Getting Started with Knowledge Management

[MadhuriGudiseva]

Author: mike.malcangio

Are your tier two and three teams complaining that they keep providing the same information to the Service Desk? Did an analyst on your team recently leave and now no one knows how she was able to make that error message go away? Chances are if you are experiencing these kinds of challenges, you would benefit from embracing a more knowledge-centered approach to incident management. Knowledge Management is all about getting the right information, to the right people, and the right time. It may sound simple, but achieving it takes planning, hard work, and dedication. In this first entry, we are going to explore some the foundations one should lay before getting started with Knowledge Management in ServiceNow. In future installments will look at ways to configure and customize your instance and take advantage of the rich platform capabilities to turbo-charge Knowledge Management.

• First, let us explore the objectives of the knowledge management process.   Knowledge Management seeks to:
• Improve the quality of decision-making by ensuring that reliable and secure knowledge, information, and data are available throughout the service life cycle.
• Enable better quality of service, increased satisfaction, and cheaper service by minimizing knowledge rediscovery.
• Ensure that the knowledge is secure and shared with the appropriate audiences
• Gather, analyze, store, share, use, and maintain knowledge, information, and data throughout the organization.

Given these objectives, where do we start?

The first step in this journey is really tool agnostic. Our most successful customers have someone with clear ownership over the process. They help guide whether the administration of the Knowledge Base and decide whether it is going to be more decentralized or centralized. They determine who is writing the content and who owns it.

Once ownership and some of the more basic questions about how your company would like to tackle the Knowledge Management process, it is time to figure out what the scope of the Knowledge Management system will be. Is it just the Service Desk, is it all of IT, is IT and HR, etc.? Remember, this can change with time but you will want to know upfront who the audience for you Knowledge will be and who's going to be contributing. Is it internal only? Is it destined for self-service? Once these are answers are known you establish some boundaries for who needs to be involved and when. Are there any policies or standards that in your company or that apply to your company that may affect how long you need to retain data within your system or who will be able to see what?

All of this introspection and forethought before actually kicking off the initiative will help you formulate your strategy for how your company is going to implement Knowledge Management. In our next installment will step through the different facets one should incorporate into their Knowledge Management strategy.