Resolved tickets mean fewer tickets
The effect comes from two directions. Technicians find the answer faster, and some users solve the issue themselves in the self-service portal without any ticket being created at all.
It sounds obvious, and yet most organizations have a knowledge base nobody uses. The reason is almost always the same: it sits too far from the work.
The article has to be written from the ticket
This is the single most important condition.
If a technician who has just resolved a ticket must open another tool, find the right place in a tree structure and fill in a template to document the solution – it won't get done. Not for lack of willingness, but because the next ticket is already waiting.
Require that the system can create an article directly from the ticket, with the resolution text already filled in. That is the difference between a knowledge base that grows on its own and one that needs a project every quarter.
Three kinds of content
Solutions. How a recurring fault is fixed, step by step.
Known errors. Problems where the cause is known but the fix is delayed, with a workaround. These come from problem management and are often the most-used articles you have.
User procedures. How to do something yourself – linked to the service catalog where relevant.
Internal or public
Not every article should be visible externally. Procedures involving permissions, infrastructure or workarounds belong internally.
Publish what users can follow themselves without risk, and write those articles in a different language from the internal ones. A user who encounters the phrase configuration item goes back to emailing someone.
What isn't maintained stops being used
An incorrect article is worse than no article. It gets read, followed, doesn't work – and after that the technician doesn't trust anything in the knowledge base.
So measure usage. Articles not opened in a year probably describe systems you no longer have. Review them, update what still applies and delete the rest.
Give every article an owner as well. Without one, it is nobody's responsibility that it is accurate.
The metric
The first-line resolution rate. It is the best measure of whether the knowledge base is doing its job – if it rises it works, if it falls it isn't keeping up with volume.
Also track which searches in the portal returned no results. That is a ready-made list of the articles you should write.
The link to documentation
The knowledge base answers how to do something. IT documentation describes how the environment looks and fits together.
They overlap and should be linked, but they shouldn't be forced into the same structure. A password reset procedure and a description of a client's network topology have different readers and different lifespans.
How the process fits with the rest of your delivery is covered under ITSM, and how it is used day to day under service desk.
