Point ServiceNow Process Mining to Knowledge Base and spot inefficiencies
Knowledge Management forms a crucial part of ServiceNow platform with advantages:
- Drives ‘first time resolution’ by leveraging triage steps on similar tickets in the past
- Encourages self-service through knowledge articles
- Improves knowledge quality with AQI (article quality index) completed by experts
- Enhances Agentic AI and ‘searches’ with superior quality knowledge base
Point ServiceNow Process Mining to your knowledge base to reap the following benefits:
- Spot rework where articles go back and forth between draft, published and retired
- Identify topics of knowledge that show longer ticket resolution times and focus on improving them
- Test hypothesis: tickets are re-routed when there is no knowledge article or a poor quality one on the topic, and vice versa
- Garner support from ownership groups by showing impact of poor-quality knowledge on the KPIs (key performance indicators)
- Continually improve knowledge base with before-and-after analysis
To unlock this value, follow the steps below:
* Sample data used for mining is not strong enough to show compelling results but good enough to understand the capabilities.
1. Build ‘Process Configuration’ for Knowledge table
Access ‘Process Configuration’ and create a new record for ‘kb_knowledge’ table. Specify the fields (as shown below) or the ones relevant for you.
The system will suggest ‘improvement opportunities’ based on fields you selected in the previous step. Add them all to the library to be used on multiple mining projects later.
2. Create a Project for mining the Knowledge table
From the process mining workspace, create a new project and point it to ‘knowledge base’ table for mining as shown below.
Under ‘activities’ you can pick ‘workflow_state’ field or any other relevant for you. Adding ‘Latest aqi state’ as an activity will display stages of knowledge articles passing through the expert review.
Breakdowns recommended are displayed below.
At step 3, add ‘automated improvement opportunities’ from the library. The library was set up in the previous step when Process Configuration was created.
3. Review Results
After mining the project, you will see ‘improvement opportunities’ on ‘summary & insights’ page as displayed below. These show you where your knowledge management process needs improvement. In this example, there is ‘rework’ and the knowledge articles were sent back upstream after publishing. You could open the process map for it from ‘view in workbench’.
From analyst workbench, you can view the full process map for knowledge table with the flow of records at each state and the average duration.
Breakdown filters help go deeper into which topics, ownership groups, article types and others, to expose potential areas of improvement.
Other Use Cases
1. Mine Task Table along with Knowledge
As shown below, one ticket (e.g. incident) can have multiple knowledge articles attached to it.
Point your mining to ‘Knowledge Applied to Tasks (m2m_kb_task)’ table along with any source task table such as ‘incident’. You can add any task table e.g. incident, case or others that knowledge articles are attached to, as a ‘child’ table for mining.
2. Mine Incidents marked as 'knowledge'
In the example below, an incident is marked as 'knowledge'.
The results below will help understand which assignment groups have been marking incidents as 'knowledge' (highlighted ‘true’).
It also shows knowledge table along side incident displaying the average duration taken to publish knowledge articles after they were originated from incidents.
The breakdown filters can be applied to both tables i.e. ‘incident’ and ‘m2m_kb_task’ to further analyze possible process bad behaviours. Breakdowns of task, topics of knowledge, ownership groups (shown below) will be immensely useful in improving the Knowledge Management processes and consequently reducing the ticket resolution times.
Tips:
- Make sure audit log is turned for the tables targeted for mining
- Consult your system administrator for custom fields or re-labelled ones that you must use for mining
- AQI functionality is available only after advanced knowledge management is activated
- Whilst Knowledge is being improved, use ‘compare’ functionality for before-and-after analysis to improve continually.
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