What do you find to be the most challenging part of knowledge management?

[ItzJulia]

Whether you are using Service-Now or not, we all have things that come up with knowledge management that makes the job tough.   What is the most challenging task you face?

For us, it is maintaining the content to ensure it is still accurate.   The renewal process for us is still some what manual and getting the SMEs to find the time to review documents is a challenge.   Especially since they are often involved in day to day support or project work with deadlines.  

[jeffsmith182]

Hi Julia,

This sounds like a very familiar set of circumstances...

The only way I've KM to work is with a robust process behind it and backing from the management.

KM seems to be left behind after Incident, Problem and Change, and yet Knowledge will always make the other three big processes work so much more efficiently.

If you can convince the management to get behind you, and promote things such as 'Shift left' (e.g.moving the simpler workarounds from Level3-->Level2--Level1(ServiceDesk)-->Level0(end users), then you might get the Knowledge Base to run itself.  

To help with the burden placed on the Knowledge Article (KA) owners, perhaps you can also prioritize your Knowledge Articles depending on their importance.  

e.g. If your KA relates to a Service which is a Priority 1 issue, then perhaps give the article a 'high importance' field.

Likewise if it is not important, find a method to flag it for renewal, but not to push for it.

We've also found housekeeping to be essential.   We have about 10,000 articles at present, but a good 4,000 of these are Retired.   This was done by checking the Knowledge Article usage stats and suggesting to the KA Owners that they should be Retired if not used for over 12 months.

It's still not perfect.   We have one team in particular who insist that they are too busy to do any reviews.   Then when they do decide to do it, they require retraining each time!   We're thinking about an approach to this which involves one of us booking an hour a month to go through their reviews with them, but we'd rather not take this approach if possible.

[danielbilling]

I agree with you Jeff that having a robust process with active management support is key to get things running but i still see so many struggle as it only stays as process on paper. The outcome is that you create isolated initiatives based on peoples wish to do "something" and you end up with examples like a Service desk knowledge database.

What I tell people is to always reflect on their material and experience in relation to the DIKW model (data, information ,knowledge, wisdom). Your "knowledge" has no value if doesn't support someone else. Building a mindset that your material put into context can be beneficial for your colleagues and even become facts for making business decision will create a environment for collaboration as well as trust.

When it comes to building knowledge for customers (aka endusers) i haven't seen many succeed. I believe the reason behind is lack of patience. These knowledge sources has a tendency to spread wide in term of topics and areas, so people give it 2 or 3 try and then give up.
This is not the case with specifically assigned repositories (like the SN wiki) as it is build for a specific audience.

Maintaining content seems to be the way forward (and not about keeping it up to date) ,but removing any article that people don't find value using  

[servicenowkevin]

For maintaining the content, I use a little of the process that Jeff Smith mentioned in his post. Prioritizing what needs to be reviewed based on links/reuse/views. That content will be referenced more often so it makes sense to update it first.

If you're updating content based on process, not technical changes, it can be a little more difficult, and that's when you need a strong/clear document lifecycle in place. It's been my experience that when people know the KB is the source of the truth and there's a strong lifecycle for an article in place, that the content gets updated appropriately.

In terms of getting time from the SMEs, if you're able to show that the content has value (in that it's saving your org money), then getting time from SMEs is easy, or it has been for me. How do you prove that? Maybe I'll do a blog post on that since I'm sure we all have different takes on that.

[jeffsmith182]

Proving that KM saves money is a big issue for a lot of KM teams.

In my experience, it is often the sole driver behind having a Knowledge Base.

A blog post would be much appreciated

The only things we try to do here, but haven't really matured include:

• Measuring Incident and Problem counts over time vs KB usage.
• Known Error usage (we've embedded Known Errors into out Knowledge Base)
• Positive feedback from end users and level 1 support.   This gives us an indication that a call to the Service Desk or to Level 2&3 support was avoided.

Note that these are really timer savers and not direct cost savers though.
Any other ideas would be greatly received as the people with the money tend to count actual savings as real savings and are not nearly as impressed by cost avoidance measures.