If you are concerned about expert knowledge being held in the heads of only a few good people in your organisation, and are considering asking subject-matter experts to share their expert knowledge via, for example, an Open Ticket Request System (OTRS), typically operated by Service Desks, you will find the solution below describing the implementation of a simple, quality-assured and easy-to-use knowledge-management OTRS process with a built-in automatic-review function very informative and interesting.
We recently implemented this often overlooked process at one of our clients, a large German Telecommunications company. Knowledge Management is dealt with only briefly and, in our opinion, vaguely in the ITIL Service Management Lifecycle. However, Knowledge Management is one of the key processes that impact all five stages of ITIL Service Management and without it, chances of improving strategy, design, transition and operations are limited. We should also not forget that building knowledge is a key point in the Continual Service Improvement process. Essentially, no increase in knowledge means no improvement in services, for without knowledge, we are blind.
The goal of this particular stage of the service-management implementation was to address the five stages of knowledge management, ensuring that there were no cracks in the process, whereby knowledge could be overlooked, lost, corrupted, underutilized or allowed to go stale. If a knowledge artefact is to be useful, it has to be captured, stored, checked for accuracy and understood before being used and then reviewed periodically.
The challenge
We have often found that knowledge is either not recognized or the mechanisms for adding it to any form of Service Knowledge Management System are so complex that most knowledge experts prefer to retain tacit knowledge, rather than transform it to explicit knowledge (see Nonaka & Takeuchi The Knowledge-Creating Company). So our first challenge was to provide ease of storage. Various organizations have tried to circumvent this issue by having some sort of competition to encourage storage, but as research (How to incentivise knowledge sharing?) has shown, this is not productive. The key here is to allow the Knowledge Providers to generate the knowledge artefacts simply and transfer the information with no fuss to a resource that will store it for them. Any organization should want its Knowledge Providers to share and utilize knowledge without the hindrance of an administrative burden. Providing a simple method of sending the information to the function that stores it, is equally important.
This leads to the second challenge, storing the information. If, as we stated above, the Knowledge Providers should concentrate on their area of expertise, then who should store the knowledge artefacts?
Thirdly, once it has been stored, we have to ensure it does lose anything in translation. To resolve this issue, each knowledge artefact, after it has been stored, needs to be forwarded to a Knowledge Expert for review/edit/approval. As it is stored in a Service Knowledge Management System that may be unfamiliar to the Knowledge Expert, it is vital that we find a mechanism that allows the Knowledge Manager, (who oversees the whole process) to forward the knowledge artefact to the Knowledge Expert for reviewing/editing/approval as simply as possible, without adding to the administrative burden.
Knowledge Provider-> Knowledge Saver->Knowledge Expert->Knowledge User
Then the next step is to ensure that, once the knowledge artefact has been correctly stored and approved, it will also be understood and used. Many knowledge-management projects focus on capturing and reporting the numbers of knowledge artefacts stored. While ensuring we continually store knowledge artefacts is a critical success factor, it is an equally important critical success factor to ensure the knowledge artefacts are used, and they can only be used if they are understood.
The final challenge is the one most often overlooked. Knowledge artefacts are only valid for a finite time as we live in a world of constant change. Many knowledge management processes we have encountered in the past offer no concrete method of reviewing whether the stored knowledge artefacts are still valid.
The solution
To resolve the capturing issue, we decided to set up a simple process with the Knowledge Providers sending all knowledge artefacts to the Service Desk, thus using them as a Single Point of Contact for Knowledge Management capturing. Utilizing the mail-capturing functionality of OTRS, we imported the emails sent to the Service Desk mailbox and categorized them as knowledge artefact tickets for processing, thus allowing us to measure how many new knowledge artefacts were being sent to the Service Desk by the Knowledge Providers.
The Service Desk, which in ITIL is the function that uses this knowledge the most, is ideally placed to store knowledge artefacts. The Service Desk is the function best placed to categories artefacts and add the appropriate taxonomy so that they can be found and used easily. The Service Desk are also skilled in taking complex information and transforming it to useful knowledge in plain language during the Service Request & Incident Management processes. The OTRS system enables the people working for the Service Desk to create knowledge artefacts (termed FAQs in OTRS) with a deep level of categorization and multiple keywords. Furthermore, as each knowledge artefact is stored, it generates a ticket to a special approval queue, which enables the Knowledge Manager to keep track of the knowledge artefacts that need approval. Each of these tickets can be forwarded to the appropriate Knowledge Expert, requesting that they review/edit/approve the knowledge artefact. If the experts do not have access to the Service Knowledge Management System, it is not an issue, as the Knowledge Manager can, with just two clicks, add the text from the stored knowledge artefact to the ticket.
To ensure that the users of the knowledge artefacts were able to understand them, we instituted a weekly review session of new knowledge artefacts with a feedback loop to the Knowledge Experts in case extra clarification of the knowledge artefacts was wanted. Minutes were taken at each meeting and action taken as appropriate.
Then we needed to make sure we could measure the usage. This is simplified in OTRS, as each time a knowledge artefact is used, it can be linked to the Service Request, Incident or Problem with minimal effort.
Finally, in order to ensure our knowledge artefacts were not out of date, we instituted a periodic review. We used the approval flag in OTRS to set each knowledge artefact as unapproved, thus triggering the approval lifecycle and, depending on the feedback from the Knowledge Experts, we marked the knowledge artefact as no longer relevant, updated it or refreshed its validity date.
Thus we could identify a series of critical success factors and associated key performance indicators to measure the process and ensure it was functioning.
Critical Success Factor – Are our knowledge experts sharing their tacit knowledge?
Key Performance Indicator – How many new knowledge artefacts do we receive per reporting period as a percentage of the total number of knowledge artefacts?
Critical Success Factor – Is our Service Desk storing the knowledge artefacts efficiently?
Key Performance Indicator – How many new knowledge artefacts are stored per reporting period as a percentage of the total number of knowledge artefacts?
Critical Success Factor – Is our Service Desk using the knowledge artefacts?
Key Performance Indicator – How many knowledge artefacts are linked to Service Requests or Incidents as a percentage of the total number of knowledge artefacts?
Critical Success Factor – Are our knowledge artefacts still relevant?
Key Performance Indicator – When was the last time a complete review was performed?
Conclusion
Knowledge Management is tricky subject, but by using the basic process and creating the appropriate effortless procedures made possible by the high quality cost effective tools, it can be achieved with surprising ease.
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