Explain what it means when industry leaders indicate that they are moving their organization from knowledge-centered support to knowledge-centered service. Also describe some of the implications for this movement towards knowledge centered service. What are some of the struggles employees may face?
Answers
Explanation:
In the 21st century, digital is the way of life, especially inside any business or organization. With significant shifts in innovation and productivity, it seems that support functions can barely keep up. While technical support used to be an internal, back-office department that customers never saw, today’s customers interact with technical service teams on a daily basis. Support teams within organizations may struggle to keep up, but Knowledge Centered Service is changing that. Knowledge Centered Service, or KCS, emphasizes knowledge as a critical asset for delivering service and support. KCS stood for “Knowledge Centered Support” until the v6 release in April 2016 at which time the phrase was updated to “Knowledge Centered Service”. In this article, we are exploring the KCS principles and methodology.
BMC Helix: Next Generation ITSM
What is Knowledge Centered Service?
To understand KCS, let’s take the long view of service teams in digital workplaces.
In most organizations, regardless of size, IT help desks are swamped with requests, ranging from small, tedious items that are easy to accomplish but take time, to larger problems that must be dealt with immediately. IT service teams are always balancing these requests, based on priority, individual knowledge of a problem, and time required researching, which can mean reaching out to people outside of the IT service team.
The problems with these existing issues are clear:
Time spent solving repetitive issues
Time and resources spent researching complicated issues
Knowledge is a major solution to these bottlenecks. Accessing pre-existing knowledge helps drastically reduce the time spent solving problems, therein saving money and resources. This theory, known as knowledge management, is a popular way to mitigate the challenges of service teams that are under increasing pressure to respond to customers correctly, quickly, and flexibly.
When an IT service team solves an issue, often handled by only one person, it is very common for that knowledge solution to go by the wayside. With one problem solved, the IT staff moves onto the next problem. In a perfect world, that information would be captured for future use, in a sort of knowledge center, in order to save time and resources when the same or similar issues arise again. If no knowledge base has been built, there’s no place for that specific knowledge to become part of a collective, collaborative knowledge.
While knowledge is a clear solution to the chaotic reality for IT desks, implementing knowledge management effectively still eludes many organizations. The challenges are two-fold: building a knowledge base, then using it successfully.
Building a knowledge base takes time, priority, and a joint approach with teams beyond just the IT service desk. Unfortunately, knowledge management often isn’t prioritized or embraced by a large enough group of knowledge experts, often because it is seen as an extra task for an already overloaded team.
In cases where organizations have already implemented some type of knowledge center, there are still bottlenecks to successful implementation: too much bureaucracy in the way of reviews or approval cycles or a lack of priority or time in developing it. In some situations, content that has been created often isn’t relatable or contextual to the customer experience.
This is where Knowledge Centered Service(KCS) comes in. The theory maintains that speeding up service is very doable within a provided network for the IT service team to access and maintain knowledge.
There are four core principles of KCS that aim to improve how IT help desks function:
Abundance: Share more, learn more.
Create Value: Work tasks; think big picture.
Demand Driven: Knowledge is a by-product of interaction
Trust: Engage, empower, motivate
KCS isn’t just theoretical though: its tenets provide both a method and techniques that help organizations respond to issues quicker, including shortening the time necessary to address complex issues, and provide consistent answers for customers that enable self-sufficiency. The goal of KCS is to integrate the use of a knowledge base into an organizational workflow in order to:
Create content as a by-product of solving problems
Evolve content based on usage and demand
Develop a knowledge base of the collective experience of an organization
Recognize learning, collaboration, sharing, and improving