question Keeping knowledge up to date in ServiceNow AI Platform forum

Keeping knowledge up to date

bryanalff — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 14:42:36 GMT

Hi Everyone,

My knowledge site has plenty of knowledge articles. To help ensure the knowledge stays fresh, we have implemented a strategy where each document is reviewed by the owner once a year.

On paper this looks great. In practice however, it's sometimes a problem. For starters, the total number of article owners increases as the knowledgebase grows. Plus, in a years' time a lot of things can happen to an article owner. An owner could be promoted to a new job, or they may have retired, or even left the company.

What strategies do you use to help ensure the knowledge in your databases stays up to date?

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

britt_champeau — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 15:56:56 GMT

Hi Bryan,

At my previous company, I set up an Author=ActiveUser check at the beginning of the review workflow. If the author was no longer with the company, I had an automated email go out to both the Knowledge Management team and the manager of the inactive employee's former team. The SLA for edits was 30 days, so we could spend the first few days reassigning the article to a new author.

I've also seen the same Author=ActiveUser check at the beginning of the review workflow kickoff a retirement workflow that would create a SUB task sent to the inactive employee's former manager. Once the new article is created, it would place the older article created by the inactive employee in a Retired state.

Please let me know if this helps or if you'd like more information.

Britt

Knowledge Engineer - ServiceNow

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

servicenowkevin — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 16:10:31 GMT

Bryan Alff at service now we do a few different things to ensure our content is up-to-date:

Each release of a product we review our top used/views content and determine if it needs to be updated. We work with the appropriate SME to do that, not necessarily the author.
Our Development and Support teams (as well as customers) provide regular feedback on content to let us know if something needs updating or archived as they use the knowledge base.
We report on content that isn't getting used to determine if it is still valid and necessary to retain.

As the size of your knowledge base increases, it may become less practical to review every piece of content each year. By encouraging active participation in the form of feedback and by reviewing the top content with each release, we're able to keep things updated. This isn't a perfect method, certainly, but it fits our business currently.

If your content isn't related to product releases, but is more process based, then the basic premise above still applies, but you review the top content based on process changes instead of product changes (assuming you're privy to those changes).

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

bryanalff — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 17:07:21 GMT

Hi servicenowkevin,

Thank you for the quick reply. In our knowledgebase we have both product and process driven knowledge. Two good examples would be MS Office how-to's and 3rd party escalation sheets. Both are important and both will have different usage patterns. The MS Office material is used every day. The 3rd party escalation sheet is only used if something major went down. We could use SME's, but the SME concept has the same problem as an owner. They too at some point will be promoted to a new job and they too will someday retire from the company. Plus, now the administrator has the added burden of figuring out what SME should handle what article. The plus side is that there should be fewer SME's than owners.

Right now I sort of like Britt Champeau idea because it has an SLA that can be tracked and measured. If a parson or group is not looking after their knowledge, at least now it can be shown to what degree. It still has the burden of someone tracking down people to review the knowledge, but at least it's a more measured solution.

For now I'll contemplate both options and see where it takes me.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

britt_champeau — Thu, 17 Jul 2014 17:31:35 GMT

Hi Bryan,

There are many ways to implement the sort of review process you need. I'm glad to hear you're considering multiple options! ServiceNow has a fantastic Knowledge Management team, which owns Knowledge Articles, and maintains the Knowledge Base. They're doing a wonderful job of not only publishing new content, but curating existing content. It's exciting to see a company fully commit to Knowledge Management. This was a pleasant surprise for me when I entered the company because, at my previous company, the Knowledge Management team consisted of only me. Each company's business requirements are different based on their specific situation, and I hope you can design something perfect for you and your organization.

Good luck with your review process, and let us know how everything goes!

Britt

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

jennifer_dell-e — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:08:57 GMT

Hi Bryan,

We face the same challenges with keeping our 1700+ articles up-to-date. We also have the policy that articles need to be reviewed/validated by the SME at least once a year. Currently, SMEs can only be L3 employees, so turnover is generally low. Currently we send an email to the SME giving them 30 days to complete the review. If the SME is not able to review within 30 days, then we push the expiration date out one month to give them extra time.

