Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

Transcription

1 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

2 Managing Knowledge Knowledge management has been talked about and researched and widely employed for over 25 years. It s not just an IT department and service desk activity, but an important business capability and can be a competitive advantage. However, as with the more recent growth in selfservice adoption, knowledge management can be problematic unless organizations understand that it is more about people and their behaviors, rather than the technology. Of course, the technology plays an important part. Organizations would struggle to manage their knowledge effectively without fit-forpurpose technology, but it takes invested people to get knowledge management right. If you re just starting with knowledge management, or looking to get existing knowledge management efforts back on track, then this ebook is for you. 2 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

3 Defining Knowledge Management Knowledge management can mean different things to different people. And for some, it can be too easy to focus on its individual parts, rather than the desired outcomes of employing it. So it s good to have a shared understanding of what knowledge management is from the outset, and even to go beyond its traditional definitions. Knowledge management has been described as: The process of capturing, storing, distributing, using (and reusing), and managing the knowledge within an organization. 1 This definition is great until you start to think about the desired outcomes. In that it uses the parts already mentioned above to describe more of the means than the end of knowledge management. Instead, knowledge management needs to be viewed as more than just the systematic management of knowledge. Ultimately, it needs to help improve IT and business outcomes. Otherwise, as history has shown, people and their organizations can become overly proficient at one or more of the parts say, knowledge capture and storage at the expense of truly benefitting from the use of what s being managed. 1 Source: 3 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

4 Knowledge Management as Defined by ITIL Knowledge management has long been a part of ITIL the popular IT service management (ITSM) best practice framework and is one of the 26 processes that ITIL 2011 offers best practices on. If you ve studied for an ITIL qualification, then you know ITIL describes knowledge management as: The process responsible for sharing perspectives, ideas, experience and information, and for ensuring that these are available in the right place and at the right time. The knowledge management process enables informed decisions, and improves efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge. 2 This takes us forward by starting to address the ongoing use of the captured knowledge and benefits it will bring to IT and the organization as a whole. However, such definitions need to go further. People should be encouraged to think of knowledge management as more than a process. Instead, they should view it as an embedded capability that involves people and technology in addition to the process elements. Then moving beyond the management of the captured knowledge, with a focus on the end that the process-based means delivers. Ultimately, it s best to focus your organization on exploiting knowledge, not just managing it. The knowledge management process enables informed decisions, and improves efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge. 2 Source: 4 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

5 Key Knowledge Management Terms Knowledge management can be viewed as capturing what we have in our heads tacit knowledge and making it available to others as explicit knowledge. It can also be beneficial for those responsible for the knowledge management initiative to understand the differences between data, information, and knowledge. The captured knowledge is stored in the form of knowledge articles in something called a knowledge base, which will differ based on the knowledge management solution your organization uses. Data ITIL describes data as a discrete series of facts about events. It s usually raw in format, not organized in any way, and provides no insight in terms of patterns, structure, or context Information ITIL states that data becomes information when it is contextualized, categorized, calculated, and/or condensed Knowledge Information becomes knowledge when it s organized, structured, and/or processed 5 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

6 Knowledge Management Can t Be an Afterthought In order to be successful, knowledge management needs to be an embedded part of official ways of working, not something else to do as an aside or an afterthought. 6 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

7 Knowledge Management Use is Multidirectional and Still Evolving It s important to understand that for the IT service desk, knowledge can face inwards and outwards, and will enable the future of IT support (again both inwards and outwards). Inwards Where knowledge is used by service desk agents to help customers. This is a common starting point for an IT department s knowledge journey Outwards Where knowledge is used by end users and customers to help themselves via self-help Future Use Where knowledge is used as an information source for new technologies that help both end users and IT support staff 7 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

8 The Evolution of Knowledge Management In short, the IT service desk opportunities for knowledge management have evolved and will continue to evolve. The evolution has been as follows: 1 At the start of the Millennium, knowledge management was seen as a way of improving the effectiveness and efficiency of employees, no matter their role in the organization. For instance, in quickly providing service desk agents with more than they personally know to better enable them in solving end-user issues or service requests. In this use case scenario, the availability of suitable knowledge is a triple-win, allowing agents to deliver better customer outcomes, more quickly, and with the potential to reduce costs. This might be phase one of your IT department s knowledge management initiative. 8 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

9 The Evolution of Knowledge Management 2 More recently, knowledge management has been at the heart of an even bigger opportunity for IT service desks: self-help. IT self-service capabilities not only allow end users to help themselves, and usually more quickly than contacting the service desk, but also deflect simple issues away from busy service desk staff. Knowledge management also offers a greater level of self-service stickiness. This might be phase two of your IT department s knowledge management initiative. 9 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

