Successful Self-Service: It's All About That (Knowledge) Base

[MichaelDortch]

Successful self-service — enabling users to help themselves and each other — is a critical element of enterprise service and process excellence. Successful self-service makes an enterprise more agile, resilient, and trustworthy. Successful self-service lowers operational costs and increases user productivity and satisfaction.

Given all of these benefits, then, why is adoption of enterprise self-service for critical business functions still so uneven? Take business intelligence (BI). Logi Analytics, a provider of data discovery and analytics tools for BI, surveyed business and technology professionals about self-service BI in July and August of 2014. The survey (free; registration required) reports that self-service BI reduces IT requests by 37 percent, but that only 22 percent of business users have access to and use self-service BI tools. What are most users using instead? Why, spreadsheets, of course. (Any similarities to enterprise service management are strictly intentional.)

So what's standing between most enterprises and successful self-service? Where budgetary constraints are not prohibitive, in many cases, the biggest obstacles are inadequate tools, inadequately promoted. Clearly, spreadsheets can't possibly connect users with tailored, consolidated, integrated information, ad hoc collaboration or feedback features, or other high-value self-service features. Heck, not even Microsoft SharePoint — or ServiceNow — can do all of those things without help.

A service catalog and a knowledge base are minimum requirements — table stakes, as it were. But they do not by themselves enable successful self-service.

The typical service catalog/knowledge base combination today is like a giant haystack with minimal needle-finding abilities available to users. Even the most engaging user interface typically provides only minimal help to users seeking consolidated information about a specific topic. And many if not most of those user interfaces are not that engaging in the first place.

Even when those interfaces are engaging and flexible, as is certainly the case with ServiceNow, other bedeviling limitations affect deployment, adoption, and success. Service catalog and knowledge base tools often take too long and cost too much to make both accessible and truly useful. Integrated features and straightforward, proven processes for creating, connecting to, and integrating useful information are limited or non-existent. And all too often, what tools are available are far more easily understood and used by IT people than by non-IT people.

Tools for enterprise self-service are evolving and will continue to do so. So your tool evaluation and selection processes and acquisition and replacement options are important. But they alone can't guarantee successful self-service.

How To Enable Successful Self-Service At Your Enterprise

Beyond tools and processes, successful self-service requires outreach. And as you may already know from my past diatribes, screeds, and pontifications, I believe effective outreach has four necessary steps.

Engage. Make sure that every form, process, workflow, and interface element intended to enable and support self-service is engaging to those who should be using them. In case you're wondering, yes, this does mean you must engage those intended users in the design, selection, and integration of those forms, processes, workflows, and interface elements. It's frankly a job too important to be left in the hands of IT alone.

Inform. Don't just throw self-service tools and features over the transom or cubicle wall and expect users to adopt them. Tell users about them. Repeatedly, especially as self-service features evolve and successes arise.

Persuade. As and after you inform your users about their self-service options, encourage users to use them, and managers and executives to promote their use. Market, sell, and evangelize self-service across your enterprise, as a benefit to both users and the organization.

Invite. Make absolutely sure to encourage frequent feedback and input from current and intended users, to maintain and extend their engagement and support. Incorporate features for input and feedback into the tools you implement, and the processes you use to manage and integrate those tools. If you aren't sure about the importance of this, have you heard of Amazon.com, Angie's List, TripAdvisor, or Yelp?

ServiceNow provides a great starting point for almost any enterprise's journey toward successful self-service. But it's just a starting point, and only one of many possibilities. Whichever starting point(s) you and your team choose, you will need commitment, focus, and support to continue that journey.

Your enterprise's self-service journey must be a continuing conversation between those who consume self-service services and those who provide and manage those services. Someone's got to get that conversation going. Why not you? After all, how much "treble" can it be?