Knowledge article as guidance content for service catalog items

[Dave Thackeray]

Guidance content can be quite lengthy in advising colleagues how to complete quite extensive forms in the Service Catalog.

We're also sticklers for accuracy and consistency and so I'm really keen that we use workflow features available in the Knowledge Management system.

My vision is that we create and consistently format guidance as a KB article in Knowledge Management, and that passes through an approvals and review process before it's published to the Service Catalog.

This means we can:

• Format guidance content
• Make sure it's consistent by it passing through a workflow
• Use it elsewhere (we favour the Create Once, Publish Everywhere model of content development)

Is this possible? Could we publish in Knowledge Management and then show that content, once approved, inside a Service Catalog item?

Or is there another way to ensure this granular level of governance and consistency?

[Logan Poynter]

Hello Dave,

Awesome, now that we are tracking on the same thing I'll pose my opinion for you to digest. 

While OOTB - as you're aware - maintain items has no formal review procedure like Knowledge. The stages you see on the Knowledge (Draft, Review, Scheduled Publish, Published, Pending Retirement, Retired) are defined in the properties of the workflow itself, and logic is built around that for when/how it should be visualized. 

I think you have a good use case for establishing formality to catalog item content and ensuring quality by having a review process. Without knowing your organizational structure, take my below suggestion with a grain of salt if it doesn't fit well but hopefully, it can spark an idea. 

When you said, "service owners to manage the guidance content" - are these individuals maintaining the catalog item itself too, or does that pass to you (or your admins) to update the catalog item?

Assuming the latter, I think the best approach would be to establish a record producer to request content updates using a structure you specify, with an associated flow to:

A) Capture the appropriate first/second/third approvals (however many needed) through an Ask for Approval action

B) Task to perform the content update on the associated item using a defined template to establish the desired formality

C) A content review approval from the service owner before claiming the updates are completed

Please mark my answer as correct/helpful if it has helped you.

Thanks,
Logan

[Dave Thackeray]

You're right. Service owners (distributed teams) will manage the content, but the approval/publishing rights will remain with the central team (mine).

I've only been working with ServiceNow for a few weeks - rejuvenating the Service Catalog is among my priorities. So I'm not properly au fait with all the terminology.

I'll review the concept of Record Producer (I'm a musician, so this one should be easier to digest than most) and how we establish one, if that's not an existing role.

1. How would we go about establishing a structure and associated flow for a Service Catalog item? Is this something we'd develop inside ServiceNow?
2. There would only ever be one approval required - but it might be by different members of our central team (depending on the category)
3. Would the template be a standard catalog item template (Create or edit a catalog item template | ServiceNow Docs)?

I very much appreciate your help with this - and hope your answers help others, too.

[Logan Poynter]

Hello Dave,

Glad I could provide some valuable recommendations and feedback to you. If you have any other questions feel free to reach out or add me on LinkedIn.

Regarding your questions:

1. This really just depends on what kind of Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) your organization has with catalog items. The pieces that make up an item will be the same across the board (variables, variable sets, how you use those variables, etc.) The best approach IMO is to identify everything that should exist across all items and create a variable set. Then specific catalog item requirements would just be individual variables. The flow behind the items will have the same structure, every flow has a start, approvals, work tasks, and generally contains email notifications. What you do within the flow for each item (how it handles the records or business processes) will be individualized like variables.  

How I personally approach the requirements gathering when a new item is proposed is a reverse funnel: Start at the goal and work backward to what the user would see in the portal. I've found that if you start broad and work down you can sometimes miss a step due to the evolution of the discussion over time and then have to rework to make it fit.

2. You would achieve this by using a Group as the approval so your Ask for Approval action would look like this:

3. Yes, that's the recommended approach. Establish your baseline for all items and then only customize what is unique to the item. 

Please mark my answer as correct/helpful if it has helped you.

Thanks,
Logan

[Dave Thackeray]

I think we've almost cracked this nut, Logan.

I only have one more question, and that relates to creating or editing the Service Catalog item by the service owner.

A quick recap - I'm talking about a Service Catalog item having two distinct components:

• Guidance content - that's essentially everything in the Short description and Description fields
• Form - that's the variables.

With that in mind:

1. Assuming the item had already been created, how would you recommend that the service owner edited content shown in the red box - what I call the guidance content? Would we need to add all service owners to ServiceNow? And if so, what's the lowest level of access we could give to them in order that they could simply edit/review content for their catalog items?
2. If a new item needed to be created, could a service owner accomplish that - picking variables and creating the guidance content - before it was sent through the workflow to our (central) group for editing and approval.

I hadn't thought about putting ALL variables inside a single, universal variable set.

I think an effort has been made to create several sets, for different groups of items. Items have been grouped based on commonalities in the information that needs to be surfaced through the variables. And I think at that time it made sense to have several variable sets.

I'm intrigued by your suggestion for a single set, though. All I care about is that we only have one version of each variable; as has been documented in your KB, and as CSS works, the dream is to have only one instance so that you change it once, and the change is reflected everywhere it is used.

I really appreciate all your help, Logan.

[Logan Poynter]

Hello Dave,

1. Maintaining Catalog Items requires admin role unless you want to go the route of establishing a new role and appropriate ACLs then dispersing that amongst the owners, but that doesn't limit them to only their own item and should remain to only your internal administrative team.

When it comes to confirming content, you could build a "Confirmation Flow" on an annual basis that does a look-up on the sc_cat_item table and simply emails the service owner the content (i.e. description, short description, etc.) with approval where they say yes it's still accurate or no changes are required. If changes are required, point them to the record producer above to update. 

2. Same as 1, admin role or a new role and ACL are required. You could go the route of a second record producer to suggest catalog items but if you're using the Idea module already in your organization, this may be an option to leverage the service owner's experience to tell the story of how/why the item can have a positive impact on the organization.

Please mark my answer as correct/helpful if it has helped you.

Thanks,
Logan