Answers to questions from the Knowledge Management webinar

[servicenowkevin]

A few weeks ago mike.malcangio and I did a webinar on Knowledge Management and there were a ton of questions asked during the session. We couldn't get around to answering all of the questions during the call, so I thought I'd take a minute and answer some of the most commonly asked questions here. If you haven't watched the webinar, you can check it out here.

Since we already covered:

• The basics of Knowledge management
• Capabilities in KM on HI
• Upcoming features in the product

This doesn't cover everything that was asked. I'll try to do a follow-up later this week or next with more answers.

Are you presenting at Knowledge 15?

Yes. Mike and I will both be part of the KM SIG event happening on April 21st. Mike will lead the conversation as the moderator and I'll be joining the customer panel for the Q&A portion. I'll post more details about that event soon. I encourage all of you to join us for that session so you can network with other people in the ServiceNow Knowledge Management space and learn what other customers are doing with Knowledge Management.

Can your knowledge base filter articles so that employees only see articles that are relevant to them?

Yes. I wrote a blog called Controlling Access to Articles that covers the topic in some detail. Sherry Sullivan provides a comment on that article explaining how she does access control. Both solutions in the article are viable options.

Can a KB article be associated with an incident without actually embedding the KB's content in the incident?

Yes. That's actually how we do it at ServiceNow and I know some of our customers do this as well. Fredrik Palmqvist provided a solution in the comments section of this discussion. It's a little buried, but it's in there.

Do approvals for KM workflow approvals appear in the sysapproval_approver table?

Yes.

In which version is all of this available?

Everything I was providing data for and discussing in terms of our workflows and approach is available in Dublin and Eureka. Some of the stuff mike.malcangio discussed will be available in Fuji.

Can you force incident linking or knowledge creation for every incident?

Yes, though I believe it requires customization.

Do you have a step-by-step on linking an article to an incident?

I think Deflecting and Resolving Incidents might help you out with this.

More information about public knowledge base articles and Google:

Erich Zirnhelt is working on a separate blog that will cover these questions as it would get a bit too detailed for this. For information on our public KB articles see Public access to Knowledge Base articles on HI

Was I using standard reporting or Performance Analytics?

I was using standard reporting almost exclusively in the presentation. There were a couple of spots where I exported data to Excel to create the specific chart I was looking for.

Where was the TTR (Time to Resolve) data stored?

It's a field that is populated in the incident on our instance so the data is pulled from the incident table.

How are articles routed to article approvers?

For our workflow, we use the Topic. Each topic has an associated list of approvers that we update regularly. When an article is created, the article appears in the approval queue for people associated with that topic. You can base this on any field you have in your KB article though, category, as an example, may work better for some organizations.

How do you determine if your articles are helping to resolve cases other than looking at Time to Relief?

We look at incident volume, views, and ratings. If our views are up, the customer rating of the content is good, and the incident volume is flat or trending down, that's a good sign. We correlate this information to when we started working on content for that topic area. As an example, we targeted SAML issues in September and over two months created a fair amount of content. As of January, we had seen a three month downward trend in SAML related issues, cutting SAML incident volume by 25%.

How do you create templates?

We actually include some HTML in the templates we create so that when some chooses a KB template, like the Solution template we created, they have fields within the body of the article to complete, like Symptoms, Cause, Resolution, Additional Information, etc.

Acronyms, can you explain some of them?

Sorry about the acronym use. I'll try to keep it under control next time. I just get so excited!

• TTR (Time to Relief) - The point in time that a solution is provided to the customer. Not to be confused with the point in time when the the incident is resolved.
• INT (Incident) - That's just our internal way of writing incident.
• HI KB - HI is the portal through which customers interact with ServiceNow to file incidents, manage accounts, etc. KB is short for knowledge base.
• KE (Known Error) - A known error is an article that is associated to a problem (bug or product issues).
• PRB (Problem) - A bug or product issue. Problem is one of the features in the platform, much like Incident and Change.

Is there way to require review of content after a period of time?

Yes. There's a Valid To field that allows you to specify when an article must be reviewed. You can configure the default duration and change on an ad hoc basis thereafter. You can either run reports or configure the platform to notify you/the SME when a valid to date is approaching.

What is your process for keeping content up to date?

We have a few different ways of approaching this.

1. For every new product release or process change, we review the top articles related to the product/process and update as necessary.
2. We have a Comments section on the bottom of every KB article. We review the comments every morning and update the content as necessary.
3. We use valid-to dates for content that will require regular reviews.

How can I make sure my search results are good?

Understanding search weighting is going to be important for you to get solid search results. You can review the search weighting blog postI posted a few months ago for more information about that. It has some very useful links. Also, there's a feature coming in Fuji that allows you to specify which articles you want to appear at the top for specific searches. As an example, if I have a great email troubleshooting article, I could have it appear when somebody searches for "email filtering", etc.

Does Knowledge Management get used outside of the IT world?

Absolutely. At ServiceNow, we use it for Human Resources, Finance and many other departments. It doesn't matter what type of knowledge you're capturing, the knowledge base will give you what you need. If I want to know about vacation days, new expense policies, etc. I go to the ServiceNow knowledge base and search. The information is restricted based on role and audience. That is, customers can't the see the content because of the audience, and some of the content can't be seen by people that aren't managers, etc.