What is the knowledge base?

The knowledge base is your organisation’s source of truth for how you answer security questionnaire and RFP questions. It holds approved question-and-answer pairs — knowledge base items — that ResponseHub reuses whenever the same ground comes up again.

Where sources are the documents you imported, the knowledge base is the wording you have decided on.

Why the knowledge base matters

It fixes your wording. Without a knowledge base item, an answer is generated from your sources afresh each time, so the same question can come back worded differently on different questionnaires. When you have settled on how a question should be answered, storing it as a knowledge base item means that exact wording is what gets used.

It covers what your policies don’t. Plenty of questionnaire questions cannot be answered from a policy document, however complete your sources are:

• The named individual responsible for something
• Questions about your product that no policy describes
• Anything you have no formal policy for yet, but still need a consistent answer to

The knowledge base is where those answers live.

It compounds. Every answer you approve is available to the next questionnaire, which is what makes the second questionnaire faster than the first.

Where answers come from

ResponseHub draws on both your knowledge base and your sources. For how it chooses between them, see knowledge base vs sources.

Building your knowledge base

You can build the knowledge base up in a few ways:

• Import from a CSV if you already keep answers in a spreadsheet
• Import from completed questionnaires to reuse the work in questionnaires you have already completed
• Approve answers as you work through a questionnaire, which feeds them back into the knowledge base

Next steps

• Knowledge base items — what each item contains
• Writing and updating
• Finding duplicates