same approach across those environments, helping organizations identify recurring patterns, surface proven practices, and preserve institutional knowledge before it is lost.
The result is a different day-to-day experience. Teams spend less time searching across systems for answers that already exist. New employees have reviewed guidance to follow instead of relying on tribal knowledge. Experienced staff can focus on higher-value work instead of repeatedly reconstructing the same solutions.
FROM OPERATIONAL HISTORY TO REUSABLE KNOWLEDGE
The need for that kind of experience isn't unique to one team or one department. It's a challenge we see every day in the environments DMI operates and supports.
DMI runs service operations at scale. Our teams handle roughly 100,000 help desk contacts a month across 35+ managed IT clients, 24×7, and we build and maintain the knowledge systems those desks depend on, including ServiceNow. Running those desks is where we saw the pattern: well-organized service documentation starts to drift as volume increases and maintenance falls behind. The result is repeated work, slower issue resolution, and institutional knowledge that becomes harder to access over time.
Q Knowledge was born from seeing that problem firsthand. Rather than relying on teams to manually capture and maintain every lesson learned, it helps organizations identify recurring patterns in operational records and turn proven practices into reusable guidance that can be reviewed and approved by subject matter experts.
The result is a different day-to-day experience. Teams spend less time searching for answers that already exist, less time escalating routine issues, and more time focused on higher-value work. New employees can follow reviewed guidance instead of relying on tribal knowledge, while experienced staff can focus on solving new problems rather than repeatedly reconstructing old solutions.
SEE IT IN ACTION
Request a Q Knowledge demo to see how your existing operational records can become reviewed, reusable guidance.
Prefer to read first? Download the Q Knowledge capability brief or see how DMI approaches artificial intelligence and data across federal, defense, and SLED missions.
Your systems already contain the raw material. Q Knowledge turns it into reusable guidance, with a human making the final publication decision.
