-
Knowledge
Management
The ITIL 4 body of service management best practice guidance offers a clear purpose statement for knowledge management:
“…to maintain and improve the effective, efficient, and convenient use of information and knowledge across the organization.”
Source: AXELOS, Knowledge Management ITIL 4 Practice Guide (2020)
Where knowledge, or a knowledge asset, is defined as"
“…an organization’s specific information resource that is important for that organization’s operations and value co-creation.” Although “It is important to understand that ‘knowledge’ is not simply information. Knowledge is the use of information in a particular context.”
The ITIL v3/2011 definition of knowledge management was more detailed and likely more helpful in terms of understanding:
“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.”
Source: ITIL v3/2011 Glossary of Terms
Knowledge management provides organizations with a formalized way to consistently handle their knowledge assets to ultimately have “better, faster, cheaper” operations and outcomes by making better use of what the organization collectively knows. Teams can achieve this by integrating knowledge considerations into their processes. This could be harvesting knowledge from process outputs, leveraging knowledge as an input or reference, customizing modern technology to present and integrate with sources or training teams to manage knowledge in ways that serve the organizational vision and goals.
In addition to the best practices available in ITIL 4 and other frameworks, ITSM tools have long provided native knowledge management capabilities. First, to offer ITSM practitioners the knowledge that they don’t personally have, especially IT service desk agents. Second, to allow end-users to self-help.
These capabilities have evolved from simple access to knowledge, to knowledge being suggested and presented in an automated fashion, to the use of intelligent automation to understand the context and interact with the knowledge consumer. For the latter, machine learning and natural language understanding (NLU) is employed, with various delivery channels to deliver the knowledge. Including within an ITSM tool ticket, as part of a chatbot conversation, sent via email, and as part of self-service interactions (which might be done on a mobile device).
Knowledge management isn’t simply the capture and codification of knowledge.
Knowledge only has value when used and reused - whether this is making individuals, operations, or outcomes better. In many ways, the term “knowledge exploitation” better articulates what’s needed.
When knowledge management is broken down, there are several discrete activities
There are various ways to support these activities. For example, the best practice of the Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) approach to knowledge management. More on KCS can be found here.
ITIL 4 also offers practical guidance on what’s needed for knowledge management. This guidance is shared in the Knowledge Management ITIL 4 Practice Guide that includes three knowledge management processes:
The change optimization process is concerned with continually improving the change enablement practice, change models, and standard change procedures.
For many, the first of these can be a stumbling block for organizations seeking to introduce or improve their knowledge-sharing capabilities. Read on for tips on getting started with knowledge management
There are many benefits for an organization with an effective knowledge management capability. These include:
The benefits of change enablement/management reflect these needs:
ITIL 4 brought with it some knowledge- management-specific changes. These include the introduction of new knowledge management concepts such as “absorptive capacity” - an organization’s “ability to recognize the value of new information, to embed it into an existing knowledge system, and to apply it to the achievement of business outcomes.”
The practice guidance PDF also goes into deeper detail on how organizations succeed with knowledge management. This detail makes the ITIL 4 knowledge management guidance far more practical than the theoretical guidance within
Like any other service management capability, knowledge management might need to be justified financially or in terms of return on investment (ROI). The benefits outlined above can be used to create your business case, such as quantifying the impact of knowledge availability on IT operations and business outcomes. This quantification includes the reduction in the operational “unit cost” for ticket handling, plus it might be possible to quantify the positive impact that faster resolutions have on business operations and outcomes. This includes using knowledge in major incident scenarios, when the potential business impact is far more significant.
In addition to articulating the financial benefits of knowledge management, there are some key steps successful organizations usually take:
There are also things that successful organizations do when creating their knowledge articles. These include:
One could argue that knowledge management is the backbone of ITSM - because it is involved in many other ITSM processes and one of the most widely adopted. The need is also likely even greater right now because remote working has removed the opportunity to ask the person next to you or across the room something when you need a quick answer or guidance.
Technology has long helped enable corporate knowledge management needs, and is even more critical now as teams, departments, and organizations have moved to digital operations. But how does technology help in specific terms?
The following knowledge management features all help. It's important to note that some of these features must be leveraged together in order to realize the benefits. For example, industry-leading knowledge capture capabilities add little value if people can’t access and use knowledge when they need it.