Knowledge Management

Knowledge management is a process that impacts the wider service lifecycle, not just service transition. This process provides you with one of the key systems for service management, the service knowledge management system.

In this process, you will be considering the purpose, objectives, and scope of knowledge management, as well as the concepts of the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) model and the SKMS.

The Purpose of Knowledge Management

The purpose of knowledge management is to ensure that ideas, perspectives, experience, and information are shared and that this is delivered at the right time and to the right place to enable informed decision making. You should try to reuse, not rediscover knowledge, so that you are more efficient.

Let’s consider that statement in more detail. What are the right information, ideas, experience, and perspectives? These have to be considered in the context of the audience. What may be the right information for the IT department may be completely inappropriate for your customers, because it needs to be put into a context that the customer can understand. So, when you present information, you should be aware of the needs of the audience receiving it. Shared experience and ideas should be considered in this way so that relevant experiences and ideas are provided. It is very important to understand the perspectives that exist within your organization so that you can attempt to achieve a shared cultural perspective to improve the effectiveness of your cooperation across the organization.

The statement also talks about an informed decision. Here you need to think about the decision maker, so the appropriate person needs to be able to make a decision. Sometimes the decisions will be at a low level; at other times, it will be high-level strategic decision making. In either case, you need to ensure that the decisions can be made, so your information needs to be relevant.

Therefore, the purpose of knowledge management is to deliver relevant information, ideas, experiences, and perspectives to the correct audience so that they can make an informed decision.

If you capture these ideas, experiences, and information, you will be able to reuse them in order to continue to make decisions based on both new and historical information. The reuse of knowledge is a key concept in the process.

The Objectives of Knowledge Management

The objectives of knowledge management are to do the following:

• Improve the quality of decision making throughout the service lifecycle. The quality of decisions made must rest on the quality of the information provided to the decision maker. If the information provided is inaccurate or unreliable, then a considered decision cannot properly be achieved. So, this process should strive to ensure that the information provided is accurate, relevant, and secure for a decision to be made, throughout all of the lifecycle.
  Enable efficiency in the service provider and customer by encouraging the reuse of information. It is a key concept in the framework that you should use repeatable processes to deliver an efficient service, and the use of information should also be repeatable. Rediscovering the same knowledge is inefficient, so the drive from the process of knowledge management is to ensure you have captured your information in a repeatable and accessible format. If you manage to reduce the time taken to rediscover knowledge, then the efficiencies made will result in higher-quality services and greater customer satisfaction. This in turn can reduce the total cost of ownership for the services you deliver.
• Ensure that staff members have an understanding of the value of their services. Understanding the value of the services can be achieved only through the knowledge and experience shared between the business and IT communities within an organization. Once you have established a clear and common understanding of the value of the services by communication with your user base, you can begin to make genuine improvements in the value of those services.
• Maintain a service knowledge management system (SMKS). This objective is important for the success of knowledge management, because the delivery mechanisms you use for transferring knowledge will make information easily accessible. It will be important to ensure that the information shared is appropriately presented and controlled for the correct audience.
• Gather, store, analyze, share, use, and maintain knowledge, information, and data throughout the service provider organization. Without this objective, the process will not function at all; having a repeatable mechanism for capturing data so that you can carry out analysis, which allows you to provide the knowledge to support your services, is vital to knowledge management success.

The Scope of Knowledge Management

The scope of knowledge management crosses the whole of the service lifecycle. The detailed description of the process is located in the service transition lifecycle stage, so we will cover knowledge management from the perspective of transition. But knowledge management is essential throughout all stages of the lifecycle, and the ability to communicate, share, and deliver knowledge, information, and experience is important for service management success.

There is significant importance placed on the management of data and information across the service management processes. Each process will have an element of knowledge management or shared data. In the operational processes, you create records and data that need to be connected and managed. You should consider the relationship between knowledge management and service asset and configuration management. SACM manages the connection and relationship between individual CIs and service assets, some of which may be information sources or outputs. Knowledge management manages the achievement of the knowledge and its sharing and analysis. So, there is a very clear relationship between the two processes (the relationship between the configuration management system and the service knowledge management system was shown in Figure 9.3).

