Knowledge Management Within The ITIL Framework

Knowledge Management (KM) was added to ITIL v3 as part of Service Transition – the ITIL process that addresses the development and deployment of new or changed services. Prior to ITIL v3, the Incident and Problem Management processes were responsible for addressing the management of knowledge. But with the development of a specific Knowledge Management process, ITIL v3 now provides a detailed set of guidelines and workflows for the management of all knowledge in the Service Management life cycle. ITIL v3 also calls for integration of the Knowledge Management process with Service Desk (Interaction Management), Incident Management, and Problem Management.

The goal of Knowledge Management is to enable your organization to efficiently access, update, and share all knowledge that pertains to the Service Management life cycle. Benefits of Knowledge Management include, but are not limited to, the following:

• more efficient handling of knowledge
• the reduced likelihood that multiple stakeholders will attempt to solve the same problem in isolation without first sharing knowledge
• the ability to control the access of sensitive information to certain people

Central to Knowledge Management is a repository known as the Service Knowledge Management System (SKMS). A typical SKMS stores all knowledge in a Knowledge Base. The items in the Knowledge Base are referred to as Knowledge Documents, which can also include a variety of attachment types such as text files and graphics files. It also provides tools for handing important tasks such as generating reports.

HPE Service Manager not only acts as the SKMS, it goes one step further by providing Knowledge Center Support (KCS) methodologies out of box. KCS methodologies specify ways to capture information from incidents to be used by analysts in problem solving. It also specifies that knowledge must by definition evolve over time as additional stakeholders review and modify knowledge content.

This Processes and Best Practices Guide describes Knowledge Management as the process responsible for providing knowledge to all other IT Service Management processes. Because the number of processes involved is very large, the scope of this document is restricted to those processes related to storing new KM documents and updating, archiving, and retiring existing KM documents.