SharePoint Repositories as part of Knowledge Strategy- Some Questions

[Jayne Loh]

Happy 2024 everyone! May 2024 be kind to all of us.

We are looking at implementing a document repository on SharePoint to complement our knowledge base.

Hoping to learn from your experience on this topic.

1. How well/not well is it working for you? What is your setup?

2. What are potential landmines/issues to look out for?

3. How does search metrics get tracked? i.e. does it appear under sys_search_event?

Appreciate greatly any inputs, thank you so much in advance!

[David Kay · Accepted solution]

In our experience, knowledge management and content management are different, and you need them both: https://www.dbkay.com/km/knowledge-management-vs-content-management -- so your plan makes a lot of sense to me.

Most organizations have the need for longer form, less structured document-based information: product docs or a benefits plan, for example.  These typically go inside something like SharePoint.  When people have specific questions they want answered, or issues they want addressed, the answers are often difficult to find in formal documents.  So, the person responding to the question will create a knowledge base article that captures the question in the customer's words and provides the specific answer, which often will have come from a formal document.

If they used a formal document, and that document is available to the person who asked, the KB article should link to the formal document.  In this way, the KB becomes a kind of "smart index" to the documentation in SharePoint.

I know this is a very "in general" answer--please reply if you have a more specific situation in mind!

[David Kay · Accepted solution]

In our experience, knowledge management and content management are different, and you need them both: https://www.dbkay.com/km/knowledge-management-vs-content-management -- so your plan makes a lot of sense to me.

Most organizations have the need for longer form, less structured document-based information: product docs or a benefits plan, for example.  These typically go inside something like SharePoint.  When people have specific questions they want answered, or issues they want addressed, the answers are often difficult to find in formal documents.  So, the person responding to the question will create a knowledge base article that captures the question in the customer's words and provides the specific answer, which often will have come from a formal document.

If they used a formal document, and that document is available to the person who asked, the KB article should link to the formal document.  In this way, the KB becomes a kind of "smart index" to the documentation in SharePoint.

I know this is a very "in general" answer--please reply if you have a more specific situation in mind!

[John Regalado · Accepted solution]

Hi Jayne, Happy New Year. 

I agree with David's comments and find the information in his link to be very true.   I wish to add that we find using a SharePoint document repository to be very useful especially when it comes to larger documents, videos, images, etc... related to a knowledge article.    As part of our design we've section our SharePoint homepage with tiles so that our knowledge managers can keep the heavy content in a specific area related to that type of article, i.e. customer facing vs fulfiller facing as well as articles in draft.  It also allows us to lock down certain titles (document libraries) so that when an article viewed by a customer has content linked to a specific library they can still view it, while other libraries will only be accessible by our fulfillers.  We also leverage our Sharepoint with quick links to other resources such as training and our teams channel.  

As for potential landmines/issues we find that our knowledge owners will sometimes not follow our standards and keep content in other SharePoint locations causing confusion when articles need updating and new staff are not instructed in the proper method.    Similar to implementing any ServiceNow module it takes changing the culture and changing bad habits.  Once the knowledge owners and teams start to realize how critical and beneficial it is to keep their articles up to date they start to buy in, especially when it comes to leveraging modules such as virtual agent.  Bottom line, it's like your CMDB, bad data in is bad data out, so set standards, find good knowledge owners and make them accountable.

I hope this helped a little and Good luck with Knowledge in 2024!

[Jayne Loh]

Very practical and useful advice @David Kay @John Regalado  - really appreciate it. 

I wished I saw this article earlier - https://www.dbkay.com/km/knowledge-management-vs-content-management.

In particular how critical it is to keep knowledge directly actionable, concept of seeing knowledge as a "smart index"

Would it be possible to share further your experience in using Content + KM, specifically on how metrics or processes have worked well in keeping the 2 repositories in sync?

[David Kay]

Several specific processes can help address the "keep in sync" question:

1. If there is documentation, any new article should draw from that documentation to make sure the article and the document are aligned, at least at the time the article is created
2. As the article is used internally, people should refer to the documentation to make sure the article still lines up with it.  If not, they should flag or update the article accordingly (every use is a review!)
3. People working on the documentation should look at the KB articles that link to it, so they have a better sense of when and why customers need the information in the documentation
4. If people working on a KB feel that documentation is incorrect or out of date, they shouldn't just paper over that with their KB article.  They're also obliged to raise a defect on the documentation (or whatever your process is for document feedback.)
5. If the documentation changes is a truly fundamental way, it's nice to flag the knowledge base articles that link to that documentation.  Otherwise, we can just rely on "every use is a review."