ITSM Knowledge management explained

Knowledge is power, and your tech team knows a lot. They know how to respond to incidents, solve problems, initiate transformative changes, and manage software deployments. But when all that powerful knowledge is stored in their brains, and all the relevant information is strewn across various inboxes and databases, IT teams must continually reinvent the wheel. Service delivery is inconsistent, and self-service is impossible.

Effective ITSM knowledge management empowers tech teams and end-users with a repository of readily available solutions—a knowledge base that can standardize and even automate IT service delivery. It can also boost IT efficiency, enable continual service improvement, and power a self-service portal for your end-users.

What is ITSM knowledge management? What are the benefits, use cases, and best practices? And how do you implement effective knowledge management processes (and software) in your organization?

What is ITSM knowledge management?

Knowledge management is a core component of IT Service Management (ITSM)—a set of processes used to design, create, deliver, and support IT services. Knowledge management is the process of sharing and maintaining organizational knowledge so that IT agents and users can find the information they need when they need it.

This is accomplished by creating a knowledge base: a central repository of all the perspectives, ideas, experiences, and information your IT team creates over time.

The role of a knowledge base in ITSM

The knowledge management process supports all your other ITSM processes (e.g., incident management, problem management, change management, etc.) by getting knowledge out of organizational silos and putting it into one centralized location: a knowledge base.

In your knowledge base, all the information your team needs is optimized and readily accessible to everyone. When IT service desk agents need to address an incident, they can refer to the knowledge base for relevant guidance and insights. When problem managers and change managers develop new best practices or design a new workaround, they can add that information to the knowledge base for future reference.

Your knowledge base can also be integrated with other ITSM-related software to enable automated workflows and to power self-service portals and AI chatbots.

Knowledge management frameworks: ITIL vs. KCS (Knowledge-Centered Support)

There are a variety of approaches (or frameworks) for ITSM knowledge management. Two of the most notable include ITIL (Information Technology Infrastructure Library) and KCS (Knowledge-Centered Support). These are different, but highly complementary, frameworks.

ITIL is the most commonly used ITSM framework—a set of best practices used to organize and optimize service delivery. It provides guidelines for all ITSM processes, including high-level guidance for structuring knowledge management. Knowledge management was first included in ITIL v3 and expanded on in ITIL v4, which lays the groundwork for integrating knowledge management with all other processes in the ITSM framework.

KCS is a set of ITSM knowledge management best practices. Developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation, KCS provides specific and robust recommendations for how to create a continuous loop of capturing, structuring, and sharing knowledge.

ITSM knowledge management: Terms to know

Through the knowledge management process, your IT team turns data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom.

• Data: A collection of unprocessed and discrete data or numbers that is unorganized and has no meaning or relevance. Knowledge managers identify, track, and store data to derive useful patterns.

• Information: A collection of processed data that derives meaning to aid in decision-making. Knowledge managers ask “who,” “what,” “when,” and “where” questions to uncover information that adds context to data.

• Knowledge: Insights, ideas, and judgements derived from information. Knowledge managers conduct a detailed analysis of information to answer “how” questions.

• Wisdom: Complete understanding and ultimate insight into the data, which aids in strategic decision-making. Knowledge managers answer “why” questions to gain a deeper understanding of knowledge.

There are three types of knowledge that need to be captured in your database:

• Tacit knowledge: Knowledge that stems from personal experience and is difficult to explain to others (making it challenging to capture).

• Explicit knowledge: Knowledge that is easy to explain, codify, and share.

• Implicit knowledge: Knowledge that is embedded in processes, routines, and how the team works.

Benefits of knowledge management for ITSM

What are the ITSM benefits of managing organizational knowledge in an intentional, structured way?

For agents

• Better problem-solving and knowledge-sharing with peers

• Faster ticket resolution

• Improved team interaction and collaboration

• More time to devote to more interesting work. because self-service portals and chatbots can handle recurring L1 Issues

• Reduced frustration, better overall employee experience

For end-users 

• Improved speed, accuracy, and consistency of IT service delivery

• Ability to find their own answers via a knowledge-base-powered self-service portal or AI chatbot

• Seamless customer support

• Better overall IT end-user experience

For the business

• Improved overall productivity

• Increased IT capacity

• Improved knowledge transition and new agent training

• More informed IT decision making from past history

• Reduced IT costs due to improved resource utilization

Knowledge management and IT service operations

ITIL divides ITSM responsibilities into separate, distinct processes, but each of those processes affects the others. Knowledge management is the culmination of all the insights, experiences, and wisdom derived by other ITSM teams. They all use your knowledge base, and they all contribute to it—creating a single source of truth for IT teams.

