Seeking Advice on Authoring Tools for Knowledge Management

[ZoranG]

Hello,

I am seeking advice from professionals who use ServiceNow as their Knowledge Management System (KMS).

Summary of the Problem: While ServiceNow effectively meets the Knowledge Management (KM) needs for CSM and ITSM, its authoring tool for writing knowledge articles is rather limited.

Our Needs: We recognize that our requirements extend beyond traditional knowledge management. Specifically, we aim to articulate captured knowledge in ways that support various use cases, such as:

• Support: Creating FAQs
• Learning: Developing interactive guides
• Natural Language Processing: Serving as a source for retrieval-augmented generation

The Challenge: What are the state-of-the-art tools and practices in knowledge capture and authoring?

Are you using any of these tools for your article authoring in ServiceNow?

Are you using any of these tools: ScreenSteps, Visme, Articulate Rise / Storyline, Adobe Captivate?

I appreciate any insights or recommendations you can provide.

[ZoranG]

I will post a generic version of this ask to the KM Institute too. If they offer an advice, will bring it here. 

[Dr Evil]

Hey ZoranG! 

I agree that the authoring tools for writing knowledge are rather limited and have been that way for a while. Most knowledge platforms utilize the TinyMCE editor. I have worked with several other big-name platforms, and they use the same editor. I have had to step outside the box and learn JavaScript, HTML, and some CSS to compensate for their lack of flexibility and innovation. That said, each platform adds additional constraints, such as code scrubbing functionality to remove code that could negatively impact their core code. 

As far as your needs:
Creating FAQs: What is stopping you from creating FAQs today? Are you looking for a way to collapse the answers to the questions, are you looking for a more stylish way of presenting the the Q&A? More context and information would be helpful to better understand your needs. 

Learning: This to me sounds more like training, but in the event that it is not and you are looking for new ways to deliver knowledge I will share my thoughts and experience. Learning/Training should be separate from knowledge, there has always been more appropriate ways to deliver that experience. For example you cannot drip feed content for learning, add time requirements to the page, and test for knowledge and score quiz/tests. These learnings should be conducted in a true LMS and not something I would image would be apart of knowledge anytime soon. 

NLP: ServiceNow has Now Assist and AI search that has AI, ML, and leans into NLP that can be utilized with Performance Analytics to help with RAG. 

Questions:

What are the state-of-the-art tools and practices in knowledge capture and authoring? 
- We are planning on adding Now Assist, and we do leverage Performance Analytics and AI search now for capturing knowledge opportunities. As far as authoring we use internal AI writing tools to help with cleaning up and structuring knowledge. I will say AI is not quite there yet for our specific needs in helping author, but is great for proofing and organizing. This space changes so rapidly, I would suspect we will be there very soon, but for now there are some big discrepancies in understanding our environment and our 3rd party vendors environment that it needs to be fixed and gone through with a fine tooth comb. 

Are you using any of these tools for your article authoring in ServiceNow? - I utilize the editor as much as I can and do any custom coding using Notepad++ and then bring that back into ServiceNow. 

Are you using any of these tools: ScreenSteps, Visme, Articulate Rise / Storyline, Adobe Captivate? - I do not utilize the mentioned tools in our knowledge base. We do create self-service videos and other support videos for knowledge, but learning/trainings are done with a learning and development team with folks that specialize in that field. 

[ZoranG]

Thank you very much for your insights! Your input is greatly appreciated.

Your first paragraph echoes my pains:

• I was able to change the properties and allow data attributes to sneak additional metadata in the html that is used to add user experience at the presentation layer.
• The script scrubbing is a major challenge, but I decided not to disable it because I agree with the security implications, especially since there is no out of the box script hashing or cryptographic nonce provided by the platform.
• I still need scripts to provide the user experience and now that requires widget customizations. Not difficult, but immediately becomes technical debt.

About the Learning part:

When you say: “We do create self-service videos and other support videos for knowledge, but learning/trainings are done with a learning and development team[…]”, do you store the end products in the ServiceNow knowledge bases?

Indeed, I want to store trainings and interactive guides, where the knowledge is paired with user experience. Take, for example, the ServiceNow courses; Let’s say Phil is presenting a lesson from the Application Development Fundamentals On Demand course. One lesson of the course would be an “entry/article/page” that contains video, transcript and experience that the user can control. I want to store that in the knowledge repo.

Just like in your case, for the complex use cases, content and UX are produced elsewhere and can be pushed to the (extended) knowledge tables. But the KMS is not good enough to manage this type of complexity across multiple knowledge bases and extended knowledge tables.

[Dr Evil]

You are very welcome! 

Glad you were able to get a little more functionality out of it, and agree its not a good idea to disable the script scrubbing.  

We do store the our self-service videos in the knowledge base, but they are just .mp4 videos to show a team member how to do something (educational, or how do videos basically). As far as training we don't store the end point of those videos in the KB. We will link to those training/learning platforms from a knowledge article, but they don't live in our KB. 

I see what you are saying with the store trainings and interactive guides. We keep training materials completely separate from knowledge and we don't import any of the interactive trainings from programs like the tools you mentioned. 

Exactly!