This post is about the possibilities and impossibilities of Oracle Knowledge in supporting a single point of contact for all feedback to content.

The Knowledge Management Team – To limit the amount of feedback which needs to be handled by a content owner, a lot of companies have created a Knowledge Management Team. This team is the single point of contact for all questions and feedback concerning the knowledge base. They assess if feedback is valid and filter out duplicates. The knowledge management team, however, is not responsible for the actual content of the article.

When in-depth knowledge is needed to handle feedback, then the item needs to be forwarded to the Content or Knowledge Owner. Knowledge Owners are usually Subject Matter Experts (SME) such as product owners.

The most time-consuming tasks of the Knowledge Management Team is the assessment of all feedback provided by end users.

– Is the feedback valid?
– Has the feedback been submitted before?
– Does the Feedback require a linguistic change?
– Is the feedback regarding the search engine?
– Should the feedback be forwarded to a content owner with in-depth knowledge?

In Oracle Knowledge – This way of working is not out of the box functionality in Oracle Knowledge. Oracle Knowledge assigns recommendations on an article directly to the content owner, surpassing the Knowledge Management department. If a Knowledge Management team would like to act as a filter, they should be registered as a content owner. However, they are not the ‘real’ owner of the document.

A number of workarounds to this issue are  available, all with their own disadvantages.  In the following paragraphs I will describe the workaround which has the least disadvantages (in my opinion).

Workaround – An extra role on each article in the knowledge base is required: KM team owner.  Every document needs to have an employee of the knowledge management team assigned as a content owner instead of the employee who is responsible for the knowledge. This way feedback ends up at the knowledge management department for the first assessment.

The downside is that it is not clear who is responsible for the content of the article. To help the employees of the knowledge management department find the correct person the best  option  would be  to create a data list with all knowledge owners. This data list can then be added to all channel schemas as a data list field which is only visible in Information Manager. Make sure the reference key is constructed as X_REFERENCE_KEY to make sure the field is not shown in InfoCenter.

This way, a knowledge owner as well as a member from the knowledge management team can be assigned to every document.

Keep in mind that bulk updates are not possible with the data lists without using custom export/import scripts or database statements. Also the role of the knowledge owner cannot be included in the workflow automatically and tasks need to be assigned to the content owner every time the workflow gets in a step where the content owner needs to execute a step.

For me this is the best working solution, but if you have good experiences with a different solution please let me know!