KBA standardization

[Surbhi Kaushik]

Hi,

We are currently updating our knowledge base and defining standard practices for KBA creation- Readable font with standard size, neutral color scheme for text and background. Would like to know some insights on these practices for KBAs.

Thanks in advance.

[ASHU_1]

Hi John, I believe ServiceNow doesn’t provide a built-in "Style Guide" feature, right? Then how do we come up with one, I believe templates help a bit with some structure and font, but are you saying a separate knowledge article needs to be created under a unique base as style guide?

[cavila]

Aside from what's listed above the KM module comes with an Article Quality Index assessment you can activate.  Starting out you may want to get your editor set up with the expected font and size so you start your contributors out with a win, get the style guide together and accessible, then host training sessions to set the expectations.  After expectations are set you can run AQI's on each KB either immediately after or just before it's published to gauge whether or not your contributors are following the guidelines.  You can even have them perform remediation tasks if they receive a failing score.  You set the questions, the weight of each question, and the passing score. This is a bit reactive, but you get hard numbers to see what level of adherence you are dealing with. 

[JR1]

Good idea, that does however rely on an honor system; there is nothing to prevent them from checking all the AQI questions and by-passing it. 

[Aerin]

In my opinion, it's one of the many weaknesses of the Knowledge application, that it doesn't have a way to create built-in templates to control formatting for documents. We have a Style Guide that outlines our expectations for formatting, list use, colour use, etc. I asked our devs to remove the Font Size and Font Style selectors from TinyMCE and we use a widget in the Portal to control that formatting linked to the Blocks drop-down. The rest is just done through training and repetition - our use of Knowledge is low enough that I am part of the review process for every document and I reject articles that are too far off the requirements. I'm looking at implementing the AQI and training others to take some of that over for bigger groups; a larger organization would have to get that going fairly quickly.