What is your experience with allowing or disallowing approval of self-authored articles?

[Jason Sturgeon]

Hello KM community,

We are using ownership groups for managing edit access to articles. I have had several requests for preventing an author from self-approving. Before I go and flip the switch to prevent this, I'd like to hear from the community about how you address this type of request and what, if any downsides you can see by setting this property to false.

System property to control this behavior:

Allow approval of self-authored article as ownership group member (glide.knowman.ownership_group.enable_self_approval)

Select the check box to allow ownership group members to approve self-authored articles for publication.

• Type: true | false
• Default value: true
• Location: Knowledge > Administration > Properties

[David Kay]

In fairness, many HR departments have successfully implemented KCS, primarily in a front-line shared services group and to drive employee self-service.  Before having conversations with the Centers of Excellence about this--because you're right, their first instinct is to try to preserve the illusion of control--it's important to make sure your quality practices are in good shape.  Coaching and licensing, spot-checking articles with the Content Standard Checklist, the Process Adherence Review (PAR), and especially "every use is a review" should help them get over the hump.  I mean, if front-line staff don't have a KB article, they're still going to answer the question they have in front of them without one.  Is that a more safe and secure model?

[Jason Sturgeon]

Excellent use case Eoghan. I believe this would only affect knowledge bases using an approval publish workflow so if the KB was using instant publish I am assuming it wouldn't slow things down. Do I have this corect?

[Eoghan Sinnott]

Yes this would be using the approval publish workflow. We have members from different support groups who have the ability to bypass the review state. They initially would have started off with "Contribute" access, where they had the ability to check-out an article and then submit it to be approved by our dedicated Knowledge Management team. After some coaching sessions and a base level of understanding was built these users were elevated to where they have instant publish themselves, but they do not review content submitted by others. That still falls with the KM team, with the idea being to get as many users to the instant publish as possible.

[jahnert]

Requiring approval potentially creates a bottleneck of valid information waiting on an approver. The knowledge administrator or manager really needs to own the approval process, send out reports, and emails to reviewers and managers to keep the backlog of approvals down. At Sprouts, we have 2 workflows internal articles do not require approval at all as the publications are limited to 400+ people, articles are reviewed passively after publication purposefully. If you think about it, the Service Desk creates an article on how to reset a modem, the article can be verified in real time on a support call. External store facing articles require approval before they go out to 30k plus employees, and our HR knowledge articles always require approval. The standards are higher for internal articles. There is this perception among people that knowledge needs to be perfect, as they say in KCS training good is good enough. I would engage the individual Knowledge Base Owners / Department heads to provide feedback on group ownership and self publication. Do they want the members to be able to self publish? If not, who will be responsible for working the backlog of approval tickets? Our HR department opted for a custom workflow requiring approval on all articles, then struggled to keep up with the review process, and I've ended up managing the articles for 5+ years now to help reduce bottlenecks especially when they get busy. Food for thought from Sprouts Farmers Market. 

[shannont]

Agree with Eoghan.  We also follow the KCS Methodology and allow our KCS Publishers and KCS Coaches to publish their own content.  This avoids bottlenecks and also allows for quick access to just in time knowledge.  Feedback is always there to identify any improvements.  Remember, knowledge is never perfect and should always evolve!