True Enterprise Service Knowledge Management

There’s no question that effective Knowledge Management is an essential aspect of effective Service Management. The big question and the core challenge is how to effectively deliver it.

Attivio’s response to this universal knowledge delivery challenge is Service Knowledge Expert, an enterprise knowledge management platform designed to rapidly enable SKMS (service knowledge management system) functionality in existing IT Service Management toolsets.

Built upon Attivio’s Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), Service Knowledge Expert seamlessly integrates, correlates and analyzes all structured, semi-structured and wholly unstructured information sources together, for highly agile enterprise service knowledge management.

Service Knowledge Expert's SKMS functionality empowers service organizations replace unacceptable performance with true service excellence.

Creating an expert service knowledge system from scratch is usually a futile effort. With Attivio, we got a lot done very quickly. We unified all of our service information sources without having to build anything new. Attivio''s Service Knowledge Expert makes implementing the ITIL framework worth the effort.

— Financial Services ITSM Executive

Service Knowledge Expert provides the bridge between AIE and existing Service Management tools.

Problem

The traditional approach to implementing an SKMS, underpinned by a tightly controlled CMDB/CMS structure, is resource-intensive, time-consuming, and requires an extraordinarily high process maturity level – rendering a positive ROI tenuous, at best.

Knowledge Base Solutions are critical Service Management tools, but they have an inherently limited scope, and require lengthy, manual Approval/Publish/Review process cycles. Additionally, the Knowledge Base is designed to deliver specific fixes for specific problems. It’s not terribly useful when it comes to applying Adaptive Case Management principles to the unexpected.

Enterprise Search Platforms provide an effective way to find specific documents, but offer limited Knowledge Generation & Delivery value. Like a Knowledge Base Management solution, expanding the scope of an Enterprise Search solution will do little more than deliver that many more documents for your Knowledge Workers to sift through. As a result, expanding search results can actually be a hindrance to Knowledge Workers, particularly – if it lacks real integration with the user’s current activities, extended infrastructure state and information analysis, and ITSM role and process awareness.

ITSM Tool Suites offer, at a minimum, some level of process and information alignment by integrating process management tools (Incident Management, Problem Management, Change Management, etc.) into a common interface with shared workflows. Many of the suite vendors also recognize the value of including knowledge base management and configuration management. These best-in-class tool suites have enabled service management organizations to make strides forward in knowledge management capabilities – but, with grossly limited external information ingestion and analysis capabilities, they still fall well short of attaining the elusive SKMS ideal.

Solution: Service Knowledge Expert

Attivio’s Service Knowledge Expert leverages the strengths of the above three approaches, while simultaneously addressing their inherent limitations, by tightly integrating the capabilities of existing tools, combining that integration with dramatic expansion of information scope and applying purpose-built information analytics.

Service Knowledge Expert is built on Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE), a unified information access (UIA) platform that builds a hybrid, schema-less index of all information stores to provide a single source of information analysis and consumption – regardless of source location, content, or format. In stark contrast to the traditional data warehousing approach, there is no need to pre-define complex data and workflow relationships – relationships that change with each new information source introduced.

AIE also eliminates the need for long-running, complex ETL processing jobs. Because the platform builds the hybrid, schema-less index of relevant source metadata, as opposed to ingesting and storing mass quantities of dissimilar data and content, ingestion rates are fast enough to allow near-real time results (30GB/hr) and new information stores can be added on-the-fly. In essence, AIE constructs a vast information abstraction layer of every relevant information source.

Service Knowledge Expert provides a one-stop, 360-degree view of all enterprise data and content relevant to a given incident, complete with recommendations most likely to quickly resolve that incident. Service Knowledge Expert unifies Service Management tools with formal knowledge bases and all organic service knowledge buried within multiple databases, documentation, wikis, SharePoint, email archives, websites and other silos of enterprise information.

Support analysts easily access all information relevant to a given incident in one place, complete with "best bet" resolution content recommendations and dynamic discovery of subject matter experts in the organization. Service Knowledge Expert's recommendations will constantly improve over time, adapting and learning from support team feedback. Recommendations can be overridden for a group(s) of incidents caused by a known problem.

Problem Management

Service Knowledge Expert’s powerful analytics help deliver Proactive Problem Management capabilities – crucial to discovering and eliminating problems before service delivery incidents occur.

Service Knowledge Expert integrates with Business Information reporting tools, allowing Problem Managers the flexibility to perform ad-hoc information correlation and emerging trend analysis, without needing to predefine complex data relationship schemas.

Change Management

Service Knowledge Expert analyzes past change, incident and problem records – along with extended service relationship information – to assist in change collision avoidance, expand change stakeholder discovery, and enhance risk assessment.

Business Intelligence

In addition to providing all enterprise service information relevant to avoiding and quickly resolving service disruptions, Service Knowledge Expert offers highly customizable business intelligence dashboards, providing service performance data combined with powerful text analytics to proactively identify and act upon pervasive issues affecting multiple systems, business units, customers, and much more.

Attivio Impact!

• End frustrating, time-wasting manual information gathering that causes poor service performance, high turnover, SLA violations, needless costs and impaired competitiveness
• Easily access, discover and act upon all information relevant to a given service management activity, expediting incident resolution, root cause analysis, problem solving, service changes and more
• Dramatically improve service escalation rates (higher first-time fix), mean time to restore service, mean time between failures, service team turnover and more
• Maximize the escalation effectiveness through dynamic subject matter expert discovery
• Monitor service improvements over time through insightful, actionable business intelligence dashboards, capable of analyzing service data combined with powerful text analytics
• Achieve a new standard of cost saving, revenue enhancing service excellence - and get out of reactive "fire-fighting" support mode to proactive, value-added support that helps achieve strategic organizational goals and objectives