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?

[jennifer_dell-e]

Hi Kevin, Thanks for the feedback regarding what you experienced with ServiceNow's KB. Interesting to know. We are at 1,700 articles and are finding it a challenge.

[servicenowkevin]

That's a fair bit of content to have to review each year and some of the reviews are likely not providing much in the way of value but are costing a lot in terms of resources and dollars.

[bryanalff]

Since I last posted this question, there has been a lot of discusion about how to handle article updates within my company.   At my site we have almost 10,000 articles we have to deal with, and right now we are leaning towards a gameification model to get them up to date. A statictical reporting system will also be installed to identify which articles need to be archived based on non-use.   There is a lot of value in gamifiying the knowledge articles so they better align with our corporate goals.

[jennifer_dell-e]

Hi Bryan Alff,

I think you are right - a combination of targeted content review & gamification is the way to go. The question is what to target first and what's most effective. servicenowkevin - are you also incorporating some type of gamification into your review process for the ServiceNow KB articles or plan to in the future? It would also be interesting to know if any KB gamification enhancements/plugins are planned for future SN releases? Lawrence Eng gave a great presentation at knowledge14 regarding gamification and specifically its use on this Communities page. I can see how adopting a points system tied to participant levels as this Community Site uses could be useful to increasing quality and engagement to the Knowledge Base - for internal users (who create & update content) and / or external end users (who search, view, leave feedback, create content etc).

[servicenowkevin]

Jennifer Dell-Ernstrom, I can't speak to what's coming for functionality, but mike.malcangio might be able to talk more about that. He's the Product Manager for Knowledge and is driving many of the changes that are coming.

In the mean time, check out the Share site. There are a few results there related to gamification that might help you. I haven't tried these, so I'm not endorsing one over the other, but it might help you.

We aren't using gamification internally for Knowledge. We building knowledge participation into a way of life, and making sure we're doing proper recognition of the people that are doing it well. I've used a form of gamification for KM participation before though, and it really worked well. We just aren't a point internally where it would make sense to implement yet.