Practice 5: Content Health

Capturing Value in the Interaction Process

Knowledge has value - if we capitalize on it! Our goal is to maximize the value of what we learn in the process of interaction. Following are some of the key content best practices that drive the value of what we learn to the whole interaction network.

• Capture all the KCS article information during the interaction. Rather than documenting articles at the end of an interaction, KCS recommends capturing the KCS article information during the discovery process. The situational elements should also be collected so that the KCS article represents the entire experience. This practice of considering all the elements such that they can be captured provides focus on the resolution process and creates operational efficiencies, even when resolving a new request.
• Respect the contributions of all people interacting with the knowledge. Responders are the primary creators of KCS articles through their interactions with requestors in resolving issues. However, KCS articles can be captured or modified whenever and wherever they occur. Requestors and responders are both in positions to capture new KCS articles, and their different perspectives on the environment and context of the situation can enrich the knowledge base. The combination of the KCS licensing model and the KCS article metadata attributes of audience, confidence, and governance provide a means to manage who can see an article and who has the privileges to modify or create vs simply flag and comment on an article.    
• Structure KCS articles for rapid reuse. Consortium members have observed that the redundancy rate for issues is anywhere from 65% to 90% of the total incident volume. Reusing existing KCS articles improves the speed, accuracy, and consistency of the response in the assisted path and enables requestors to find resolutions on their own through self-service. It is always faster to use what is known than to research and create a new resolution.
• Structure information for findability and readability.  A simple, consistent structure is one of the key things that improves findability.  The same structure provides context for the content of the article and improves readability. 
• Collective ownership. This is one of the Core Concepts of KCS.  Article quality is the responsibility of everyone who interacts with the knowledge base. If knowledge workers feel a sense of ownership for the knowledge base and the article quality, it encourages the techniques of "reuse is review" and "flag it or fix it" in the Solve Loop.  These techniques drive continuous improvement of the articles being used.
• Evolve Loop articles.  Evolve Loop articles are created in the Knowledge Domain Analysis process, usually done by Knowledge Domain Experts (KDEs). Patterns and trends that emerge from the reuse of Solve Loop articles, those that are created as issues are being solved, are the basis for high-value Evolve Loop articles. These include articles that are improved by the KDEs because of a high rate of reuse. Based on the analysis of a collection of articles (usually thousands), a small number of KCS articles may be updated, merged, or improved. Analysis of the self-service experience may identify issues for which an article does not exist, in which case the KDE creates one (or facilitates its creation) to satisfy that demand.  And finally, we may identify a need for diagnostic or procedural articles. These are reference articles; they do not contain answers or fixes, but they provide direction on how to perform tasks that are helpful, or in some cases, necessary to analyze a situation. We call this type of high-value content Evolve Loop articles. 

Implemented in everyday actions, these core ideas enable the organization to realize the full value of the knowledge base. The next sections provide specific techniques to the numerous aspects of creating a healthy KCS knowledge base.