KCS Roll Out

[csinnett]

We are looking to move to KCS from a traditional Knowledge Base.

I've been through all of the guidance from the CSI which is fantastic, but I was wondering what peoples' experiences were in doing this in ServiceNow and how long did it take to set up in ServiceNow and then roll out across the business including training and certification?

For context, we are a large company - around 20,000 employees and an IT department of around 700. We have knowledge coaches in place in several departments already although there would be changes to this role when we roll out KCS. I would really appreciate anyone's advice or tips based on their experience of doing this.

Thanks in advance.

[David Kay · Accepted solution]

Lots of good questions here!  Let me try to take them one at a time.

The actual setup of KCS in ServiceNow is straightforward, thanks to their KCS Modules and other OOTB functionality.  When I did a KCS Minimum Viable Product in my Personal Developer Instance, it took about four days of work.  (Obviously, doing something in a PDI is vastly different from doing it in production, but that should give you a sense of getting the basics in place.). For me, the most challenging piece was creating the mapping from Incident / Case fields to Article fields when you create a new article from the case, but even that was really well documented.

As you'll hear in every discussion of KCS, change management is the biggest lift.  In the Practices Guide, Leadership and Communication covers some of that, as does the new Adoption and Transformation Guide

(This is what we do for a living.)  Also, designing the self-service experience to leverage your KCS KB requires particular skills and focus.

In terms of scope, rather than going for all of IT it generally makes sense to at least start with the Service Desk and expand from there.  This is likely going to give you a more manageable initial roll-out that might be completed in 3-4 waves, depending on the size of your Service Desk.

The roles of a knowledge coach and a KCS coach are likely quite different.  I wouldn't assume necessarily that you'll be able to repurpose the people you have in place now, although I'd need to know more about what your knowledge coaches do and how you selected them to say for sure.

(Relevant experience: a handful or two of KCS implementations on ServiceNow ITSM, some large-scale, and several ServiceNow HR implementations.)

[David Kay · Accepted solution]

Lots of good questions here!  Let me try to take them one at a time.

The actual setup of KCS in ServiceNow is straightforward, thanks to their KCS Modules and other OOTB functionality.  When I did a KCS Minimum Viable Product in my Personal Developer Instance, it took about four days of work.  (Obviously, doing something in a PDI is vastly different from doing it in production, but that should give you a sense of getting the basics in place.). For me, the most challenging piece was creating the mapping from Incident / Case fields to Article fields when you create a new article from the case, but even that was really well documented.

As you'll hear in every discussion of KCS, change management is the biggest lift.  In the Practices Guide, Leadership and Communication covers some of that, as does the new Adoption and Transformation Guide

(This is what we do for a living.)  Also, designing the self-service experience to leverage your KCS KB requires particular skills and focus.

In terms of scope, rather than going for all of IT it generally makes sense to at least start with the Service Desk and expand from there.  This is likely going to give you a more manageable initial roll-out that might be completed in 3-4 waves, depending on the size of your Service Desk.

The roles of a knowledge coach and a KCS coach are likely quite different.  I wouldn't assume necessarily that you'll be able to repurpose the people you have in place now, although I'd need to know more about what your knowledge coaches do and how you selected them to say for sure.

(Relevant experience: a handful or two of KCS implementations on ServiceNow ITSM, some large-scale, and several ServiceNow HR implementations.)

[csinnett]

This is amazingly helpful! Thanks so much @David Kay Really appreciate you taking the time to respond!

[Carly6 · Accepted solution]

In just speaking to how ServiceNow supports KCS, I believe the only real limitation we've had is that we had to customize a solution for Process Adherence Reviews. There wasn't an out of box solution for this. We did customize our own in ServiceNow itself, though it's not ideal.

When it comes to creating, editing, quality checks (we still call it AQI), etc, it all works really well. The dashboards in UI16 are fantastic as well, helping coaches keep on top of their tasks and program managers able to see how KCS adoption & adherence is doing.

To note, we rolled out KCS in 2008 at our company and moved to ServiceNow in 2020, so the leadership buy-in and built-in onboarding of KCS was well established prior to implementing a KCS solution in ServiceNow.

We also have our own support portal, we don't use SN's. And this brought another set of challenges, so I can't really say how well the support portal works for external access to KBAs.

I hope that helps!