Lessons in Successful Knowledge Management

Successful Knowledge Management
Lessons Learned From
Organizations Who Have Achieved It
Peter McGarahan
Senior IT Director
First American
pmcgarahan@firstam.com
2014-10-23 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
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About Peter McGarahan

Webinar Purpose
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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Impacting “Change” Through Knowledge
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• 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
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.
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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.
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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.
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The Support Structure
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The Supporting Structure of Knowledge
To deliver knowledge to customers via the preferred phone and self-service
channels, these major corporations have successfully:
• 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.”
“The single source of truth”
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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).
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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.
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Educate and Train on (KCS)
Methodology
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.
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.
KCS is not something we do in addition to solving
problems…KCS becomes the way we solve problems…
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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).
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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
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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.
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Questions / Thank You!

Lessons in Successful Knowledge Management

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