You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. This tried-and-true saying applies to many areas of life and work, including knowledge management.
This isn’t a new challenge for businesses. At Atlassian, we’ve witnessed countless implementations of knowledge management technology, and we could tell you a few stories.
Just because you give employees a knowledge management capability doesn’t mean they’ll use it — unless you create a knowledge-powered culture first.
A knowledge-powered culture uses knowledge as a tactic to deliver great IT service across an organization. Rather than knowledge being an after-thought, agents can increase their productivity by reusing already-captured answers. Knowledge management reduces time spent resolving repetitive issues, so resources can be allocated to more important areas.
A knowledge management strategy is key to helping your internal employees self-serve more easily by developing a knowledge base of collective experiences of an organization.
Based on the familiar idea that “knowledge is power” and a shift to more open work cultures, we are now seeing a greater appreciation for team and organizational knowledge, and how this type of sharing can boost a company’s collective success.
Knowledge management in 2019
Some challenges are the same as they always have been when it comes to adopting knowledge management and ensuring your employees have access to the most relevant information in a timely manner. For example, when IT is siloed within a business, it creates a huge barrier to gaining a knowledge-powered culture. When departments don’t share organizational knowledge with each other, it creates duplicate work and relationship barriers.
Getting the knowledge management technology side of things right is relatively easy for IT support – it’s probably already available in your existing service desk or IT service management (ITSM) tool. But to truly reap the benefits of knowledge management, organizations need to deliberately strive for, and craft, a knowledge-powered service culture. Without an open culture – and in particular a culture of sharing – any attempts to benefit from knowledge management will be hindered by people and process, and maybe even the technology chosen.
At Atlassian, we’re passionate about helping teams build an open culture with the tools they use every day. Tools can help build rich connections between departments, and a service desk tool is key to breaking down those barriers. You can watch our Summit talk on this topic here.
To truly benefit from knowledge management, organizations need to craft a knowledge-powered service culture.
We know it’s not always easy to initiate a knowledge-powered service culture, and sometimes it’s easiest to know what to do when it’s contrasted with what not to do. Here are five dos and five don’ts for successful knowledge management in IT support:
Do
- Understand that knowledge management isn’t rocket science – it’s people science, i.e., how to get people to do the right things by providing them with the right information to do so. Start small and add one knowledge article per week to common requests you see over and over again.
- Realize that the value of knowledge management is not in knowledge capture, but rather how the captured knowledge is made available and used. Look at how employees currently access knowledge – is it located across multiple systems? Are users finding the information they need from your existing tools? Information shouldn’t be hoarded, and easy access makes everyone work better. Trust us; we’ve done the research. IT teams have a unique opportunity to provide value to departments in every corner of the business.
- Recognize that, as with self-service, the introduction of knowledge management capabilities is an organizational change management project as much as it is the introduction of new technology and changed processes. Think about how to get the message across repetitively without becoming a squeaky wheel. Is there a company-wide meeting you can present at? Perhaps make some signs around the office to keep reminding team members how they can access help.
- Get HR involved early. There are a lot of processes that HR teams do manually and could greatly benefit from using a service desk. Can you partner with them to create an internal knowledge base of common questions for new employees? When lateral teams band together, organizational change can happen faster.
- Remember to look at knowledge management from the perspective of both service desk agents and end users. Both will benefit from knowledge management, but only if the knowledge is easily accessible through self-service.
Don’t
- Only focus on turning tacit knowledge into lengthy how-to guides. Knowledge management is also about the ability to serve the right details to employees as they’re looking for it, often in bite-sized pieces. Your employees aren’t always looking for a 500-word article; they might just be looking for a quick answer to find out where the printers are located.
- Make knowledge management an awkward add-on to existing IT support practices. Rather, it should be embedded in day-to-day operations. In many ways, it’s no longer a separate project to set up a knowledge solution, but one of the things to execute when delivering IT service. For example, most companies start by setting up a service desk and answering tickets straight away. By coming up with short articles to answer common queries, a lot of time spent answering repetitive questions can be answered by self-service.
- Apply the ITIL guidelines to a T. Yes, you should glance at existing ITIL methodologies, but you can use them as a reference point and apply them in a way that fits your organization. The most recently released ITIL 4 guidelines focus on outcomes, not outputs, and how tools can support people and culture. Read more tips on this here.
- Take a big-bang approach to introducing knowledge management. As with many organizational change projects, it’s best to start small and learn from your mistakes. Learn what works in your organization and what doesn’t. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Think about small and frequent requests you receive on a weekly basis and create small answers, or “snippets,” that allow users to self-serve. For example, how often are you asked how to set up the office printer?
- Forget the past. If you have previously tried to introduce knowledge management capabilities with limited success, don’t ignore your mistakes (or any successes) when trying again. Appreciate that your previous failures might make future knowledge management initiatives harder to sell.
Knowledge management and knowledge-powered service are about people, and engendering the right behaviors. And while enabling technology is important, implementing the right technology isn’t enough if people haven’t bought into the need for knowledge management.
If this article got you thinking about all things ITSM, check out IT Unplugged, our place for all things ITSM, ITIL, and more.