The knowledge base in ServiceNow is a treasure trove of information—how to set up and use various systems and services, fixes for common issues, articles about service changes, and more. It serves as the campus services user manual for the campus community and for IT support staff.

During the original implementation of ServiceNow, service documentation from the previous website was imported into the new system as knowledge articles (KAs). The Self-Service & Training (SS&T) team started reviewing the content in October 2021 and spent the next 15 months curating the information in the 426 published KAs, editing duplicate information, and adding new content as needed. The knowledge base now stands at 632 published articles, though over 400 have been unpublished over time.

One of the benefits of ServiceNow is that articles can be available to anyone visiting the website or restricted to IT personnel or campus constituents logged in with NetID. This allows the SS&T team to ensure sensitive information that could impact security isn’t available to the public. They regularly perform audits of KAs to check whether the information can be shared more widely, to ease access to the campus community.

Content has constantly evolved and improved. Service owners are contacted regularly to review their articles to ensure the content is helpful and correct. This provides the campus community with reliable self-service which results in fewer calls to the 24/7 Support Center during peak times than in previous years.

Content is also validated through knowledge-centered service (KCS). With KCS, support personnel pay close attention to the full context of the customer’s context and capture the issue, environment, resolution, and cause. They find the relevant KA and add it to the ticket. If the KA needs to be edited, they flag it or provide edits for approval; this keeps articles current and correct.

If a new issue comes up with information sufficient to solve it, SS&T team can create an article that is accessible to IT personnel. When repeated issues with a service arise, the SS&T team engages knowledge domain experts to find a fix or solution. If the article has long-term value, it is published to a broader audience.

The SS&T team is working to train all 24/7 Support Center personnel as KCS Candidates (will attach a KA link to each support ticket and flag articles for improvement if they’re not sufficient to solve an issue). They have also trained a few staff to the next level of Contributor (can make edits to an article and submit them for publishing).

Having up-to-date information and the ability to flag articles has improved the speed of service for 24/7 Support Center staff. There has been a 33% reduction in the use of the Teams channel where staff ask each other for solutions with more answers now available in the knowledge base.

The next step for the knowledge base is adding content from the College of Nursing and the College of Science. This will include removing duplicate information about university-wide services while keeping the content about college-specific services. The SS&T team will also certify someone in each college as a Contributor.