The management of knowledge is also vital for using the service management processes with your customers and users. So, the scope of the process extends into the relationship you have with your businesses, and you need to ensure that you share appropriate information with your customers and users, in an accessible format.

Using the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom Structure

The application of knowledge management is usually displayed as the Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom (DIKW) structure, as shown in Figure 9.4.

FIGURE 9.4 Data-Information-Knowledge-Wisdom

Based on Cabinet Office ITIL material. Reproduced under license from the Cabinet Office.

Data is the starting point for your generation of knowledge. Data is a set of discrete facts, for example, a capture of the volume of service desk calls recorded in the call-logging system (such as 100 service desk calls). Organizations usually have the capability to store significant amounts of data from a variety of systems when managing services. The ability to capture accurate data, which can then be analyzed and transformed into information, is key to the success of the process. Effort needs to be made to maintain the integrity of the data, including managing the volume of data captured and using the resources for storage and update.

You need to be careful that the reports you provide to your customers and users are more than just “data dumps” that have minimal value. You need to provide greater context and understanding to make your communication more meaningful.

You derive information from data by adding context. For example, the volume of service desk calls includes some for hardware faults and some for software (for example, of 100 service desk calls, 50 were related to router failures, and 50 were related to application errors). You begin to be specific and perform basic analysis, which allows for greater understanding of what the data is telling you.

It is important to ensure that your data can be captured, analyzed, and reused efficiently. Many reports produced by IT departments simply detail information, but this may not provide sufficient context or understanding for the audience. It is the next step in this structure that provides the additional context and understanding to add value to your communications.

Knowledge is formed when you apply experience, context, and understanding to the information analysis. This can be gained from your own perspectives or from those of others. Knowledge is based on current and past experience and is an accumulation of the analysis, experience, and context that you can apply. You are answering the question “How does this affect us?”

In the example given previously with 100 service desk calls, of which 50 are router failures, you now apply experience, further information, context, and understanding to identify how this affects you. Perhaps you have only 50 routers, in which case this is a serious and significant failure of equipment. Are they all the same model or all from the same vendor? The answers to such questions provide the context you can then apply to the information to ensure you can take the next step and make an informed decision. It may also be that this example is based in a large organization where 50 router failures are insignificant for the management of the infrastructure. The context of the information is key to understanding how the original data impacts your ability to manage service.

Taking the final step, you are now in a position to make an informed decision. This is where the knowledge provided can be applied to your environment to make improvements or react to the knowledge to deliver effective service.

To use the previous example of 100 service desk calls, 50 of which are router failures in an infrastructure that has only 50 routers, the decision you make may be to replace all the routers, change the vendor, or even invoke your service continuity plans.

So, the whole structure of DIKW is designed to ensure that you deliver useful, meaningful knowledge to enable informed decision making by the recipients.

Consider how this works for reports produced from your IT department. How often do you deliver information vs. knowledge, ensuring that sufficient context and understanding are part of the delivery?

Using the Service Knowledge Management System

The service knowledge management system is a focused system that allows you to manage the data and information that is generated by the service management processes and the service measures. The system is designed to ensure that you gain sufficient knowledge from the data sources through a series of processing layers. This enables connection of the various data sources, integration of the information, and a processing layer to allow you to query, report, and analyze. The final layer is the presentation layer, ensuring that your knowledge is presented in an acceptable format to allow decisions to be made.

This structure includes integrating your existing data capture in the CMDBs and CMS that are part of the SKMS. It also includes sources such as the service portfolio, definitive media library, information in SLAs, OLAs and contracts, budgets, cost models, and service improvement plans. Finally, it integrates the various information systems from availability, capacity, and supplier management.

Figure 9.5 shows a simple diagram of this structure.

FIGURE 9.5 Structure of the SKMS

Based on Cabinet Office ITIL material. Reproduced under license from the Cabinet Office.

Other information sources will come from the integration of operation data from incident and problem management. This will include known error information and knowledge bases in use in operations.

Some of the information managed through the SKMS will include service reports and documentation supporting your services. These may be CIs, and the records about them will be managed through the CMS, whereas the actual information will be managed through the SKMS. Both of these will be under the control of change management to ensure that no unauthorized alterations are made and the integrity and accuracy of your information sources are maintained.