About Knowledge Management

The main purpose of Knowledge Management is to ensure the right information is available to the right people at the right time. It enables IT support providers to be more efficient and improve quality of service, increase customer satisfaction and reduce the cost of service support and delivery.

Objectives

Errors detected during Service Transition will be recorded and analyzed and the knowledge about their existence, consequences and workarounds will be made available to Service Operations staff.

Knowledge Management is tightly linked to Problem Management and can include but not limited to known errors, workarounds, FAQs.

Why is Knowledge Management Important?

The goal of Knowledge Management is to enable organizations to improve the quality of management decision making by ensuring that reliable and secure information and data is available throughout the service lifecycle.

Increase end-user satisfaction and perception.

More efficient usage of resources (provides relevant information to either aid in complex scenarios where knowledge may not be learned).

Improved service delivery consistency when applied to process activities (e.g. standard changes are executed the same way every time, collecting the same predefined criteria).

Improved reporting (e.g. drive the repetitive coding of incidents for a specific scenario.

Roles

Process Procedures

Step	Description
Identify Knowledge	The need for knowledge to be documented is identified through a variety of sources.
Author / Update Knowledge	Once the need for new or updated knowledge is identified, a Knowledge Author completes all the appropriate material to enable the knowledge to be available to the right audience. For example, some knowledge, such as FAQs, can be made available to end users and require certain fields of information and written in a certain tone, whereas Knowledge Records that are to be available to Tier 1 Support Resources to resolve incidents using documented workarounds. Where knowledge records are intended to be available for Incident resolution, part of authoring knowledge is establishing the standard Incident coding to enable pre-population of Incidents that are associated to the knowledge record. These are populated in an incident “template” which is associated to the knowledge record.
Review and Update Knowledge	The knowledge author can work with SMEs as required for input and to review the content. A review is required before progressing to the approval stage and ultimately publishing.
Publish Knowledge	The Knowledge Manager is responsible to approve the knowledge and upon approving it, the knowledge can be published to the appropriate audience. The knowledge manager may add additional details as required.
Identify Knowledge for Removal	Knowledge may be in use and at any time there may be a need to remove the knowledge as it may not be relevant any longer. This may because a Problem has been resolved and the workaround is no longer required, etc.
Remove Knowledge	The knowledge manager authorizes the removal of the knowledge and removes it from publication.

Knowledge Management Key Concepts

Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS)	Presents, categorizes and coordinates the approval/ publication workflow of knowledge records in a knowledge base (KB).
Roles	The various stakeholders who may require visibility to specific knowledge records. Each record can be assigned to one or more Roles.
Review and Update Knowledge	The knowledge author can work with SMEs as required for input and to review the content. A review is required before progressing to the approval stage and ultimately publishing.
Knowledge Record	A knowledge entry in the Knowledge Base (SKMS). Contains relevant information. May provide process execution or collection details (e.g. symptoms, workarounds, and so forth). Links to other process records.
Knowledge Model	An associated record that populates specific coding values in the process record that the knowledge record is associated to.

 

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