Overview of the Knowledge-Centered Service

Smart IT supports Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS).  The practices defined in KCS enhance the collective efforts of the knowledge team to create and maintain a rich knowledge base. The Consortium for Service Innovation has created the KCS methodology and maintains it. The KCS methodology is as follows:

• Create knowledge as a by-product of resolving incidents.
• Collect available knowledge in a comprehensive knowledge base.
• Reuse and improve existing knowledge before creating new content.
• Encourage users to collaborate, learn, share, and improve knowledge within the organization.

The following video (3:24) describes the benefits of using knowledge management for KCS in Smart IT.

 https://youtu.be/N8lS-LTf3sM

Whether you use KCS or traditional knowledge management, knowledge articles can help support agents and business users. After you create and publish knowledge articles, the articles show up in Smart Recorder when a support agent logs a ticket. If you use BMC Digital Workplace or BMC Helix Chatbot, the knowledge articles are available to business users.

While creating an article, if you copy plain text from a text editor (for example, Notepad), and paste it into the article content, and then try to change the font style of a specific text or sentence, all of the article text gets formatted instead of just the selected text or sentence due to the limitation of the CKEditor. While configuring source editing for knowledge articles, if you want to enable source editing (not recommended), you must open the isCKEditorSourceEditable property from the Centralized configuration and change its value from false to true.

Process overview for KCS

The following diagram illustrates the process of using and publishing knowledge articles:

When service agents record incidents, they search for knowledge articles that can help resolve the issue. If an applicable knowledge article exists, the service agent links to it. A service agent who also has the role of KCS candidate can update the knowledge article.  Service agents have access to knowledge articles even at the draft stage.

If a KCS candidate does not find a knowledge article, the KCS candidate creates a new knowledge article. When the KCS candidate completes the proposed knowledge article, the knowledge article gets set to a draft status and becomes available to service agents to help resolve incidents.

If a knowledge article is used frequently, heavy usage of the knowledge article shows that the article is important. At this point, a KCS contributor validates the quality of the knowledge article. The KCS contributor might include subject matter expert (SME) reviews as part of the validation. After the validation is complete, the KCS contributor publishes the knowledge article internally. Service agents can see that the knowledge article has a status of verified and can be more confident when using the information in the knowledge article.

A KCS publisher identifies which verified knowledge articles to publish publicly. After identifying the knowledge articles, the KCS publisher might get SME reviews before publishing the knowledge articles. Public knowledge articles are available to end users in BMC Digital Workplace.

KCS Users

As a Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) Coach, you must ensure that your team follows KCS methodology. KCS practices enhance the collective efforts of the knowledge team to create and maintain a rich knowledge base. To create an effective environment, you must monitor the team's work and plan for improvements. To enable you to do so, the Smart IT menu bar now contains a Knowledge menu (accessible only to KCS Coaches).

KCS users are Smart IT users with appropriate KCS permissions assigned to them according to their KCS role: KCS Candidate, KCS Contributor, and KCS Publisher. A knowledge team consists of KCS users who belong to organizations, departments, and support groups of the company to which you may or may not belong.

It is recommended that you have access to your team member's company and support groups. If you don’t have access to your team member’s support group, you will not be able to see tickets that belong to their support group. This will display incorrect data in KCS reports.

If you don’t have access to the company to which your team member belongs, you will see erroneous issues such as the following:

• Default question set is used instead of the question set specific to the company and organization the author belongs to.
• The assignment engine will not work as expected.

The Knowledge menu gives you a quick view of your team, and their contributions. You can set question sets to assess their articles, assess articles your team members have written, and generate team performance reports. Based on the results, you can plan strategies to improve your team’s functioning.