As our content as grown, we are looking for new ways to manage the KB. We are making several changes - one is to automate the renewal workflow to provide SMEs with auto email notications, and at the same time bunching articles together so that SMEs aren't bombarded with renewals. If the SME doesn't review content within the 30 days, then we'll auto-send a reminder email and possibly cc: the group manager.

So far we plan to try to review every article on a yearly basis. But as Kevin mentioned, as the KB volume increases it may be more practical to target content. I like the idea of targeting content that has not been viewed in XXX months as a way to identify potentially stale content.

Hope our experience is helpful to you. It interesting to me to read how others manage their content.

Jennifer

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

kirandeep_kaur — Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:41:46 GMT

My 2 cents……You can solve it to some extent by monitoring your articles more closely and making a KM strategy for the issue. Here is something I have tried in the past and has always worked to keep the KB fresh:

Articles have the last updated date. Some percentage of the articles always get feedback from internal/external customers and those continuously get (should be) updated easily by the authors as the feedback provides the information on what updates need to go in those.

For the rest of the articles, pull a report where the last updated date is >six months or one year.

Look at the usage of these articles and divide these further in two categories;

#1: articles being found and used by customers but never receive any feedback

#2 article never came up in any search and never used by any customer.

As the articles in #1 category are being used, hence are of higher priority, review the articles and make any applicable changes.

For the #2, check why these articles are not searchable or used,; do these need better tagging, better keywords in the content or require content updates and then make applicable changes and monitor their usage.

To handle these updates, you can have one or two (2-3 hour) knowledge base bashes in a year or in a quarter where the entire team focuses on reviewing and updating the un-updated articles.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

jennifer_dell-e — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:06:33 GMT

Hi Britt Champeau and Kevin,

servicenowkevin@ mentions in his reply to Bryan that as the size of the KB increases it may become less practical to view every piece of content every year. Can you give the community some guidelines based on how other ServiceNow customers use the Knowledge Base, such as what's the tipping point in terms of # of articles to stop trying to do annual reviews, and then target other methods?

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

servicenowkevin — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:35:19 GMT

Jennifer Dell-Ernstrom there's no concrete rule for this as it will always depend on the resourcing you have available and the industry you're in. That said, when we were in the 500-700 article range at ServiceNow, it was no longer reasonable to get SME reviews on every piece of content. We had to target content based on release, use, and other dimensions that we deemed appropriate and rely on feedback from customers, partners, and employees for the rest. It's worked out well for us.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

jennifer_dell-e — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:37:55 GMT

Hi Kevin, Thanks for the feedback regarding what you experienced with ServiceNow's KB. Interesting to know. We are at 1,700 articles and are finding it a challenge.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

servicenowkevin — Tue, 29 Jul 2014 21:43:56 GMT

That's a fair bit of content to have to review each year and some of the reviews are likely not providing much in the way of value but are costing a lot in terms of resources and dollars.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

bryanalff — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 16:47:29 GMT

Since I last posted this question, there has been a lot of discusion about how to handle article updates within my company. At my site we have almost 10,000 articles we have to deal with, and right now we are leaning towards a gameification model to get them up to date. A statictical reporting system will also be installed to identify which articles need to be archived based on non-use. There is a lot of value in gamifiying the knowledge articles so they better align with our corporate goals.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

jennifer_dell-e — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 19:57:45 GMT

Hi Bryan Alff,

I think you are right - a combination of targeted content review & gamification is the way to go. The question is what to target first and what's most effective. servicenowkevin - are you also incorporating some type of gamification into your review process for the ServiceNow KB articles or plan to in the future? It would also be interesting to know if any KB gamification enhancements/plugins are planned for future SN releases? Lawrence Eng gave a great presentation at knowledge14 regarding gamification and specifically its use on this Communities page. I can see how adopting a points system tied to participant levels as this Community Site uses could be useful to increasing quality and engagement to the Knowledge Base - for internal users (who create & update content) and / or external end users (who search, view, leave feedback, create content etc).

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

servicenowkevin — Wed, 30 Jul 2014 20:23:19 GMT

Jennifer Dell-Ernstrom, I can't speak to what's coming for functionality, but mike.malcangio might be able to talk more about that. He's the Product Manager for Knowledge and is driving many of the changes that are coming.

In the mean time, check out the Share site. There are a few results there related to gamification that might help you. I haven't tried these, so I'm not endorsing one over the other, but it might help you.