Knowledge management and incident management

Incident management leverages knowledge management on a daily basis. When incident managers receive tickets, they check the knowledge base for existing solutions before investing time in troubleshooting. If a solution is not already available, they create new knowledge articles. If you have an AI-enhanced ITSM solution like Freshservice in place, relevant articles are automatically suggested to agents inside the ticket. If the system determines the incident to be a recurring issue with a simple solution, the software will send relevant articles directly to the end-user for self-service, or trigger an AI chatbot to help the user resolve the issue. 

Knowledge management and problem management

Problem management involves finding the root cause of recurring incidents so you can prevent them from happening again and predicting future incidents so you can prevent them from ever happening. This requires problem managers to analyze incident trends and regularly review your known-error database—all of which can be found in your knowledge base. After a permanent solution is identified, it is stored in your knowledge base for future reference, along with the post-incident reports (PIR) with relevant knowledge articles attached.

Knowledge management and service request management

Your knowledge base doesn’t just contain guidance for how to resolve recurring incidents or solve known problems. It should also document various processes, including how to respond to different types of service requests. When your IT service desk receives a request for new hardware, access to applications, or a simple password reset, agents can refer to your knowledge base to find the procedural guidance they need. You can also automate fulfillment for certain requests.

Knowledge management and change management

Effective change management and risk analysis require a strong understanding of incident trends, problems solved, and past change planning and deployments—information that lives in your knowledge base. When change managers implement a new change, they document it in your knowledge base and review past articles to include any bug fixes or changes in the functionality. 

Knowledge management and release management

Release managers are responsible for deploying evaluated changes. During build planning, your release management team leverages the knowledge base for helpful information and insights. While building and testing codes, they work with the knowledge management team to update knowledge base articles with information about release items and relevant software changes. Version control and documentation are critical or effective knowledge management, so they also document new issues post-deployment. 

Knowledge management and CMDB

Your knowledge base is home to your configuration management database (CMBD), which contains the configuration data for all the hardware, software, servers, and networks that your tech team uses. It also documents the relationship between these assets. This critical information is stored in one always-up-to-date place, enabling agents and decision-makers to visualize the entire IT infrastructure at a glance.

Continual service improvement

CSI involves creating service improvement plans to evaluate and enhance the quality of IT service delivery. Knowledge management feedback is a critical component of this process, providing invaluable data and insights about recurring incidents and service requests. Knowledge management’s contributions to CSI can help your tech team avoid major incidents, cut costs, and improve end-user satisfaction.

Knowledge management use cases and examples

With the right knowledge management practice and tools in place, your business can:

Reduce IT workload

When Aramex, an international mail delivery and logistics company based in Dubai, partnered with Freshservice, the goal was to streamline IT operations. Aramaex built a multichannel knowledge base that enables IT agents to look up knowledge articles from anywhere, on any device, before they waste time troubleshooting issues with a known solution or workaround. Likewise, end-users can also access the knowledge base before raising a ticket. Aramaex also leverages its knowledge base to automate repetitive incident requests.

As a result, average ticket resolution time dropped by 35%. Aramex soon noticed that one-third of escalated cases were related to the same topic, so the IT team created relevant knowledge base articles, which quickly reduced those types of queries by 50%. By reducing the IT workload and resolution time, Aramex saved $56,000 after choosing Freshservice as its service provider.

Enable intuitive self-service

When Ocada Retail wanted to implement an intuitive service desk solution, one of the IT team’s primary goals was to enable self-service. Using Freshservice knowledge management tools, the organization enabled self-service for simple service requests, such as application authorizations and new hardware. The IT team also built an extensive knowledge base—known internally as “Solutions”—which provides troubleshooting guidance for common laptop and WiFi issues, instructions for how to set up a VPN, and a remote working guide.

After just three months, CSAT scores improved from 92.31% to 100%, average resolution time dropped by 28%, the number of reopened tickets decreased by 38%, and the ticket backlog disappeared altogether.

Improve the user experience

Just because you build it doesn’t mean they will come—and M&C Saatchi really needed users to come to the self-service portal. With just five IT service desk agents supporting 1,200 employees across multiple locations, improving self-service adoption was a key goal when the international ad agency implemented Freshservice.

When M&C Saatchi went live with Freshservice, visits to the newly revamped portal immediately jumped 300%. “Excellent” CSAT scores also rose to nearly 98%, in large part because employees no longer had to wait to get the answers they needed.

ITSM knowledge management best practices 

Knowledge is only powerful if people actually seek it out. How do you create a knowledge base that your IT agents and IT users will actually use?

• Automate workflows: Integrate your knowledge base with your IT ticketing system and self-service portal so that relevant knowledge articles are auto-suggested.

