Knowledge Management overview

BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management is a framework for creating, publishing, reviewing, and searching IT knowledge articles. This framework provides service desk analysts with a knowledge base of easy-to-find solutions and gives users self-service search options to help them resolve issues on their own.

Business value

With BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management, you can:

Improve service quality through easy access to knowledge
Reduce support calls and costs by enabling users to search without involving the service desk
Access third-party knowledge through integration and indexing of content
Decrease call abandonment rates and increase first-call resolution rates by improving efficiency
Keep users and service desks up to date by providing news flashes and watch lists
Reduce training costs throughout your organization with integrated, self-help knowledge

End-to-end process

Every article has a lifecycle. At the beginning of its lifecycle, the article enters the pre-publish review and approval process. If approved, the article is published. The published articles can be reviewed and retired from use, as required. Retired articles continue to reside in the knowledge base, and although they are not visible to end users, by default, the knowledge users can search for them.

Knowledge article creation lifecycle

The following illustration explains a typical lifecycle until the article is published:

KA life cycle.png

Knowledge article publishing lifecycle

The following illustration explains a typical article publishing lifecycle:

KCS lifecycle.png Article status

Statuses are used to denote the current phase of an article within the article's lifecycle. Each phase determines factors such as:

Type of work the article requires
User or group to whom the article can be assigned
Status transition options for the article
User viewing permissions
Whether the article is searchable

Knowledge lifecycle management

The BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management authoring process allows authorized users to create knowledge articles and manages the knowledge article lifecycle within a defined sequence of stages, (for example, In Progress, Draft, SME Review, Optional Review 1, Optional Review 2, Publish Approval, Published, Retire Approval, Retired, Closed Version, Cancelled).

BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management enables users to define the different lifecycle stages and the available list of stages that a knowledge article can switch to from a given stage.

When switching between stages, BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management routes the article to the next assignee by using the Assignment Engine. This routing is performed by analyzing pre defined routing rules that are based on the company that the article belongs to and the article categorization.

Some stages, such as Publish and Retire, might require an approval process. BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management uses the Approval Server to define approval workflow for these stages.

Quick tour of knowledge management

BMC Helix ITSM displays knowledge articles in two views:

Preview - When you open an article from search results, the article and the nonrole-related article that can be viewed by all users is displayed in read-only mode. It displays only the header of the article.
Full article view - When you open articles from the search results in BMC Helix ITSM Knowledge Console, by clicking the View Full Article, you can view the full content of the knowledge article.

For information about BMC Helix ITSM: Knowledge Management console, see Managing your work in BMC Helix ITSM console in the BMC Helix ITSM documentation.