Successful Knowledge Management - Lessons Learned From Organizations Who Have Achieved It

2023-04-10

Successful Knowledge Management

Lessons Learned From Organizations Who Have Achieved It

Peter McGarahanSenior IT Director

First [email protected]

IT-support i fokus 2013

• 12 years with PepsiCo/Taco Bell IT and Business Planning

• Managed the Service Desk and all of the IT Infrastructure for 4500 restaurants, 8 zone offices, field managers and Corporate office

• 2 years as a Product Manager for Vantive

• Executive Director for HDI

• 6 years with STI Knowledge/Help Desk 2000

• Founder, McGarahan & Associates (9 years) - delivered service and support best practice consulting delivered through assessment / findings / recommendations / continuous improvement roadmap.

• Retired Chairman, IT Infrastructure Management

• Senior IT director – Infrastructure Services for First American

2

About Peter McGarahan

3

Pay It Forward

Webinar Purpose

2023-04-10 IT-support i fokus 2013

To share lessons learned from organizations who have successfully

utilized knowledge management tools and practices in supporting business and technology deployments resulting in

broader buy-in, behavioral traction and measurable benefits.

4


Knowledge Management

The goal of Knowledge Management is to enable organizations to improve the quality of

management decision making by ensuring that reliable and secure information and data is available throughout the service lifecycle.

The process responsible for gathering, analyzing, storing and sharing knowledge and information

within an Organization.

The primary purpose of Knowledge Management is to improve efficiency by reducing the need to

rediscover knowledge.5


As we speak today…………..

1. Rapid technology advances are forcing radical changes impacting IT organizational structure, culture, leadership and careers.

2. IT organizations are prioritizing limited investments to innovate the business, simplify core infrastructure services.

3. IT organizations are placing key IT people into the business to further partnership and collaboration on business / technology innovation.

4. Senior executives are working to track and translate IT benefits to business outcomes (resulting impact / value).

5. IT organizations are concerned about increased Business spending on technology and the rise of Shadow IT

6. IT organizations are feverishly working to reduce their Infrastructure footprint with less legacy, less complexity and less MOOSE (maintain and operate the organization, systems and equipment) to eliminate IT as a bottleneck to business growth and expansion.

6


Impacting IT and Business Trends

• Cloud computing

• Workforce Mobilization (Smartphones, Tablets, BYOD)

• Server, desktop, and storage virtualization

• Business process, technology convergence

• Social Media

• Business intelligence

• IT outsourcing

• All Things VIDEO

• Virtual, project-based “contractors.”

7


Accelerating The Pace of Change

Given this trend toward IT and business convergence, IT must be willing to:

– Surrender some of its control over systems and services

– Give the business more control, ownership, accountability, access, and training.

A successful transformation requires:

– Proper planning and changing mindsets about traditional roles and responsibilities.

– The new IT organization partnered with the business must take full advantage of these trends to deliver business results.

8


Impacting “Change” Through Knowledge

9

• Make it “Cultural” ensuring

participation, traction and growth

• Resist temptation of using

previous project checklists, plans

and methodologies; think

differently, cross functionally and

innovatively

• Prepare, communicate, educate

and train the team – set them up

for success by giving them an

active voice in the program

• Senior sponsorship, commitment,

communication and leadership by

example

• The change is not complete after

the technology platform / solution

has been implemented.

• Diligently measure progress,

impact and results (baseline,

targets, actual)

• Leverage program success to

other functional areas,

communication channels and

collaborative forums


The Wake-Up Call To Change Culture

"IF YOU DON'T LIKE CHANGE,YOU'LL LIKE IRRELEVANCE EVEN LESS

The Change Imperative:

1. Connecting the vibrant community to share lessons learned and expand communication channels for improved awareness and buy-in.

2. Publishing great content and knowledge timely and relevant to increased productivity, engagement and consistent results.

3. Integrating technologies that allow employees to easily capture, publish, share, search and use knowledge nuggets to solve problems, share experiences, collaborate ideas and connect distributed workforce.

FOUR-STAR US GENERAL (RET.) ERIC SHINESKI

10


Preparing the Knowledge Culture for Change

1. Instill a sense of urgency.

2. Pick a good team.

3. Create a vision and supporting strategies.

4. Communicate.

5. Remove obstacles.

6. Change fast.

7. Keep on changing.

8. Make change stick.

11

Creating the Knowledge Strategy and Plan

1. Know where you are

– Assessing your organization’s current knowledge tools, practices,

preferences and performance around service strategy, structure (support

model), process, people, tools and metrics is an all-important baseline.

2. Know where you are going

– Envisioning the end result or how you visualize Knowledge impacting your

organizational and business performance.

3. Know how you plan to get there

– The Knowledge Strategy, Plan and Roadmap, the result of your gap-

analysis assessment against your future-state, should foundationally align

what you need to do to make progress against the plan.122023-04-10 IT-support i fokus 2013

The Support Structure


The Supporting Structure of Knowledge

• Integrated Knowledge Management

into the Incident Management

workflow.

• Implemented Content Authoring &

Management practices and discipline.

• Introduced and operationalized the

Knowledge Centered Support (KCS)

practice for Using, Flagging, Fixing

and Adding (UFFA) knowledge articles

to the “single source of truth.”

To deliver knowledge to customers via the preferred phone and self-service channels, these major corporations have successfully:

“The single source of truth”


Structured Success

• Focus on what types of incidents are resolved at First Contact.– Daily, highly focused on-boarding training on the most frequently used

Knowledge Articles (FCR).

– Create Categorization that is actionable & meaningful with common terminology and keywords for improved search optimization.

