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]

servicenowkevin - Thanks for the links to the gamification links. mike.malcangio - I'm interested in hearing what's on the roadmap in terms of KB gamification enhancements. Thanks!

[jennifer_dell-e]

Hi Bryan,

We face the same challenges with keeping our 1700+ articles up-to-date. We also have the policy that articles need to be reviewed/validated by the SME at least once a year. Currently, SMEs can only be L3 employees, so turnover is generally low. Currently we send an email to the SME giving them 30 days to complete the review. If the SME is not able to review within 30 days, then we push the expiration date out one month to give them extra time.

As our content as grown, we are looking for new ways to manage the KB. We are making several changes - one is to automate the renewal workflow to provide SMEs with auto email notications, and at the same time bunching articles together so that SMEs aren't bombarded with renewals. If the SME doesn't review content within the 30 days, then we'll auto-send a reminder email and possibly cc: the group manager.

So far we plan to try to review every article on a yearly basis. But as Kevin mentioned, as the KB volume increases it may be more practical to target content. I like the idea of targeting content that has not been viewed in XXX months as a way to identify potentially stale content.

Hope our experience is helpful to you. It interesting to me to read how others manage their content.

Jennifer

[kirandeep_kaur]

My 2 cents……You can solve it to some extent by monitoring your articles more closely and making a KM strategy for the issue. Here is something I have tried in the past and has always worked to keep the KB fresh:

Articles have the last updated date. Some percentage of the articles always get feedback from internal/external customers and those continuously get (should be)   updated easily by the authors as the feedback provides the information on what updates need to go in those.

For the rest of the articles, pull a report where the last updated date is >six months or one year.

Look at the usage of these articles and divide these further in two categories;

#1: articles being found and used by customers but never receive any feedback

#2 article never came up in any search and never used by any customer.

As the articles in #1 category are being used, hence are of higher priority, review the articles and make any applicable changes.

For the #2, check why these articles are not searchable or used,; do these need better tagging, better keywords in the content or require content updates and then make applicable changes and monitor their usage.

To handle these updates, you can have one or two (2-3 hour) knowledge base bashes in a year or in a quarter where the entire team focuses on reviewing and updating the un-updated articles.

[SimonDunsmoor]

Great to hear feedback from others on this topic!!!!   Its one that is brought up from time at my office and obviously one that Knowledge Management struggles with; keeping thecontent fresh!  

We are not currently using SNow, but will be implementing this year.   In our current Knowledge Base (of 3k+ documents), we have implemented the following solution:

We run a report in December which pulls all of the Incident and Requests by Configuration Item.   We then aggregate the data and pull the top 10 CIs across support and verify they are the "most important" to the support managers.   Next we pull all Knowledge Documents associated with those CIs and, grouped by CI, break them in "bite sized" chunks for quarterly review (about 150 - 200 per quarter).   I then review this list with all the Knowledge Base Authors (read below about our KBAs) so they can provide feedback regarding roadmaps for the affected CIs.   For example, if the first draft has our CRM software set for review in Q2, but in Q3 we know it will have a major release, we move it to Q3 and replace it with another CI for Q2.   Once this list is set, the KBAs all know what KDs will need to be reviewed during the year, and we give them 3 months to review each set.  

Along with this process, we report yearly on the bottom 20% of the unused KDs and provide those to the KBAs for review and really justification that they remain in the KB.

Any time there is a major release we also count on the Project Manager and affected KBA to advise KM so we can have all related KDs reviewed prior to release date.

Of course, throughout the year, all consumers of knowledge are requested to comment on the fly so we can keep the entire KB organic and fresh.

Our KM department includes a knowledge analyst and process owner/evangelist for Knowledge use.   We then embed KBAs who have authoring rights to the KB.   These KBAs are actual associates with normal job functions in their department, however, we have identified them as people invested and supportive of the Knowledge Process   so "require" them to perform a few hours a week/month keeping the KB clean and up to date.   These KBAs most often reside in the support areas as this our largest consumer of Knowledge at this time, though we are branching further into IT as the year progresses.   The KBAs then leverage the SMEs in their area, as well as the next level support areas with which they do business, to update KDs for reviews, based on comments, etc.   We have found this process to be very effective for KM and it allows us the ability to fully service the Help Desk, train new KBAs, evangelize the use of the KB and manage the overall Knowledge Process throughout Incident and Problem Management.

[gyedwab]

Don't overlook the importance of reporting to help prioritize your efforts. For example, here's a Pareto chart from Explore Analytics run against my live Knowledge data to let me know which topics provide 80% of knowledge use:

https://my.exploreanalytics.com/pub/view/bb7ba9d9a65e49e8b3f1b08a762c7458

Or a timeline view to see how that has evolved over time -- interactive, so I can use the animation controls to filter it by Department, or examine a particulare timeline:

https://my.exploreanalytics.com/pub/view/eb9abe64aa3649e5a778dded719508d8