What does knowledge and your role look like at your company?

[Dr Evil]

I'm curious what it is like at other organizations. I have been a knowledge manager for about 15 years in two organizations that do knowledge vastly different. I've been working in SNOW for about 5 years with no experience beforehand with this particular platform. 

Questions:

1. Are you a one-person team, or do you have other knowledge experts such as dedicated authors, domain coaches, product/process owners that help?
   
   
2. How many knowledge articles do you have in your main knowledge base?
   
   
3. Do you have full admin rights or not?
   
   
4. Summarize all the things you do at a high level. (so not a question 🙂 ) 
   
   
5. I'm assuming everyone is a Knowledge Manager, but please list if other.

My Answers:

1. I am the only person that manages knowledge. SMEs just write and submit them for approval for version 1, and all subsequent versions don't require approval from me to update.
   
   
2. We have one knowledge base I support that has about 2300 articles.
   
   
3. I do not have full admin rights.
   
   
4. The only thing I don't do is write the KBAs, but I do all the formatting, editing, publishing, support/triage, enhancements to knowledge, and I don't have admin rights but have to solve without the visibility. We had a 3rd party admin agreement before my arrival that we are in a long-term agreement with.
   
   
5. My title is Knowledge Manager.
   
   

[Gianluca Roncat]

- My company have different support teams for the various fields, every support team write and check his own articles,  the responsable of each field approve them. I only made supervision of the process

- We have two knowledge bases with some hundred articles

- I don't have full admin rights

- We introduced the knowledge only recently and, at the moment, I see myself more as a KCS evangelist than a Knowledge manager 😇

[Dr Evil]

Thank you for taking the time to answer. 

[TamG]

Hi Travis,

This is a great question to ask.  We are doing a little bit of reorganization for knowledge, and I'm totally new to ServiceNow and learning as I go along with ServiceNow Training.

My Answers:

1. We have a ITSM team that owns the process/backend, but we have two people including myself that manages knowledge and assists support teams with creating and maintaining their articles.  I create the branded templates that include SOPs, Quick Reference Guides, Process Guides, Runbooks, Playbooks, etc. Currently, we import and attach Word documents instead of using the editor for a more cohesive and branded look.  SMEs will go into the template library, select the one they want to use and fill it out.  They then submit to the KB and we review to ensure it makes sense and that standards are being met and then approve them for publish and manage the review cycle.  
   
   
2. We have four knowledge bases with several hundred articles total.  The goal is to increase this dramatically over time.
   
   
3. I do have full KB admin rights, but I don't mess with the admin much right now until I know what I'm doing.
   
   
4.  Because I am a professional writer, I write KBAs, help others write their KBAs and fill in gaps in other authors KBAs.   I work with IT engineers, and they just don't have a lot of time to document everything, so I help them by giving them guided templates to ease that process.  I ensure what is published is factual, high quality, not missing steps, and is in compliance with company policies (doesn't include PHI, passwords, etc).  
   
   I also write the policies for the KB that provides framework for how everyone should be using knowledge such a standards, process/procedures, etc.
   
   
5. My title is Sr. Technical Writer

Would love to know more about everyone's role in Knowledge.

[Dr Evil]

Hey Tam, thanks for the reply! There are so many ways to structure knowledge, it seems to be done differently at every company. I find it interesting that all of the documentation is attached verses made available via the KBA itself. I would be curious how the search results are influenced/impacted when implemented over time, but since attachments are searchable you should be fine. It definitely seems like you have a good review process.