Determining Knowledge Categories for End Users

[SuzyH_]

Does anyone have any suggestions for end user categories as far as grouping knowledge articles?

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Hi Suzy, 

A lot of creating categories will depends on your end users. Is it an internal Knowledge Base, if so, you may consider creating categories based on roles, such as HR, IT, Sales etc.
Analyze the number of articles for a certain application/subject etc. compared to the total number of articles in the Knowledge Base. I would also recommend using a hierarchy, so you can create subcategories within categories. You could have an overall Category of 'MS Office' and within that have individual categories for Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc. depending on the articles that are published.
I would also avoid going overkill on the amount of Categories that you create. They are meant to help the end user filter their searches and also provide insight through reporting. If you have too many categories it can become confusing to navigate, and provide the Knowledge team with little value.

Let me know if you have any further questions.

[jenniemiller]

Hi Suzy,

This will likely depend a lot on your industry and what makes the most sense overall for your business. What we have done is create Categories based on the services (Business and Technical) that we offer. E.g. Software, Training and Development, Cybersecurity, Accounts and Access, Facilities, etc. When we were migrating our knowledge from our previous system into ServiceNow, our Customer Experience team did a card sort with a representative customer base to get a better understanding of how our customers categorized different requests, services, and technology. We used this to inform our Categories in the knowledge base and tried to be consistent in the use of those categories throughout the platform.

Hope that helps! Let me know if you have any further questions!

-- Jennie

[trout1974]

I have worked on several SN Knowledge Management teams on several government contracts. We make our Knowledge Base categories match the Service Desk Incident ticket categories. Example: End User Software > O365 Outlook (Software Name) or End User Hardware > iPhone (Hardware Name) 
For our Service Desk Analysts it  helped them find what they were searching for, along with escalation of their tickets. 
It all depends though on your environment.  

[mamor]

Hi there;

Interesting approach. But then how about all the categories pertaining to Service Requests? Like information requests, how-to guides, etc?