About Knowledge Management

The Knowledge Management process gathers, analyzes, stores, and shares knowledge and information within an organization. The goal of Knowledge Management is to improve efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge. Collecting information in the knowledge base lets organizations match new incidents against previous ones and reuse established solutions and approaches.
When the knowledge base is implemented correctly, it can significantly improve incident resolution time and customer satisfaction. The knowledge base can contain information about the best practices that address the most common issues that users encounter. Instead of having to solve the same customer issues repeatedly, incident technicians can search the knowledge base for information about similar issues. Providing established methods for addressing common incidents reduces response time.
Users can access the knowledge base to obtain self-service resolution of common problems. By providing users with the knowledge resources to solve problems on their own, you can greatly reduce the number of incidents that they submit. When a user submits an incident, they can search the knowledge base to determine if there is a solution to the incident. If the user finds a solution, they might be able to implement the solution on their own. This self-service reduces the number of incidents that are submitted to the ServiceDesk.
In ServiceDesk, the Knowledge Management process provides a means to submit, review, approve, and post information to the knowledge base. The process increases the reliability of the knowledge base so that it can be used to improve the other processes in your organization.
The Knowledge Management process includes the following key features:
  • The Bulletin Board, which facilitates proactive notification of important issues.
    For example, if the Internet access is down, you can let users know that IT is aware of the problem. As a result, you minimize further incident submissions for that issue.
  • The ability to set up a nested category hierarchy to organize knowledge base items and make them easier for users to find.
  • The ability to set permissions at both the category level and the individual document level.
  • A knowledge base approval process that helps to ensure that the content is relevant and accurate before publication.
  • The ability for users to rate knowledge base items based on their usefulness. ServiceDesk automatically gives higher ratings to the articles that are most often used to resolve issues. You can run reports on the ratings to determine which knowledge base items should be removed or modified to improve their content.
  • A fully-audited content management system that stores the knowledge base content. You can run reports to analyze this content. For example, you can report the number of times a knowledge base item was viewed and how recently it was viewed.
  • The accessibility of the knowledge base information from within the ServiceDesk processes. Easy access from processes lets users take full advantage of the knowledge base, as well as easily add new content to the knowledge base.