Help with Knowledge Base Validations and Auditing

[mikecline83]

Hello, Thanks in advance for any input or suggestions that you might have. First off, I apologize for the randomness of this post. My company is trying to do most of this on our own and they don't seem to want to hire additional staff to help maintain the Knowledge Base while expecting it to perform like they did. In short, our KB is a little bit of a mess at the moment and I'm trying to keep it from spiraling out of control... I'm really looking for some best practices or things that others may have learned along the way.

Background:

Our company used to use a shared knowledge base (outside of ServiceNow), rooted in SharePoint. When we upgraded to Geneva, we opted to migrate all of our IT documentation and articles from that system, into SN en mass. They all came in as unpublished and we have been slowly working our way through them, cleaning them up, applying a style standardization, checking for accuracy then publishing.

Questions:

• How do we move forward with keeping our Knowledge Base clean and accurate?
• Other than users reporting incorrect information, or the need for an update; how do we schedule a review of published articles?
• We have a lot of articles that cover the same CIs but different issues, fixes and other documentation; should we combine these articles or leave them separate?

I'll probably think of more questions later but this is a good start. Again, thanks in advance for any assistance you might be able to provide.

--Mike

[Michael Fry1]

Keeping it clean is always a challenge for us too. In ours, new articles expire in 1 yr, not the default 2020. Author's of the articles are required to update / retire / or both. Author's receive report on expiring articles so they can review.

The knowledge approver's are all the technical leads. So not all articles would be approved by the same person. or KB owner.

Articles on same CI - are the categories the same? If yes, I'd merge them together. Otherwise ok if separate.

We also use multiple Knowledge Bases, driven by different departments, & customers, and the need to have their own categories.

[StephLindorff]

I have a hard rule that we never expend resources on a knowledge article unless we know it's adding value (which tells us the effort will add value).   It's natural to have knowledge that becomes outdated.   From the very beginning I established that everyone in IT has a shared responsibility for knowledge; everyone is expected to Use, Fix, Flag or Add knowledge.  

Fortunately ServiceNow makes the Fix/Flag part of it easy as users can leave a Feedback comment on any Knowledge Article (KA) that needs improvement.   I treat Feedback as the highest priority of all knowledge work because we know those particular articles are being viewed/used.   I also have a filter that only looks for Feedback with a comment (the Feedback has to be directly actionable).  

If you have a small knowledge team I strongly recommend distributing the work or you will quickly develop a bottleneck.   Designate SMEs (Owners) for each KA and give them edit rights to their KAs.   Work with each team to identify someone who can be developed as a Knowledge Champion.   I also have these people review SUBs and decide if the requested knowledge should result in a draft KA (they close the SUBs by either clicking a Create Article button or choosing a close option that will not generate a KA).

I also use the Valid To field but it needs more muscle to be really useful.   If you have the dev resources, have a notification sent to the Owner team 2 weeks before the Valid To date arrives asking them to review the KA.   Revert the KA to Draft when the VT date is exceeded (and monitor for KAs that are stuck in Draft). I also have added an "Extend Valid To" date that they can use to increment the VT date if the contents are still good.   Because you brought all your content over in a bulk migration everything will hit the VT date at the same time - this will not go over well with the Owners (it will be overwhelming).   I use View Count and Use Count to determine which of the expiring KAs warrant effort.

Regarding multiples of the same article - "is the juice worth the squeeze" applies here (it applies to every choice we make as KMs) - only consider merging KAs that are being used and viewed.   I would recommend a single KA for each topic but you don't want it to be a "warehouse" KA that has a ton of stuff.   If it starts getting really long consider ways to break it out.   You may have multiple Issue articles that point to a common Solution article (the issue articles capture all the ways that the issue articulates itself and, because they are focused on what the user is experiencing rather than the root cause, are more easily found based on what the user is saying.  

Finally, I make searching for existing knowledge part of the process for every SUB.   This helps you find and KAs that will add value with some improvement.   As I said at the beginning it is natural to have a bunch of articles that don't add value.   I just ignore them unless they're cluttering up search results (in which case I optimize the findability of the desired article based on the keywords being used for the search).   You could periodically do a mass retire on articles that haven't been used/viewed for x months but that effort will probably be better used in other ways.

Steph

(Queen of the Very Long Post)

[servicenowkevin]

mikecline83 I can answer based on what what I've learned from some of our other customer and what we're doing internally.

1. That's going to depend on your content and organization. If you have sets of content that warrant having separate knowledge bases, then I'd suggest having "knowledge champions" or "knowledge owners" for each knowledge base. They would be the shepherds of the content. Have canned reports built and emailed out to the champions that show what content is waiting for review and approval and have some goals set for them in terms of how much they'll review each week or month while you get through the back log. I understand they aren't dedicated, so you'd need to negotiate this with their managers.
2. Set the valid-to dates for the KB articles and have reports set up to alert you when something is nearing the valid to date. You have have a small group of users assigned to each knowledge base or each category and have them do the reviews, they could be the knowledge champions.
3. As for the CI thing, I think Michael.Fry is right in his response to you. It's going to depend on the content.