Reporting on Who is viewing your Knowledge Base content

[servicenowkevin]

A while back, I discussed an interesting topic around getting granular reports for usage in Knowledge Management. This week, a customer had a requirement to know who is viewing content and how that can shape their content needs. I hadn't considered that people may not know exactly how to report on this, let alone the different options they had to report on it.

The benefit of reporting on who is looking at your Knowledge Base content is that it allows you to not only tailor your content based on audience, but gives you insight on the expert level of those who do. Perhaps you have a help-desk person that performs very well in the workplace and you would like to see if their performance is because of their knowledge consumption. Maybe there's a few people that are struggling and you'd like to see if it due to them not reading the required training articles, or best practice documentation. Internal staff viewing your content isn't going to give you a full story, but it can show some correlation.

This is my report set-up, excluding filters. Usually, I'll filter on team and created (as in, when the view occurred).

How to set up your KM report to show you who is reading your Knowledge Base articles:

1. In your instance, click Reporting > New.
2. Set these values:
   1. Table = kb_use.
   2. Type = List.
   3. Group By = User
3. Add a Created date filter to restrict time period as necessary.
4. If you have external viewers as well, filter our those viewers.
5. Click Run.

From there, you can add in additional columns and filters as you see fit. You can also export the data and manipulate it in Excel. As an example, one of the things I'll include in the report is Article ID so that I can compare the articles being viewed by people on the same team. Are the successful people viewing different content? If they are, why? Do they conduct searches better? Is content hard to find? Was it not communicated well enough? These are just a few of the questions you can ask yourself once you dig into who is reading what content in your company's Knowledge Base.