Ownership Groups vs KBase Owners & Managers for Approval Workflows

[Rebecca B]

Hello Everyone, We have not yet enabled ownership groups in Knowledge. I am looking for opinions from the community.

1. Are you currently using Ownership Groups? 
2. What are the benefits?
3. What are the Challenges?
4. If I turn these on, is there truly, no going back? 

We had created our own (customized approval workflows). However, we would like to move towards OOB. If I understand correctly, if we do NOT turn on Ownership groups, that the Knowledge Base Owner and Managers would receive the approval tasks.

The individuals at Knowledge Base Owners and Manager in our org may not have the expertise to approve specific knowledge articles, so it seems that we would like to create ownership groups based on area's of expertise at the knowledge article level.

For example: Cerner Ownership Group - receive all approvals and feedback for Cerner related articles.

Looking for honest feedback from the community :). I appreciate your assistance.

[jenniemiller]

Hi Rebecca,

We do use Ownership Groups for Knowledge Management at our organization. We have them aligned (mostly) to be the same groups as the Assignment Groups. The thought is that the Service Owners should own all aspects of their service, including the documentation (public-facing and internal) for that service. As Knowledge Managers and Owners, we provide the templates and style guides to make sure that from team to team, we are providing our customers a consistent look and feel to our knowledge articles and ensuring that the articles adhere to accessibility and usability standards. The issue you pointed out - that the Knowledge Managers wouldn't have the subject matter expertise - is a large part of our decision to use this model for our knowledge. It also helps keeping article creation and updating from bottlenecking at the knowledge managers. I hope this helps! Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions!

-- Jennie Miller

Knowledge Manager

Michigan Medicine

[Mike Van Vooren]

@jenniemiller - Do you make the Ownership Group field mandatory?  We are considering moving away from our custom "knowledge domain" field, which we created before Ownership Groups came around.  Right now, that field is optional, since it was meant to protect editing to just specific types of articles. I don't want to lose the editing flexibility we have now with our KCS roles, so my hope was that I could continue to make Ownership Groups optional.  However, I do like the idea of reusing existing Assignment Groups instead of our custom ones.

[jenniemiller]

Hi Michael,

Yes, we do make the Ownership Group mandatory, but we allow anyone with the itil role to be able to author knowledge articles. This keeps with general KCS practices, where our Service Desk can write a "stub" article if they see a knowledge gap, and then (because we also have the Approval Publish workflow in place) the article will go to that Ownership Group for the SMEs to fill in any gaps, review it for accuracy and approve it to be published to our Portal.

To touch on your flexibility comment, we exposed the Author field on our form, so that a person outside of the Ownership Group could be granted the ability to edit the article, allowing for collaboration between teams. E.g. A Technical Writer could be the Author and draft the article, and then the Ownership Group would have a SME review and approve.

Hope that helps!

-- Jennie