There seems to be increasing interest in Knowledge Management these days. In fact, reports are that Google no longer has an overriding emphasis on simply being the best “search engine” – instead, they have placed increasing emphasis on the importance of Knowledge Management by positioning their latest Enterprise Search product as a key device in tapping into an organization’s collective knowledge.

The Costs of Poor Knowledge Management

IT Management is coming to the realization that departments are simply not sharing information as well as they could. There are too many “silos of information” associated with each department – resulting in a lack of shared knowledge, ideas and experience. The result?

 Re-discovery of knowledge – when a workaround or
solution is not captured and shared effectively,
someone else is likely going to have to “re-invent that
wheel” to solve the same issue
 Duplication of effort – Not sharing a reusable solution
means my colleague is going to have to expend the
same or more effort to re-create their version of the
solution
 Longer resolution times – having to reinvent solutions
means incident/request average resolution time is higher than it otherwise would be
 More frequest escalations – Without effective Knowledge Management, a support center will experience more frequent escalations to higher level support teams (since back-line subject matter experts are not sharing information with the front-line service desk)
 Customer and user dissatisfaction – When solutions take longer to achieve, and escalations are more frequent, customer dissatisfaction tends to be the result
 Higher costs – All of this leads to higher costs of IT support operations, which of course IT management is keenly interested in driving down these days

Knowledge Management (KM) to the rescue! A process driven, best-practice KM implementation can in fact address many of these challenges, resulting in huge benefits – to the IT support organization, as well as to customers and users.

Read the full article: https://www.thinkhdi.com/library/supportworld/2013/km-lifecycle.aspx