Knowledge Article Management Guidelines

[slgonzales]

Good morning all! 

I'm new to the Knowledge Admin process role at my current organization and I'm reaching out to get feedback on how others are managing regular content review, KB validity (expiration) dates and retirement of articles over time. 

I want to establish reasonable timelines to ensure article content is reviewed regularly (at what time mark? yearly? quarterly?), articles are retired as appropriate, and we also want to establish reasonable expiration dates of KB articles if they are not reviewed in a timely manner. 

I'd appreciate any information that can be shared with respect to how these process policies are managed at other organizations. 

Thank you! 

[Pam Calvey · Accepted solution]

My company has about 5,000 articles and we use the 1-year default for validity review. It's up to the Document Owner group knowledge managers to decide if an article is no longer useful. If articles are not reviewed in a year they automatically retire. Knowledge Managers are told they can manually set the date to less than a year if it makes sense for the content. 

I've heard of large companies with tens of thousands of articles setting their valid-to default at 6 months, because they go through so much knowledge they can't afford to keep around non-useful articles any longer than that.

[Pam Calvey]

The 30 day goes to members of the doc owner group that have role of knowledge manager (We don't follow true KCS license structure). The 15 and 0 day notifications include the group manager. 

[Rum]

OK, this is good to know with differentiation between the 15 and 30 day notifications. Thank you.

[Rum]

We're in the process of setting up email notification for KB articles to be expired. The plan is to have the notification goes out 2-3 months before the articles expire. This will give the authors and the teams extra time to review & update the articles. In the last year or so, some team have created a lot of KB articles that were published on the same day, so this could be a bit challenging for review and update. The email notification will go out to the team, not individual author, in case the author leaves the organization.

Our Admin has rights to Unretire KB articles, but so far we haven't need to unretire any articles.

[Rum · Accepted solution]

I created a Knowledge Management Standards that applies to our ServiceNow (not for any other systems....SharePoint, OneDrive etc...). This contains a review time table for different types of documents. We also schedule all KB articles have one year review from the published date.

[slgonzales]

I appreciate you sharing! This helps a lot as we're also working on establishing the appropriate location for specific types of knowledge. Thank you so much!