We aren't using gamification internally for Knowledge. We building knowledge participation into a way of life, and making sure we're doing proper recognition of the people that are doing it well. I've used a form of gamification for KM participation before though, and it really worked well. We just aren't a point internally where it would make sense to implement yet.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

SimonDunsmoor — Thu, 31 Jul 2014 17:57:50 GMT

Great to hear feedback from others on this topic!!!! Its one that is brought up from time at my office and obviously one that Knowledge Management struggles with; keeping thecontent fresh!

We are not currently using SNow, but will be implementing this year. In our current Knowledge Base (of 3k+ documents), we have implemented the following solution:

We run a report in December which pulls all of the Incident and Requests by Configuration Item. We then aggregate the data and pull the top 10 CIs across support and verify they are the "most important" to the support managers. Next we pull all Knowledge Documents associated with those CIs and, grouped by CI, break them in "bite sized" chunks for quarterly review (about 150 - 200 per quarter). I then review this list with all the Knowledge Base Authors (read below about our KBAs) so they can provide feedback regarding roadmaps for the affected CIs. For example, if the first draft has our CRM software set for review in Q2, but in Q3 we know it will have a major release, we move it to Q3 and replace it with another CI for Q2. Once this list is set, the KBAs all know what KDs will need to be reviewed during the year, and we give them 3 months to review each set.

Along with this process, we report yearly on the bottom 20% of the unused KDs and provide those to the KBAs for review and really justification that they remain in the KB.

Any time there is a major release we also count on the Project Manager and affected KBA to advise KM so we can have all related KDs reviewed prior to release date.

Of course, throughout the year, all consumers of knowledge are requested to comment on the fly so we can keep the entire KB organic and fresh.

Our KM department includes a knowledge analyst and process owner/evangelist for Knowledge use. We then embed KBAs who have authoring rights to the KB. These KBAs are actual associates with normal job functions in their department, however, we have identified them as people invested and supportive of the Knowledge Process so "require" them to perform a few hours a week/month keeping the KB clean and up to date. These KBAs most often reside in the support areas as this our largest consumer of Knowledge at this time, though we are branching further into IT as the year progresses. The KBAs then leverage the SMEs in their area, as well as the next level support areas with which they do business, to update KDs for reviews, based on comments, etc. We have found this process to be very effective for KM and it allows us the ability to fully service the Help Desk, train new KBAs, evangelize the use of the KB and manage the overall Knowledge Process throughout Incident and Problem Management.

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

jennifer_dell-e — Mon, 04 Aug 2014 15:29:05 GMT

servicenowkevin - Thanks for the links to the gamification links. mike.malcangio - I'm interested in hearing what's on the roadmap in terms of KB gamification enhancements. Thanks!

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

StephLindorff — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 13:35:31 GMT

We've gotten around the problem of people who have left the company with a customization that uses assignment groups rather than individual people as Owner. When it's time for a review, the article goes into the groups Work list. We also have a customization that requires the manager of the person who updated the article to sign-off before the update is published.

FYI, we also follow servicenowkevin's process of making review of existing knowledge part of every Change project (both application and process).

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

gyedwab — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:31:49 GMT

Don't overlook the importance of reporting to help prioritize your efforts. For example, here's a Pareto chart from Explore Analytics run against my live Knowledge data to let me know which topics provide 80% of knowledge use:

https://my.exploreanalytics.com/pub/view/bb7ba9d9a65e49e8b3f1b08a762c7458

Or a timeline view to see how that has evolved over time -- interactive, so I can use the animation controls to filter it by Department, or examine a particulare timeline:

https://my.exploreanalytics.com/pub/view/eb9abe64aa3649e5a778dded719508d8

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

SimonDunsmoor — Wed, 29 Oct 2014 14:38:28 GMT

unknown

Stephanie Lindorff - Is that a difficult customization?? It is one that will be required for us during implementation as that is the exact way we manage our reviews and responsibilities through SMEs and KB Authors (KBAs).

Re: Keeping knowledge up to date

Cupcake — Fri, 10 Jun 2016 14:24:43 GMT

Brittanie I like your solution,

But our need is like Bryan's. Our customers want to have the Valid To date change to 1 year from the date the KB article was updated.

Any recommendations.

Karen