DevOps in spirit champions better collaboration between your IT operation and developer teams.
Few of the major challenges when you are in DevOps transition includes,
- How do you make sure that your operation team has enough and accurate knowledge of the system?
- How are the things built?
- What to do in case stuff breaks on production (incident triage, etc)?
You can use documentation on Sharepoint or similar repository and have the team upload stuff on it.
But, if you use any such repository,
- Is the information easily digestible or searchable?
- How do you make sure that the information is not stale?
- How do you maintain these other systems?
- What should be the access controls on these repositories?
Let's look at another set of problems.
- Do you really believe that your development teams are able to completely reuse stuff?
- How would a team member X able to determine what the team member Y has created? Reading through documentation?
- Are you sure that your instance does not duplicate scripts created by different developers performing the same task?
- If ServiceNow is going to stay 'Z' number of years, do you really believe there will be no attrition?
Just imagine your newest developer instead of going through tons of documentation or disturbing that senior dev (headphones on), can get the information he wants in a Google-like search. This would result in actual dollar saving, by reducing the time required for a new developer to come up to speed with your instance implementation.
Imagine, your production support person having all the additional technical details he might require to troubleshoot the issue without involving your developer team? This results in actual dollar saving again, right?
To the technical team - Is there anything worse than to get an undocumented instance for providing support and you have to scratch your head every time when something breaks or something needs to be added? I am sure some of us have been through this nightmare.
All of these and many similar questions lead to one path - Knowledge Management.
Knowledge management, specifically Knowledge base, is a powerful tool that can help you organise and present a subset of related data to the intended audience. Now to address our previously discussed issues,
- Why not create a simple knowledge base that to document your scripts?
- Steps to troubleshoot in case of an error?
- Document and share best practices within your team?
- Share some design patterns that others might not be aware of?
- Use knowledge to increase your team collaboration.
Still doesn't sound interesting? Well, let's try to make it interesting.
You can find the first version of this attempt https://github.com/iamkalai/SNInternalAPILibrary. The updates basically create a record producer, knowledge base and categories, a business rule, a template, few modules for easy accessibility.
I have intentionally kept the interface (record producer) very light so that people do not have to spend too much time filling too many fields (I hate too many fields on the form ). Just choose a category of the new entry, short description and description - done. It auto publishes the knowledge article without any additional action.
So how or when do I use this?
- Add an article if you are creating or updating a script.
- Add an article to note the steps that you did, to troubleshoot the issue.
- Building a new application or service? Document in the system.
- Read a best practice on the community? Document it.
Still sceptical about this? Let me ask, what is the downside?
- Are we introducing a technical debt? The components used are easy to configure and you can alter the design as per your need.
- Is this going to increase cost? - Knowledge management is part of the platform.
Now, for customers using something like this, did it work? What were the challenges? Did you get any real benefit?
For people still learning the platform - This demonstrates how powerful the platform really is. I have hardly written 10 lines of code and can hope to get business value out of it. If you go through the source code, you will be able to learn,
- Record producer and producer script.
- Templates and its usage.
- Knowledge base and categories.
- A business rule that can directly publish the articles instead of requiring clicking of Publish button.
- Text search group.
- Application and different types of module.
- 3 types of variables in ServiceNow.
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