Knowledge success stories

[CasandraGB]

Hello everyone! I am the knowledge SME for a company that has a decentralized knowledge creation/maintenance model, with a knowledge database of 5k+ articles.

Here, the different teams/groups create and maintain their own knowledge articles that can be meant for internal use or for end users.

The challenge I'm encountering is to keep this model and yet implement a series of knowledge reports that would show how each group/team is doing so they reach the main goal of having articles up to date and no knowledge tasks pending.

The ultimate goal is that the VA provides those articles to end users and stops incidents from being created.

Do you have any success stories about companies having a similar decentralized model? Or that maybe started like this but opted for a centralized model where the knowledge is created and maintained by a dedicated team of people?

Thanks in advance for your help!

Regards

Casandra

[David Kay · Accepted solution]

Casandra - absolutely.  Because Avaya was (is?) a KCS shop, they used the normal KCS mechanism of "every use is a review."  What that means is that any time their engineers attempted to use a KB article, they evaluated if it was "sufficient to solve"--good enough to resolve the issue to their and the customer's satisfaction.  If not, for example if the user interface had changed, the engineer updated the article then and there.  So if an article is used 100 times this quarter, it's effectively reviewed 100 times.

In most KCS shops, you have to earn the right to update these articles by demonstrating your proficiency and becoming a Contributor or Publisher.  If you're not able to update the articles, you can flag them with the changes that are required...but ideally that's a corner case in a mature implementation.  Fortunately, this flagging process is supported by ServiceNow.

[Leri Andrews]

I am the HR knowledge manager for a large company (>80k employees in >75 countries) with a de-centralized knowledge model. To solve your particular issue around reporting, I have a custom dashboard set up where any interested party can see their own tasks (knowledge flags, feedback tasks, upcoming expiries, knowledge peer reviews and approvals, open drafts) and on another tab with interactive filters for ownership groups, authors and countries they can see outstanding tasks (feedback and expiry), customer feedback (star rating and usefulness) and article usage (views and use in cases resolutions). This is in addition to the usual notifications and menu items.  

The success of this approach depends very much on the market and people involved.  An engaged Team and Team Lead in a large market will put in the effort to review HR cases, identify gaps and create articles, They'll keep an eye on the dashboard and act quickly if any numbers turn red.  Conversely, an overworked team of two in a small market will prioritise payroll and other vital services and be unable to find the time to uplift knowledge articles, even though having better articles and promoting self-service via the portal will reduce pressure on them.  It is also very dependent on the culture in the country - no matter how accurate the article, in some markets the employee will still want to ring up and check.   My experience of the VA is that people find it too frustrating.  

I am considering removing ownership groups and approvals entirely and offering a partly centralized service. Sometimes the administration overhead of owning a mere 10 articles becomes too much once they are translated into 9 other languages.  Sometimes all that is needed to throw a countries knowledge into disarray is for a single person to leave.

I would love to survey other companies to understand their set up and get an idea of 'best practice' - an elusive thing in ServiceNow!