10 The Evolution of Knowledge Management 3 Now, as artificial intelligence 3 and in particular machine learning 4 becomes another tool at the service desk s disposal, there is a potentially even bigger opportunity to leverage knowledge. Why? Because popular machine-learning technologies, and use cases such as chatbots 5, require vast amounts of information and knowledge for them to be able to function effectively. These technologies are only as good as their information sources allow them to be. 3 The simulation of intelligent behavior in computers. 4 Algorithms that can learn from and make predictions on data. 5 A computer program that simulates conversation, or chat, with humans (or potentially other chatbots). 10 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

11 Why Knowledge Management is Important Knowledge management capabilities offer a wide range of benefits that resonate differently between organizations. The benefits for IT service desks include, but are not limited to: Increased staff efficiency and productivity IT service desk staff can get to the right solution more swiftly, and can thus handle more tickets, which can deliver cost savings too. Ticket deflection Simpler issues and user requests for information can be dealt with via self-help, thus removing the need for IT staff involvement (and costs). Plus, it allows service desk staff to spend less time on simple, repeat issues and more time on more complex and greater value-add business needs. A better customer experience Whether due to better informed and more efficient IT support staff, or the customer s ability to swiftly help themselves via self-service, customers have a better experience. And now, as artificial intelligence starts to make inroads into IT support, capabilities such as auto-responders and chatbots offer a more interactive version of selfservice, increased support availability, and the benefits that accrue as above. 11 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

12 Why Knowledge Management is Important Niche knowledge can be made more widely available The service desk might have business or technology specialists who can share what they know, but the benefit of knowledge management can also span teams. For instance, the most commonly needed Level 2 and Level 3 knowledge can be made available to Level 1 staff to help them to deliver a better support experience. Increased staff and knowledge retention Staff are better able to do their work, which drives up morale and retention. In the cases where staff aren t retained, for instance in retirement scenarios, knowledge management also helps to ensure that while the staff may leave, their important knowledge does not. Easier IT support staff recruitment New staff members don t need to be as knowledgeable or as experienced thanks to thirdparty knowledge availability. Plus, the knowledge also makes it easier to onboard new staff. 12 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

13 Personal Incentives Be warned, as with self-service adoption, trying to focus purely on the financial benefits of knowledge management is likely to deliver a suboptimal and potentially failed outcome. Why? Because knowledge management needs organizational (people-based) change to succeed, and for people to change they need personal, as well as business-level, incentives. 13 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

14 The Common Knowledge Management Adoption Issues (and What You Need To Do) An important thing to bear in mind when starting with knowledge management, or trying to improve upon existing efforts, is that getting knowledge management right isn t easy. While social media use in our personal lives has helped us to become accustomed to sharing more, there are still many barriers to break through in making knowledge management work effectively within your IT support ecosystem. Four key knowledge management adoption issues are outlined here, and more detail on these and other issues can be found in the supplementary ebook Exploiting Knowledge to Deliver Better IT Services. The most common adoption issues are: 1 The humanness of people is ignored. Most people fear change. It can be difficult for them to change from what they are doing and to how they think and behave. So knowledge management requires a solid investment in organizational change management (OCM) to prepare people for, and to help guide them through, what is ultimately a new way of working. 2 There s too much focus on the means at the expense of the end. It s no different than other ITSM disciplines such as problem management or configuration management where information is collected, organized, and stored but too little of it is then put to good use. So, ensure that your knowledge management efforts are focused on the distribution, use, and reuse of knowledge. Remember to focus on knowledge exploitation. 14 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

15 The Common Knowledge Management Adoption Issues (and What You Need To Do) 3 Knowledge management is 4 viewed as an add-on activity. The employed technology hinders as much as it helps. Embed knowledge management capabilities into business-as-usual processes so that it s part of what needs to be done. Also, amend reward and recognition models to reflect knowledge management importance. A failure to do this will most likely result in knowledge management being something that s done after the real work and given the workload of modern IT service desks, it will probably rarely get done. While knowledge management is very much a people thing, it still needs fit-for-purpose technology to be workable and successful. This technology needs to support all the elements required for knowledge exploitation so people can quickly capture or access the right knowledge as needed. The right technology ultimately makes knowledge management easier for everyone. The right technology ultimately makes knowledge management easier for everyone. 15 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

16 Next Steps IT teams and employees are always looking to improve productivity by using the fastest ways to find information and solve problems. ServiceNow Knowledge Management is a key enabler in helping organizations solve problems faster and at a lower cost. With Knowledge Management as an integral part of the ServiceNow ITSM suite, organizations empower their employees through self service to deflect the incident volume and reduce the number of Service Desk escalations. To learn more about ServiceNow Knowledge Management, please visit: knowledge-management.html 16 Knowledge Management: Making Everyone an IT Support Guru

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