Various roles in one Ownership Group

[Aga_Sznajder]

Hi All!

I am a Knowledge Manager building a solution for GBS structure. There is a need to have a secure, controlled governance of articles, so I decided to do the following:

• Create ownership groups for HR, Marketing etc to ensure creation of content related to their areas is created and controlled by specialists
• Create an approval workflow, where each Ownership Group should have a bunch of defined approvers among members, applicable both for publication and retirement of articles - and here is my issue.

Long story short: I would like to have 2 types of roles in one group - authors and approvers. Is it possible? My SN team suggests to create 2 separate groups - one for authors, one for approvers. I don't like this idea, as it would double the number of groups and might complicate the workflow and governance. I would rather have one group for each function and two roles within it. Does anyone have similar solution? If yes - what roles are you using for both authors and approvers and how do you apply it. 

I would really appreciate any suggestions and ideas.

Aga

[Leri Andrews]

Hi

I too have struggled with how to do this and to make the OOTB knowledge work in the way I need it to.  In a previous instance I had ownership groups and approval groups and a custom workflow.   It meant people had to request author roles, approver roles, ownership group membership and approver group membership and I ended up dealing with a lot of access admin.

Now I only have ownership groups, which also act as approver groups if the workflow says so - but this means they ALL get asked to approve (which you don't want). 

I've attempted to work with a custom workflow so that if you are in the group you get instant publish but if someone outside the group publishes then it goes for approval.  But here I have run into problems because it turns out that HR Case access gives the ability to create an articles but if the person is not in the ownership group they cannot edit the article they just created. 

If an article is created without an ownership group, then it goes to the Knowledge Base managers for approval but I'm unclear where the expiry and feedback notifications go. Possibly you would be closer to achieving your aim with a knowledge base for each function.

My particular issue is that I might have an ownership group for a country which contains articles on payroll, benefits, time and leave.  The people in the group are a mix of actual teams - Payroll, Workforce Admin, Rewards.  Because they're all in one group, they are all getting the notifications and are getting frustrated "I'm in payroll - why am I being told about the holiday policy expiring?".  The feedback is all getting assigned to the group manager and they are struggling to work out who to assign the tasks to.

I really think the knowledge governance structure is too inflexible for how business services functions are organised - but let me know if you find a way to do this that doesn't involve too much customising.

[Aga_Sznajder]

Hi Leri,

First of all thank you for sharing your experience, I really appreciate it! I agree, that current KM setup is not flexible at all. Currently what I have exactly is:

• Workflow requires one approval level for all articles created
• Only ownership groups members can approve articles, there is no option for "loose" users to create anything - quality and security reasons
• Approval requests goes to all group members, excluding the author themself, as we don't want to have one set of eyes creating and checking the same article

I need to limit the number of notifications being sent across ownership groups to just 3-5 approvers, as it makes no sense for newly employed members to review articles intended to support them - this is the role of feedback. I want ownership group to simply have two levels of roles, I remember we had something like that in previous instances - like 3 or 4 years ago. It was super easy to set up, we used it in IT environment and it was intuitive, helpful. 

I do agree with you, that KM module is not flexible at all. Knowledge should be governed in a secure way, as it influences both employee's daily work and customer's experience, so should be as close to perfect as possible. This way we just throw random information to bases with no or minimum control and hope user's feedbacks will fix the topic of quality. 

[shannont]

Hi,

Can you provide what you are trying to solve by having both Authors and Approvers in an OG? We are in process of moving to OOB from a very custom platform.  With that, we are using OOB workflow (instant publish) with OGs.  Our OGs will consist of our KCS Coaches and we are automating creation of OGs based on Assignment Groups and adding the coaches in those AGs into the OG.  We also want to allow Authors to edit their own content and found this in the documentation which you may already be aware of: 

If an ownership group is associated with a knowledge article, the author or reviser of the article can't contribute to the article after the article is published. You can override this behavior by enabling theglide.knowman.ownership_group.overrideproperty. When the property is set totrue, the authors or revisers of knowledge articles associated with ownership groups retain contribute access to their published articles. By default, the property is set to false. 

We will be doing this so Authors can edit their own content.

[Aga_Sznajder]

We want to have small Ownership Groups with very specialized knowledge, as this will reflect the actual situation - the OG will be in fact based on fulfiller group (or we will use fulfiller groups we already have and add KM role). Approvers will be members of the OG, with additional approver role, so that once article is in review, only those selected people will receive notifications to review content, approve or reject it. I don't want all the OG members to receive this notification, as this would create confusion by notifying also new joiners, who have the least knowledge of the process described in an article.