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

[Leri Andrews]

HR Knowledge Manager here.  At your disposal you've got the possibility of several knowledge bases with different workflows. You can use ownership groups or route everything to the knowledge base manager.

As for the need for control in HR mentioned by Jahnert, if your article tells people to press a button that doesn't exist - they'll get annoyed.  If it tells them they get 6 weeks of sick-leave at full pay and it turns out they don't, then the consequences are rather more damaging.   Sometimes 'good enough' isn't good enough!

If you've got nicely defined ownership groups matching your software applications then they're all happy to get notified on feedback and improve articles.  If you've got a small HR Team supporting a market where there is a payroll expert, a recruitment expert and someone in charge of policy then what's the point in forcing the hiring partner to approve the payroll article?

Who will get the feedback if the article is not right? If you're confident your people are going to respond to the feedback and improve the article then maybe just get the information out there.  Will you be implementing a KCS model where your knowledge coaches will be wielding carrots and sticks to weed out the dross?

Maybe let them do it and make a judgement in 12 months  🙂

[David Kay]

A small but important point: KCS coaches don't have carrots (except for the nice verbally supportive kind) and they're certainly never armed with sticks!  KCS coaches are peers and have zero authority over the people they're coaching.  For example, granting (or, heaven forbid, revoking) a KCS license is the manager's call, not the coach's.

[andreababch]

I always like to have second eyes on information if for clients or HR, and I thought an Ownership group would have 3 or 4 people, so it should not be a bottleneck to have author prevented from approval, but maybe wrong. If you are looking to instantly publish, then it seems like you would let author approve to avoid any type of delay. In our case, if we implement Ownership Groups, we may still have Managers as final approver to make sure formatting, categorization, meta data are correct, but leave them off for our Tech KB.

[Dipesh Kalantri]

Hi @Jason Sturgeon 

We are also using ownership groups to manage article lifecycle including approvals.

Currently we are not allowing author to approve own article even if author is part of Ownership Group.

This is to ensure articles are reviewed properly .

However at times( very rare) we get issues where Ownership group members are not available and it is important to publish article , in such cases we as KM admins do the approval based on email confirmation from respective team and we also ask them to get it reviewed later .

Regards,

Dipesh