In case you missed it, check out Britt's blog post about the changes to our Known Error (KE) articles on HI. Britt Champeau was central to the changes you are seeing - her mix of experience with the platform and intuitive understanding of the business needs allowed us to create something I'm happy to show off!
We took a multi-pronged approach to improving this experience for our customers and for our internal content experts, and thought this group would like to learn a bit more about the reasoning and technical details.
Dynamic Content
Our Known Error articles are the front-facing view of our PRBs - some of the information is automatically published, some of it manually. Prior to these changes, the developer/expert/author had to remember to push any updated information (e.g., the builds in which the issue was seen) to the KE article. This created a bottleneck, and left much of our content incomplete.
We now pass that dynamic information from the PRB right to the KE article. Any changes made to the PRB update the article's Modify Date (which is important for Subscribers - more on that later), and the build information is revealed in the Seen In and Fixed In sections.
Improved Workflow
Another bottleneck we addressed was having every single article reviewed by the technical experts. This makes sense the fraction of the time the article is written by a team outsider, but most of the time the articles are being written by the experts themselves. Since we have Assignment Groups tied to our Problem Categories, we can tell if the author is one of the assigned experts for that area - if they are (i.e., they belong to the approving assignment group) we skip that step in the workflow.
We still require every article to go through an editorial review by servicenowkevin team to ensure it meets our content standards.
Subscriptions
In order to keep you current on the progress being made on a Known Error, we created a watch-list driven subscription feature. If you subscribe to the article, we will send you updates whenever the article (or associated PRB) is updated with new information. This means you don't need to open an Incident to get these updates anymore!
By the way, we hope to introduce subscriptions to our other KB articles later this year.
Community Integration
You'll now see a section in the articles called Associated Community Threads. As our moderators identify conversations in the community that relate to Known Errors, they will be linking them together. This will allow Community members to see and easily access these linked articles, and allow our KB users to see if there are any active conversations about the Known Error. We know that the community can be a great source for solutions and wanted to make access to those as easy as possible. This is brand new functionality, so it will take us a while to populate these relationships.
On the backend, we created a related list in the PRB that stores the community thread information, and exposes that through the published KE article. One advantage of having it in the PRB is that our developers can also see the activity without having to look at the KE article every time.
This overall program has included the community features Vidhya Srinivasan announced earlier this month, and we still have a few more coming, so keep an eye open for those!
How are you handling the challenges we targeted with these changes?
Do you apply a social aspect to your Known Error or Knowledge Management program?
