What is the best definition of IT Service Management?
IT Service Management (ITSM) ensures efficient and effective delivery of IT services aligned with business needs and maintaining customer satisfaction. Knowledge Management is a key component that captures, stores, and shares knowledge across the IT organization to strengthen and optimize ITSM.
Implementing a Knowledge Management system represents support for all the activities that make up the IT Services management strategy, which we talked about in the last article. KM ensures that the right information is always available to do the job and, more importantly, to facilitate the decision-making process.
If you are reading this article, you are probably interested in Knowledge Management solutions that can boost the IT department: contact a Pigro expert for free, or read on to learn more.
From which elements a Knowledge Management System is composed?
The ITSM Knowledge Management is structured around a set of data, information, knowledge, decisions, and the relationships between them.
The enormous amount of unstructured data that an organization produces is often underestimated, but it is said that it reaches about 80% of the total. To make these data usable and useful, it is necessary to transform them into information.
Information answers all questions about the structure that surrounds and contextualizes the data. Knowledge is an even more complex level, defined as a set of experiences, values, and insights that provide an environment and context for evaluating and incorporating new information. In organizations, it often turns into standard procedures, norms, processes, etc.
Finally, based on the elements mentioned so far, you can leverage them to make informed decisions.
Objectives of the KMS about the IT Service sector
The objectives of Knowledge Management applied to Service can be summarized as:
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Improving the quality and efficiency of services provided by a service provider;
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Aligning the knowledge of all staff on the information needed for effective service delivery;
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To leverage the value of staff, rooted in experience and best practices, as well as that derived from knowledge of their service-using audiences.
Features of a Service Knowledge Management System ITIL
According to the ITIL framework (Information Technology Infrastructure Library), which collects all the guidelines in IT service management, a Service Knowledge Management system must have several characteristics:
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It must be implemented as a knowledge management platform: that is, a platform where you can find the information and knowledge needed to solve problems. It can be composed of several systems, but all must be equally accessible and connected;
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It helps to break down the barriers of access to knowledge between the various company departments: the SKMS is not integration to each archive or database in its own right, rather it helps to avoid disintegration and information silos, offering a single point of access for the whole company;
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It contains both data and information, but not all of it is easily transferable: it contains structured, semi-structured, and unstructured data, some of which can only be read by machines, others by humans, such as documents, web pages, procedure contents, product sheets, etc. However, it also encompasses tacit experiences and knowledge that reside in staff, customers, and relationships with the external environment.
Some examples of the benefits of an SKMS
Thanks to a Service Knowledge Management System, it is possible to improve activities strictly related to the IT department, and other divisions such as Customer Service and Help Desk, or Sales and Marketing, up to top management.
For example:
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For IT it is possible to manage more quickly the resolution of incidents or problems related to inefficiencies, thanks to an information base always available and questionable;
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Thanks to the use of artificial intelligence and machine learning, it is possible to implement so-called "predictive" solutions, which self-learn from interactions with customers and facilitate the Helpdesk in responding to requests;
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In the Sales and Marketing field, it is possible to improve performance, anticipate market needs and trends, as well as define resource priorities, thanks to analytics and data that are always accessible and shareable between departments;
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Finally, management levels will always have a complete picture of the management and use of company assets, thanks to KM tools that provide a single point of access to any knowledge repository.
How to implement a Service Knowledge Management system
To implement a system to manage all knowledge (not just Service Knowledge, the one related to the IT department), you must first identify and track all existing information sources.
Second, you need to organize and store knowledge systematically, keeping it constantly updated.
It is also necessary to assign roles to the users of the knowledge base to have an overview of the activities being performed.
In this way, you can periodically analyze employee searches and understand which areas of the documentation are most lacking, so you can fill in the knowledge gaps.
Knowledge Management tools and software that use Artificial Intelligence, like Pigro can help you with these tasks. You can keep the knowledge base up to date, minimizing effort.
With the new Knowledge Insights feature, Pigro allows you to analyse the quality of support content, such as guidelines, how-to articles, procedures, etc.
Pigro measures the efficiency of the knowledge base, providing specific KPIs and insights to optimise it, while also keeping track of how users use it. This will make it easier to identify critical points and any knowledge gaps that need to be filled.
Read also: ITSM - what is it and which benefits for the companies
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