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.  

[palmen]

We're struggling to get people to actually use knowledge.

There are a lot of people who doesn't even search the Knowledge-base, and when people actually search they often "forget" to attach the article to the incident.

It's always hard to teach someone to work in a different way compared to what they are used to, we try to focus a lot of the new employees so they start searching knowledge from the beginning so it becomes a routine.

[ItzJulia]

We did two things right off the bat to increase our users rates.   First, we targeted the new hire orientation that our company holds.   We made sure that we were there to teach the incoming employees how to search the KB to find answers as well as submit their own tickets.   this all saves time for the employees and costs for the company.   The thinking was that we would teach the the right way before they developed bad habits.   Secondly, it became mandatory for the help desk agents to search the KB for every ticket.   They were measured on it.   If they got a certain number of misses during their probation period, they were not hired.   If they were already full time and got a certain number of misses, it showed up in their reviews and unsatisfactory.   These two things helped to drive up our user hits.  

[palmen]

That will probably help a lot to get people to start searching for knowledge even if I think it's hard for us to go the exact same way.I should probably have a word with our KM and our boss to see what we can do with this. We could definitely try it out on new employees in the future to make it a requirement for them to always search and also meassure it.

[ItzJulia]

Good luck.   remember sometimes change is hard for people.   Approaching it this way will get people using it from day one for new employees and will remind existing employees that management is serious about knowledge centered support.   Some existing employees may resist even still but knowing they are being measured on it will help them get over it.   also you may want to approach the most resist employees and ask them to share their knowledge to create new documents.   This way they have some pride of ownership in the solutions.  

[jdahms]

Julia Lloyd I am curious to how you made it mandatory for the help desk agents to search the KB for every ticket.   How did you track whether or not they were searching?   We were thinking about making sure they either click the "Was this Helpful?" button when using an article, or using the submission workflow if a helpful article was not found.  

Any feedback would be appreciated.