Article Retirement Reminder

[rosenst22]

Hi. We have a dashboard for all of our authors which shows their articles expiring in 30 days, 60 days and 90 days. It's dynamic and personalized. We plan on sending quarterly communication out to remind them as well. We've seen issues with authors letting their articles expire, but then having to republish it later on. How is everyone else managing their authors to make sure their articles aren't consistently having to be republished? Any help is appreciated. 

[Community Alums]

Hi @rosenst22 ,

Please use a Business rule mentioned in the solution:https://www.servicenow.com/community/knowledge-managers/hi-i-have-a-reqirement-in-knowledgment-artic...

[Eoghan Sinnott · Accepted solution]

Hi, 

We have an automated notification system in place, so that it sends an email to the author/contact/backup to notify them that an article is due for review once it gets to within four weeks of it's Valid to Date. Then a reminder is sent if it gets within two weeks, and a final reminder one week out. 

I also use the dashboard approach, and also a Trend chart to show them when the articles are due for expiry over the year. I have found that this helps in managing workloads, so that someone doesn't have April or May with no reviews, and then all of a sudden 100 articles to review for June.

We also use a 365 day Validity on the majority of our knowledge bases.

Managing ones that have gone past the valid to date can be a tricky situation, but I do have a few best practices in place to try help. First of all is a report that shows anything gone past the Valid to date, so you can see at a quick glance the current state. On these articles then we check either the Knowledge Use or the Knowledge Applied to Task table to see if the content is being used. If the article has been attached to Incidents recently then we take this as the content is correct, as if it wasn't the issue would be flagged. Same goes for the usage. If the article hasn't been used in a specific time frame then we make the decision to retire it, and it can always be republished at a later date if needed.

I hope this is of some help to you!

Please consider marking my reply as Helpful and/or Accept Solution, where applicable. Thanks!

[Karolina]

I manage the HR knowledge bases and we have a relatively low population, but here's how we go about it:

We have modified knowledge feedback tasks and added a new type - expiry task which is triggered 60 days prior to the Valid to date (we have 365 days validity). A notification is sent with instructions, and the task is assigned to the ownership group's manager who then cascades it further to the team member who is currently taking care of the process described. On the date the article expires, we have an additional notification sent to the knowledge manager and the author. As I knowledge manager, I then remind the author that they need to check the article and take one of the actions described in the notification. Once in a while I also review the dashboard to check if we have any articles past their Valid to date and, if required, I reach out to the authors to clarify. If they continue to take no action - it's on them, there is no article and they have to suffer the consequences 🙂 Based on the dashboard, I also flag to the managers and teams if we are approaching a period when many articles are expiring, so that they can plan their workload accordingly.

Authors also have a dynamic list in their Workspace to check their assigned articles expiring between today and the end of next quarter. 

[Dipesh Kalantri]

 Hi rosenst22,

Previously we used to have Author dependent notifications however this approach is not scalable as people may change teams/leave company or move to different role. Hence we have defined approach for using "Ownership Groups"  where now we do not have dependency with author, when Valid to date appears system sends email 45/30/15 days before (3 mails) to author as well as ownership group members and each mail has option to either extend or retire article , if no action is taken then article gets retired.

Apart from above we have created dashboard for ownership groups to monitor their KM KPI's & take actions as appropriate.

This approach has helped us to ensure improved governance.

Regards,

Dipesh