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.
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
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior Manager @
Knowledge Repository
Khaitan
& Co
Upcoming Conference | National Conference on Transforming Libraries into Knowledge
Resource Centres 11th – 12th January 2018, SNDT Mumbai For further details
contact Prof Jyoti Bhabal (jyotibhabal@gmail.com
)
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