Tips for a successful knowledge management

A comprehensive knowledge base eliminates the need to rediscover or reformulate knowledge.Knowledge that doesn’t serve is knowledge wasted. And for knowledge gained from experience and research to be useful, IT enterprises need to organise, manage, and utilise it in the best ways possible. Fortunately, the best way isn’t a herculean task when you employ simple tricks to build a profound knowledge base (KB).

Gathering information

The most important part of knowledge management is knowledge building. The first step is to identify prospective sources to derive and extract knowledge. Resolutions on common issues can be used as templates if they are added to the KB as knowledge items.

Converting tacit knowledge to explicit knowledge is essential for a successful knowledge management system. However, that conversion requires collaborative efforts with careful investigation and input from experienced technicians. Also, to achieve a comprehensive KB, encourage your IT technicians to move resolutions directly to the KB.

Identify & retrieve

Organising and categorizing existing data can be challenging, especially when handling large KBs with wide scopes. However, it is important to group knowledge items and place them under relevant topics so that information is not lost in a pool of data.
There are different ways in which you can organise knowledge, depending on what suits your organisation best.

Grouping can be based on document types, such as guidelines or bug fixes, or on the subject matter, such as hardware issues or software updates. Creating logical hierarchies is a method that will ease user navigation. The hierarchy should begin with broad topics and move on to categories and subcategories.

Implementing processes

Creating a well-structured and relevant information base is crucial. The quality of the content should be peer-reviewed by subject matter experts for accuracy and relevance. Ultimately, information cannot be published as knowledge without a proper knowledge approval process. All generated content must go through peer review and should be continuously improved.

Along those lines, you can configure an automated approval workflow, which prevents a solution from being published without peer approval. Create a unique knowledge manager role with permissions to approve solutions. Configuring an automatic trigger for notifications to approvers on submission of a solution will make the approval process easier.

Pick your audience

Not all bits of information in the KB is relevant to all users. By choosing the right audience for a knowledge item, you can eliminate clutter in the end users’ self-service portal. For technicians, create specific roles and groups based on the field of expertise and share only relevant topics. For example, finance documents are always confidential and therefore should be accessible only to related users.

Effectively prompt

No matter how elaborate a KB is, it cannot be effective if it is out of reach. Making the KB easily accessible to end-users in the self-service portal will help them arrive at solutions without assistance from a technician, lowering the number of incidents.

Widen horizon
A well-built KB should not be limited to storing resolutions for incidents. Use the KB as a repository of important checklists that keep a particular service up and running. Commonly used information such as checklists on regular server housekeeping tasks or changes that require restarting the server will keep technicians from missing crucial steps in change implementation.

The KB should also be used to save important workflows in IT services, training material for technicians, user guides, and even FAQs. This, in turn, helps reduce incident response time and will help technicians keep up with pre-defined service legal agreements.

Create a team

Creating a knowledge management (KM) system in your organisation certainly has its advantages. One of the most significant of these is the added ownership and accountability in the KM process. You can create a user group of technicians who are well- trained in the proposed KM model for your organisation.

This team should be assigned to supervise the approval process. They should also be able to streamline KM workflows, identify possible areas of extension, and be responsible for collecting information from resources. This will help avoid chaotic roles and prevent missing information.

Evaluate performance

Constantly monitoring the efficiency of your KM system with relevant metrics will help you evaluate its performance.
After you’ve built your knowledge base and have a good knowledge management system running, sit back and reap the benefits. Whether it’s just a few tweaks to an existing knowledge base or a brand new one, it shouldn’t be long before customers and employees respond with words of praise.

-Source: www.entrepreneur.com