Does anyone know of a white paper on how to lay out a Knowledge Base from start up?

[Seth D]

I'm the Knowledge Base Process Owner at a firm that has recently Implemented SNOW. We currently have a Knowledge Portal populated with several knowledge bases with roughly over 1,200 articles. The current organization (or lack thereof) of our knowledge base has hardly any high level rationalization. Most of current articles and KBs are IT related, so we have KBs like "General IT", "Service Delivery", "Service Now", etc. 

My vision and goal is to attract more functions and departments ( such as HR, Facilities, Finance, etc.), who currently don't have a knowledge base and are just pulling data from word documents housed in shared drives to buy-in the SNOW Knowledge Base. Therefore, I would like to rationalize and organize our knowledge base from scratch to not only make sense but be sustainable for the future when adding new entities.

All help is appreciated. I'd be happy to provide more information.

Respectfully, 

Seth

[BBoies1 · Accepted solution]

Hi Seth,

First of all, “Knowledge Conference” isn’t the right category for this sort of question. I’m guessing you saw “Knowledge” and got click-happy. Because of this, you might not get as many views (or helpful responses) as you would if this were posted in a more appropriate category, such as ITSM.

Now to actually be helpful: ServiceNow’s documentation on KB and Knowledge Management is frustratingly sparse. I think it’s because it varies so wildly from company to company, and is hard to standardize. With that said, here are some SN links that might help:

Best practices for setting up Knowledge base (Community)

Master the knowledge management process (Whitepaper)

Knowledge Management guide for users (Docs)

Here’s some non-SN links that might be useful:

How to Create Effective ServiceNow Knowledge Base Articles (Crossfuze article)

University of Minnesota Knowledge results

The University of Minnesota has a glorious KB that is actually full of great info on creating, managing, and administering KBs. The above link is to a search result for “knowledge”. I recommend checking out the “ServiceNow Knowledge: Knowledge Overview” article, as it addresses how their KBs are organized across departments.

Finally, I’ve attached the ITIL 4 Practice for Knowledge Management. I’m not 100% on whether or not I should share this here, so if anyone asks you didn’t get it from me.

[Seth D]

Hi BBoies, thank you for the reply and the insight you provided.

I quite honestly went through the categories within ITSM and others and could not locate a good spot for my question, so while I was in here, I noticed there were other questions regarding KB Management. I assure you it wasn't a result of my click-happiness, ::chuckles:: . 

Anyways, regarding the scarcity of SNOW KB material, I must agree as I've noticed the same throughout my role.

However, the content you provided seem like plenty of reading material for right now from which I can certainly tailor my own knowledge base.

I appreciate it very much! I'll go ahead and mark this answered.

Respectfully, 

Seth

[Michael QCKM]

Seth,

Though KM is part of ITIL via ITSM, I firmly believe it is important enough to have it's own category/Forum. Sadly it doesn't, and unfortunately, everything in SN is labelled with "Knowledge", but mostly refers to their "Knowledge" Conference, which is NOT Knowledge Management related.

When doing this work, PLEASE review Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) best practice and information from those that know about Knowledge Management. KCS concepts will be critical to starting you off correctly, and help point out gaps in OOB functionality that you'll need to know about.

• The following resources are shorter (shallower) to longer (deeper). KCS resources available are vast, and you will know what and how you learn best.
• • KCS In Five Minutes, 20 slides, 15 seconds each.
  • KCS Introduction [.pptx]
  • How Good is Good Enough? [.ppt] – Content quality survey
  • KCS Roles and Competencies (A description of competencies for the KCS roles: Candidate, Contributor, Publisher, Coach, Knowledge Domain Expert/KDE)
  • Glossary of KCS Terms
  • Appendix F: KCS and ITIL
  • Then you can dive deeper into "Principles and Core Concepts", then move on to the "Practices Guide" for a deep dive… starting at the beginning and working your way down.

Information Mapping/Plain Language writing is a method of “digesting” content into KB-usable formats. It is an external, paid resource, but their free webinars are generally good enough. Information_Mapping.mp4

[Monica11]

Hi @Seth D When it comes to actual Knowledge Base management (how many, how to separate, when doess a KB have too many articles to split, and so on) is not documented well. I've not yet found anything like this and have consulted with both ServiceNow and one of their preferred partners that we are using to move to the cloud.

Not too encouraging, I realize, but having said that, here's my experience over the last 8 years of owning the Knowledge Management process for my company (last 5 and continuing) and managing knowledge for one of our business groups (3).

• While we were on Knowledge v2, we had ~150k knowledge articles in the single knowledge base that v2 supported. This volume is spread throughout all workflow states, Draft to Retired.
• When I moved to Knowledge v3 (not until Geneva - yeah, we limped along on v2 for all that time 🙂 ), I created knowledge bases based on security needs, with no restrictions going into the main IT KB.

Today, currently on Madrid and moving to New York in May with Orlando later in the year in the cloud, I have

• ~65k total articles. We found that while on prem, we had a significant search performance improvement (50%) by reducing the table size so we followed KM industry standard and stopped being pack rats by purging retired KAs after certain criteria was met.
• These are then spread over 6 KBs, each with unique Can Read/Contribute conditions, the main IT one, of course, being open.

Even with this, the main KB still has over 21k published articles which, when categorized correctly, may not be such a bad thing however our topics, due to also having non-IT businesses utilizing the Knowledge application, creates a wide range of topics. Because of this, I'm considering splitting it into core IT knowledge and a second (7th?) for our non-IT businesses.

A critical factor in my evaluation for this split will be a deep dive on the categories the IT KB has configured. Talking with UX experts, there are established, industry guidelines and research behind menus. Naming, how many, how deep should they be nested, and so on. I'll have one of those UX experts help with the evaluation as we move to the cloud so I can make my informed decision of To split, or not to split, that is my question. 🙂

Hope this helps,

Monica