– Identify opportunities to author and publish these solutions to self-service portal in the form of FAQs, “How To” training and simple procedural technical issues.

• Reduce escalated L2 / L3 incidents. Never escalate Incidents w/ workarounds.

– Increases FCR while minimizing AHT.

– L2 / L3 can focus on higher priority items / infrastructure / application projects.

• Monitor escalated incidents with no workaround.– Create, publish, use and measure workarounds / solutions for high priority

incidents, most frequently escalated (to whom) and with the longest MTTR.

• Through problem management.– Determine workarounds most utilized and which incidents result in business

impact and customer dissatisfaction.

– Invest in permanent solutions that eliminate them (incidents / problems).152023-04-10 IT-support i fokus 2013

Creating the Knowledge Team

Knowledge Manager• Role: To architect the KM process and ensure it’s

successful implementation and continuous improvement.

Subject Matter Experts• Role: To contribute frequently to the creation and

maintenance of the knowledge as it relates to their domain and subject area of expertise.

Front-line Analysts• Role: To search and use knowledge to resolve issues on

First Contact, flag KAs that need fixing and issues that need KAs creating.

The Collaborators• Role: Working together, these workers share knowledge

real-time (Conversation) and are the ones best positioned to capture as created.

16

KCS is not something we do in addition to solving problems…KCS becomes the way we solve problems…

Knowledge Centered Support (KCS ) is a methodology with an established set of practices and processes focusing on Knowledge as a key

asset of the support organization.

Educate and Train on (KCS) Methodology

KCS seeks to:

– Create content as a by-product of solving problems.

– Evolve content based on demand and usage.

– Develop a KB of our collective experience to-date.

– Reward learning, collaboration, sharing and improving.


Making UFFA a Priority

• “Deliver Knowledge at the speed of conversation”

• Using knowledge when available for timely resolution – minimize escalations.

• Knowledge articles successfully utilized at Tier-1 (FCR) are prime candidates for Self-service.


Making UFFA a Priority

• Track all service and support activity.

• Process and Tool as one (Integrated)!– The solutions must be provided to the support analyst

during the Incident Management Process to facilitate first contact resolution (FCR).

• Use, Add, Fix and Flag (UFFA) capabilities!– Ability to flag incidents / problems that require Knowledge

Articles to be added or current Knowledge Articles to be fixed.

– Ability to contribute their own quality knowledge (Add).

– Incentive, recognition, rewards, performance appraisals around UFFA.



Self Service Structure

• Fix It – contains self-service functionality, tools and Knowledge Articles targeted and written for customers designed to resolve their issues on First Contact / Attempt.

• Order It – contains standard Service Request forms that provide a means for customers to order from the Services Catalog.

• Learn It – contains instructional “How-To” Videos, procedure-driven Knowledge Articles and any lessons learned that can be easily shared (Collaborators) with customers looking for assistance on how they can get something done.

20

Self Service Success Steps

• Engage your targeted audience first. They typically know what they want to find and use on Self-Service. They can tell you how they have done it before; easily, quickly, comfortably and successfully.

• Personalize the self-service experience with profile and preference information that continues to learn with each interaction.

• Build trust, confidence and set expectations accordingly, delivering - regular status updates that keep employees informed of resolution / fulfillment or next steps.

• Measure adoption, experience and success rate.

• Ensure marketing articulates employee-centric benefits beyond the obvious cost-cutting reasoning.

• Train over the phone using remote control. Send members of the Service Desk out to the business to provide hands-on training. Highlight ease-of-use.

• Appoint self-service champions as spokespersons, who, by word-of-mouth and leading by credible example, increase adoption while providing you with valuable feedback on what to add next to the self-service portal because if you did – they would USE it.


The KM Success Measures

• Confidence

– Service Desk & Tier-2 & Tier-3

– Employees / Customers

• Search

– Find, use, resolve

– Find, inaccurate, flag, fix, republish

– Do not find, flag, add

• Adoption / Use

• Work Effort / Time / Cost Savings

• Success Stories

• Reduction in backlog / Inventory /

• Improved SLA adherence

• Successful end-result (resolution, answer, fulfilled)

– Knowledge base utilization / Driving FCR

• Experience / Satisfaction

• % of Staff

– Using

– Flagging

– Fixing

– Adding

• Improved efficiencies / productivity

• Increased customer / employee satisfaction


The Resulting End

• Everyone knows, uses and contributes knowledge.

• The knowledge is a source of training.

• Self-service use dwarfs internal IT service and support activity.

• No more knowledge hunting, it’s captured as it happens.

• The culture cares and shares knowledge freely.

• A quality focus on measurable results.

KA Quality = Use (KBU) & Effectiveness (FCR, R@L0).


1. Create the technology platform and architecture utilizing related technologies to broaden and unite all departments and core elements across the enterprise.

2. Influence the business model and multiple strategic areas based on current trends and preferences that would fuel innovation and business for growth to:

• Improve their understanding of customers and markets.

• Allow them to engage externally at the time, place and point of need.

• Facilitate collaborative dialogue.

Social Knowledge



The Upside of Social Knowledge • Supplying the correct answers / solutions

to customers.

• Fulfilling standard service requests in a

timely manner.

• Sharing lessons learned of things that

people figured out.

• Sharing expertise and knowledge with

others.

• Collaborating with others on ideas (hitch-

hiking to another direction and piggy-

backing to a new level).

• Communicating and keeping stakeholders

engaged and involved during business and

technology changes, updates, outages,

rollouts, upgrades, etc.

25


Questions / Thank You!

Technology

Successful Knowledge Management - Lessons Learned From Organizations Who Have Achieved It