In self-service and support environments, a healthy knowledge base isn’t optional. It’s foundational.

Knowledge health refers to how well your content supports speed, trust, and resolution. When the right article is easy to find, accurate, and up to date, it deflects cases and resolves issues faster.

When it’s not?

• Customers escalate
• Agents struggle
• Everyone loses time.

Outdated, redundant, or poorly maintained knowledge is a silent liability. Without structure, even strong content ecosystems decay.

That’s where governance comes in.

Why Governance Matters

In the KCS methodology, governance refers to the standards, roles, and processes that guide how knowledge is created, maintained, and improved. It’s not just a policy checklist. It’s the engine that sustains the knowledge base over time.

KCS defines eight core practices, and governance plays a foundational role across all of them—especially Content Health, the fifth practice, which focuses on keeping knowledge relevant, usable, and trustworthy.

Governance ensures:

• Consistency across teams
• Role clarity and accountability
• A feedback loop that drives continuous improvement

When governance is missing, the effects show up quickly. In my experience leading enterprise KM at Broadcom, we saw that weak governance often added 20% or more to resolution times. It wasn’t the tools. It was the structure around them.

What Good Governance Looks Like

You don’t need an army of editors or a flood of process. You need the right habits, supported by the right roles and data.

Here’s what strong, KCS-aligned governance looks like in practice:

Clear Roles and Shared Responsibility

KCS doesn’t assign articles to individual owners. Instead, it relies on shared ownership supported by role clarity:

• Contributors capture knowledge in the moment of solving—right in the flow of work
• Publishers validate content for broader audiences
• Coaches reinforce standards and mentor contributors
• Knowledge Domain Experts (KDEs) identify trends and guide high-value improvements

At Broadcom, we used this model across 1,500+ publishers and 300+ coaches. It worked because everyone understood their role in capturing and sustaining content—not because each article had a single owner.

Content Health Through Use

KCS encourages a “reuse is review” approach. Instead of auditing everything, you prioritize what’s being used. Updates happen naturally when content is reused, and spot-checks ensure standards are upheld.

We used dashboards powered by SearchUnify and Python reporting to surface high-impact articles, gaps in search behavior, and potential sensitive data risks. It allowed us to focus effort where it mattered.

Integrated Workflow

Governance doesn’t work if it’s separate from daily work. That’s why KCS includes Process Integration as one of its eight core practices.

At Broadcom, we embedded knowledge capture and improvement directly into ITSM workflows using platforms like Wolken. Feedback loops, quick article updates, and real-time validation were part of how teams operated—not something extra.

Preventing Knowledge Base Bloat (Without Sacrificing Completeness)

KCS doesn’t aim to shrink the knowledge base—it aims to make it useful and complete.

While duplicate and irrelevant articles should be addressed, the real issue is often findability, not volume. If articles are well-structured, searchable, and based on real demand, users can locate what they need—even in a large repository.

That’s why KCS recommends:

• Demand-driven content creation—capture knowledge when solving real issues
• Eliminating redundancy—streamline duplicates, merge when needed
• Enhancing structure and metadata—to support search and retrieval
• Enabling feedback—so users can flag friction and improve the experience

Archiving has a role, but it’s not the primary solution. As the Consortium puts it, archiving treats the symptoms, not the cause. It can help clean up clearly outdated or invalid content, but aggressive archiving risks losing rare but valuable knowledge.

At Broadcom, we focused on improving structure and surfacing content through analytics, not simply cutting volume. That’s what led to stronger self-service success and more trusted results—without sacrificing completeness.

What Success Looks Like

I’ve seen this firsthand as part of a small team leading KM and KCS efforts at Broadcom and Symantec, working alongside a global network of publishers, coaches, and domain experts. We were tasked with unifying multiple knowledge systems—each with its own standards, teams, and legacy content. In many cases, weak governance led to longer resolution times and greater effort across teams.

To bring alignment, we relied on governance. With clearly defined roles, structured review cadences, and feedback-driven improvement cycles, we:

• Reduced global support volume by over 25% in 2024
• Cut time to resolve across product lines and divisions
• Enabled a self-service ecosystem with 1.5M+ monthly views and over 90% CSAT

This wasn’t just cleanup. It was a strategic transformation built on sustainable governance.

Governance Is a Practice, Not a Project

KCS makes this clear. Governance supports Content Health not as a one-time fix, but as a continuous effort. It evolves alongside the knowledge base, adapting to new products, changing customer behavior, and growing teams.

Without it, knowledge becomes stale. With it, knowledge becomes a competitive advantage.

Your Turn

If you’re leading a support team, KM function, or transformation initiative, ask yourself:

• Do we have the right roles in place to capture and sustain article quality over time?
• Are contributors empowered to create knowledge in the flow of solving?
• Do we track usage and feedback—and act on it?
• Is governance built into our workflow, or is it bolted on afterward?

Knowledge health isn’t automatic. It’s intentional. Governance is how you sustain it.