Knowledge-Centered Support:
themselves when IT issues crop up. This, in turn, increases dependence on your service desk and keeps support
costs high. The same information is created over and over to resolve recurring mundane incidents, which
lowers efficiency and causes a backlog of larger problems. Technicians spend a lot of time duplicating
efforts because they aren’t aware that their co-workers already have found solutions to the same incidents they
are addressing. Frustration builds because customers feel as if they can’t get their larger issues resolved.
Add to this the increasing complexity of the IT environment, exploding user demand and pressure for IT “to
run more like a business,” and the depth and breadth of the knowledge challenge becomes clear.
The practice of knowledge management has evolved to address this challenge. Generally speaking, knowledge
management is a set of practices designed to collect, organize, structure and distribute knowledge for
ongoing use and training and for enrichment of the corporate culture.
In recent years, Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) has emerged as the most complete and effective
approach to the practice of knowledge management in service and support environments. Knowledge
Centered Support (formerly known as Solution Centered Support) recognizes that knowledge is
created whenever a support technician resolves an incident, and thus seeks to capture and leverage that
knowledge across the entire support organization. In this way, information gained in every interaction
evolves (based on demand and usage) into a comprehensive and effective knowledge base that is the sum
total of the organization’s collective experience at any given moment.
By implementing a Knowledge Centered Support based knowledge management solution, your support
organization can address virtually every aspect of the knowledge challenge it faces. Knowledge Centered
Support can make the solutions to about 80 percent of IT-related problems available both to your help desk
and to your end users, so employees can successfully deal with more problems on their own. Technicians
can leverage existing knowledge so they aren’t resolving the same incidents over and over. Efficiency
improves, costs are lowered, customer satisfaction grows and technicians have more time to focus on
using their skills and experience to solve the backlog of really tough problems. This results in greater job
satisfaction and lower turnover. The purpose of this paper is to promote an understanding
of both knowledge management and Knowledge Centered Support, review their major
benefits, discuss the principles of an effective Knowledge Centered Support practice, and provide a
step-by-step guide for getting started on implementing a Knowledge Centered Support-based knowledge
management solution.