• Prompt agents to contribute: If agents search the knowledge base and don’t find a relevant article, provide a template they can use to create one for future use.

• Request end-user feedback: Provide “like” and “dislike” buttons so users can indicate whether a knowledge article helped them resolve their issue.

• Spice it up: Reading long blocks of technical writing is boring. Make knowledge articles more interesting and digestible by adding images, videos, and gifs.

• Make it accessible: Ensure your knowledge base is easy to find, navigate, and use. Optimize it for both web browsers and mobile, and use SEO best practices to ensure content is easy to search.

Implementing knowledge management in ITSM

How do you implement a winning IT service knowledge management process?

Establish knowledge management practice objectives

Knowledge management is a team effort, so everyone needs to understand the primary objectives of your knowledge management strategy. That means leaders need to articulate the short-term and long-term vision and the business problem that knowledge base can solve. It helps to create a knowledge management council of people with the right ITSM skills who can devise strategy, mission, and vision statements. Then clearly communicate the vision statement clearly to your IT team and end-users.

Define high-level process

Define a clear process for knowledge capture, maintenance, and distribution. Make it easier for agents to capture knowledge by implementing IT helpdesk software that automatically converts resolved tickets into new knowledge base articles when those topics are not already available. Develop templated article formats and an SEO strategy to guide knowledge base search indexing; this improves accuracy and faster retrieval of relevant articles.

Follow an inclusive lifecycle approach

Do not treat knowledge management as a separate tool; make it inclusive within every ITSM process. Integrate it across every service lifecycle stage. Then it becomes an integral part of your organization’s day-to-day IT operations management (ITOM). This indirectly results in a mindset change and cultural change. 

Follow the ITSM knowledge management process flow

The ITIL knowledge management process flow includes:

• Creation

• Storage

• Distribution

• Application

Or you can refer to the (very similar) KCS process flow:

• Capture

• Structure

• Reuse 

• Improve

Whichever terms you use, it is important to focus on each stage to realize the value of knowledge management. Assign relevant permissions to every service desk member to suggest article edits, and define an approval process for knowledge managers so articles can be published quickly.

Create a knowledge management council

This council is responsible for end-to-end knowledge management activities, including:

• Identifying existing content sources

• Mapping interaction channels (where is knowledge created and where are requests submitted)

• Defining primary processes for contributing, accessing, and sharing tacit, explicit, and implicit knowledge

• Evaluating existing and available knowledge management solutions that support:

  • Content management

  • Tagging

  • Search

  • Expertise location

  • Knowledge-sharing communities

  • Authoring tools

  • Platform integrations

Develop a knowledge-driven culture

Knowledge management is a cultural transformation beyond process implementation. Sharing knowledge is a behavior that has to be developed gradually. ITSM software can help achieve this goal by prompting agents to create knowledge articles and encouraging users to provide helpful feedback. Yet, to make sharing knowledge part of your work culture, this behavior must be demonstrated at the highest levels and driven from the top-down.

Knowledge sharing is not common among every employee, so making it part of your culture code requires an intentional effort. Look out for this attitude when recruiting new employees. Publicly acknowledge and reward employees who contribute to the knowledge base. Share success stories across the organization to develop a global culture.

Measuring success of your ITSM knowledge management system

Driving an organizational shift towards sharing knowledge requires a combination of clearly defined processes, well integrated software, training and skills-building, and accountability for results. Knowledge management metrics indicate whether your knowledge management service strategy is paying off. They enable you to assess the current state of knowledge management in your organization and plan for continual service improvement.

Relevant key performance indicators (KPIs) include:

• Number of articles added—per day, week, month

• Knowledge base contributions by support team member

• Number and percentage of solutions reused

• Number and percentage of incidents resolved using a knowledge article 

• Average resolution time for incidents resolved using a knowledge article

• Self-service portal usage rates

• Agent satisfaction with your knowledge base

• End-user satisfaction with your self-service portal

Using these KPIs, you can assess whether your knowledge management practice and software is actually improving agent performance, operational efficiency, and employee satisfaction

Freshservice for your knowledge management strategy

Freshservice ITSM provides your business with a knowledge base that serves as your IT organization’s single source of truth, enabling your agents to work smarter than ever before. With AI-enabled tools such as smart-suggest and auto-suggest, they don’t even have to go looking for answers in your knowledge base, because answers come to them. Authoring content is just as simple, because they can auto-convert emails and tickets into articles. Meanwhile, your knowledge base powers an intuitive self-service portal that deflects simple tickets, freeing up agents for more interesting and meaningful work.

Knowledge isn’t just power. For your business, it’s key to productivity, performance, and profits. When you have the right tools in processes and tools in place to manage that knowledge intelligently and intuitively, you empower agents and end-users alike.