As time goes by, I find new (and often better) ways of looking at data related to the Knowledge Base. Over the last couple of months Erich Zirnhelt, Britt Champeau, and I have tweaked some reports to get more meaningful data and more granularity. In my continued efforts to share the reports I'm running, I thought I'd share some of the latest reports (or latest versions of existing reports) we're using to get a better look at the success and areas of improvements in the ServiceNow Knowledge Base.
Knowledge Base Creation
KB creation is always a hot topic among the Support and IT teams. The report I used formally tracks creation based on category, which maps to Support/IT/Operations teams. I use the information provided by the KB creation report to share with the appropriate groups and their managers. By reporting on groups, I can clearly call out teams that are participating and focus my adoption efforts on teams that are not participating. This allows me to make more informed decisions and saves me time by weeding out the teams that need more attention.
There is one caveat here. If a person belongs to multiple groups, the result will appear twice. I've filtered out all of the sub-groups from this report to ensure each result is reported only once.
Knowledge Base Search Queries
Using the ts_query_kb table, you can chart where your searches are coming from (by user type or location), what the search terms are, or if they've had zero results. In the example I provide below, we are tracking what country the search users are from. When we control for user attributes we can learn more about the search style and the topics that they're most interested in. This report allows us to understand our users and their search needs to identify gaps in our content.
Here's a chart of how it looks on a per week basis, counting distinct users and grouping by country. I've removed internal employees from the list because our employees are heavy users of the Knowledge Base. Notice the increase in search after we upgraded to version 3 of the KM? That's because v3 introduced search-as-you-type, where the search results are updated in realtime.
Using these reports we have been able to identify the needs of our users to shape and mold the content creation process. What types of reports are you interested in pulling in your Knowledge Base?
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