I recently had the opportunity to chat with a practitioner
about the importance of knowledge management and had to smile when she declared
that ‘knowledge management is back.’ The premise of the comment was that early
attempts at knowledge management were unsuccessful as organizations seemed to
think that the knowledge was going to ‘magically’ appear. Gartner speaks to the
fact that organizations also often focused on collecting knowledge, rather than
dispersing it.
There’s often a perception that ITIL only focuses on
knowledge management in Service Transition. This conversation really brought
home to me the importance of emphasizing the fact that knowledge management
spans the service lifecycle.
It has taken the IT industry a while to understand that
there needs to be a strategy for knowledge management that culminates in the
right information being delivered to the right place or person at the right
time. Doing that successfully requires a process, methods, policies,
procedures, tools, and metrics.
Another consideration is the shifting of generations in the
workforce. Think about it. How do young – or young at heart – people solve
problems today? They Google or Tweet and draw upon the knowledge and expertise
of others. And those ‘others’ are perfectly willing to share. The ‘social generation’
is not afraid to share their knowledge and expertise the way that generations
have been in the past. Organizations just need to ensure they have the
processes and technologies in place to capture that knowledge and publish it in
the best and most usable form. To that point, a whopping 42 percent of
organizations are planning to update or add knowledge management technology in
the coming year according to HDI’s 2012 Support Center Practices and Salary
Report. According to the same study, knowledge management is now one of the
most widely adopted ITIL® processes, behind only incident and change
management.
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