The Case for Knowledge Management

“An investment in knowledge pays the best return”

–Benjamin Franklin

 

As a leader in IT one of the experiences I had the most difficulty with was the lack of centralized Knowledge Management to support both our teams and customers, both internal and external to the organization.  We stored information all throughout departments in silos.  There was not one specific place to store and access information.

I started the conversation, in my organization, by gathering what documentation I could find and uploaded these to SharePoint.  The IT teams in all areas could locate and utilize the information stored on a central SharePoint site.

The type of information included were technical in nature such as how to fix hardware or system issues.  These tasks would normally have been handled by level 1 or 2 support.  In this case the articles would be available only to those team members who are in system support positions.   But many times, the instructions on how to fix something were like the old MapQuest directions that you used to print out – The first 5 or so turns you already knew since they started with leaving your driveway. Those steps in our instructions could be done before the person even before contacting the service desk.  Examples might include rebooting computer or clearing cache and cookies.  The service desk could also walk people through those instructions if they had them.  Instead the service desk attempted to gather or create their own information which duplicated our information.  Clearly this was due to a lack of centralized knowledge.  Many other departments (HR, Finance, Engineering etc.) also had their own information that was decentralized.  These also would be included in the Knowledge Management Database.

One day I suggested to leadership, “let’s put all this together and make it accessible!”  The answer was “who will curate them?”. That was a great point.  The information needs to be created, verified, updated and retired.  The information must have a life cycle to be a useful system.

I have spent time reviewing Information Technology Service Management (ITSM).  I found many processes that support continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) which we were striving for as an organization.  We had installed Cherwell as our Service Management system and we were successful in implementing it for our daily ticket/service requests.   When I reviewed the tool and how we were using it, I noticed there was a few key items we had not implemented.  One was Knowledge Management, which is a standard feature available in Cherwell.  I already knew we had so many documents in multiple departments and we were not sharing them. Here was the perfect tool to store the information.  The documents even already existed!  They would need to be adapted to a format, tested, crowd-sourced for updates and after being assigned to someone to own the document, it would be delivered to the portal.

Except the portal option did not exist.  But it could.

I found several examples on YouTube showing us what our customer portal could look like.  Imagine, the first point of entry is a portal that asks you what you need help with.  You type (or maybe even speak) keywords into a line that searches and brings up the documents that are coded with the keywords.  You can search through the documents presented.  If they help you (or not) you can grade them, (thumbs up or down, click like or dislike). If they don’t answer the question or correct the issue, the system can link them over to entering a service ticket for help or further information.  You can also have outages on that screen so that people can note “Oh yeah… Peoplesoft HCM is going through an upgrade right now and is not working” and then people won’t enter a ticket or call the service desk (as much) during outages.  You’re giving them the information to help themselves and it makes your (IT Support) day better too.

It does take a lot more time to manage this system, but I would say that the amount of time saved by your customers, and your service personnel would be worth the additional cost. You also benefit immeasurably by demonstrating your commitment to your customer.

Some points to consider when starting and adopting a Knowledge Management approach:

• Well defined Team and roles; who’s responsible for content; who’s reviewing and updating, etc…
• Training: There are certifications and training for these key roles.  These should be considered as mandatory for successful implementation.
• Identification of the information:  You need to identify the knowledge you want contained in the system and where it is located or who has it. If the “go to “person for key processes gets “hit by a bus” as the saying goes then you have lost your SME for that information.  There is a cost associated with this lost and it could be deep.
• Organization Culture Shift:  In order to start the conversation, the organizational culture must be one of learning, transparency and trust.  Information and knowledge should be shared via mentoring, lunch and learns, SME training sessions and more.  Leadership must communicate this shift change from the top down.
• KM System rollout: This should be handled like any other key system.  You must identify the people and tools, information and plan the execution.  The system must be adopted from the customer viewpoint being both flexible, adaptable and intuitive.  The system must consider security, accuracy, friendly UX, and training. The rollout of the system should be done in a phased implementation to check lessons learned and best practices as you proceed.  Everything should be audited and at end each document will have a life cycle including retirement.

You will have challenges driving adoption of any new system.  But if you have a well-planned rollout with ambassadors to train and moderate, your success will be evident in the value brought to your customers and organization.