Knowledge and KPI's

[Coralyn Notting]

I've been trying to come up with some KPI's for our Knowledge Articles, and I think Views Per Day would be useful for some of our articles. Is this something that can be calculated within ServiceNow? I've been exporting a list of articles and using Excel formulas to determine this number. I'd also like to differentiate between what is available on the View Log (all historical views across version numbers) and the View Count (views in the last 30 days).

If you know of other posts or resources that focus on Knowledge KPI's in ServiceNow, that would be useful, too. We're about to enable actionable feedback, which is prompting this view of knowledge. 

[Eoghan Sinnott · Accepted solution]

Hi Coralyn, 

You can report on this using the "Knoweldge_use" table. Create a new report on this table, and then use one of the 'Time Series' reports. Use your condition to specify the data you want to see(time frame, specific articles, knowledge bases etc). Then on the Configure screen, use the Trendy By 'Created' (to show when the view was created) and select Day to display the data per day.

[Kim27]

Hi, there are quite a few posts about KPIs and Reporting. This one has helped me: https://www.servicenow.com/community/knowledge-managers/knowledge-reporting/m-p/353209

Your first step should be to understand the various knowledge tables you can report against. You may need your SN Admin to run a list of the knowledge tables. 

The view count in and of itself provides some insight. But comparing views to other measures can be more meaningful. For example, an increasing view count could signify more people looking at knowledge, but it could also indicate there are issues with finding knowledge so more articles are viewed in order to find the one needed. For this report you may want to find the total number of knowledge searches (ts_query_kb) and compare it to the number of the number of knowledge views. The result you want is as close to a 1:1 correlation as possible - one search = one view - indicating that users are finding what they need. A high search count and low view count indicate the user needs to do multiple searches to find the article needed - a knowledge gap or metadata issue. High views to low searches indicate users either have knowledge bookmarked or are following links to a specific article. This can also be an indicator of a findability issue and is worth investigating. 

Do you attach knowledge articles to incidents, requests, etc,?  You may want to look at knowledge use compared to the number of tickets. For this, you will want to use the "Knowledge Applied to Tasks" table (m2m_kb_task). This report will show you who is using knowledge and can be used to identify where you may have knowledge gaps. 

I hope this helps.