Keeping knowledge up to date

[bryanalff]

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?

[britt_champeau]

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

[Cupcake]

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

[servicenowkevin]

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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).

[bryanalff]

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.