Ownership Group Approval flow

[owenbarber]

We have a situation where the owner of the Ownership Group creates and Article and applies their Ownership group to it.  This then routes the approval to all other members of the Ownership group except the Owner who is also a member of the group and the article author.

Is this expected behavior or is there something we are missing?

Have not been able to find a definitive answer as yet on what the expectation is here so any help and advice would be appreciated?

For Context the Author/Ownership Group Owner and Member does not have self-publishing rights or Coach (Approval) rights. I tested by giving them self-publish rights but this made no difference and the approvals still routed to everyone else in the group apart from the Author/OG Owner.

[Tanushree Maiti]

Hi @owenbarber 

With an ownership group associated with a knowledge article, ownership group members can approve self-authored articles for publication. You can override this behavior by disabling the glide.knowman.ownership_group.allow_self_approval property. By default, the property is set to true. When the property is set to false, ownership group members can't approve self-authored knowledge articles.

Refer: Ownership groups 

[drosenst2]

That is one way of doing it. I would ask if that is the best practice/process for your business. I've always had articles go to the KM team for approval and if there is a trusted group who can approve their own articles, then I would do it the way you mentioned. I normally don't start out with OG approvals, but get there slowly and selectively. 

[MaryG · Accepted solution]

This is expected behavior. ServiceNow automatically excludes the article author from approval routing regardless of their ownership group membership or role. The platform won't generate an approval task for the person who submitted the article.

The glide.knowman.ownership_group.allow_self_approval property controls a related but slightly different scenario — whether ownership group members can approve articles they authored when the group itself is the approver. Setting it to false enforces stricter separation, but the base behavior of excluding the author from the approval task generation is OOTB regardless of that property.

If the requirement is that the author/group owner should also be an approver when someone else in the group authors an article, that works as designed — they'd appear in the approval routing for articles they didn't write.