Issue/Question
What are the Knowledge Centered Service (KCS) Candidates responsibilities
Environment
Cause
The KCS Licensing Model consists of various stages: 1. KCS Candidate, 2. KCS Contributer, 3. KCS Publisher and KCS Coach or Knowledge Domain Expert
Resolution
KCS Candidate
The KCS Candidate understands the basics of KCS and knows how to interact with the knowledge base in a way that captures their experience and capitalizes on the collective experience of the organization. A KCS Candidate must be able to recognize relevant information in the knowledge base and exercise judgment in their interaction with it. They should not use or deliver a KCS article that they do not understand. Since articles in the knowledge base are created with a specific audience in mind, dictating vocabulary and level of technical content, a Candidate adapts knowledge to suit the profile of the target audience.
Upon completion of training (often web-based training or an element of new hire training), the KCS Candidate should:
Competencies:
- Understand the structured problem-solving process
- Accurately and consistently capture the requestor's context in the workflow
- Search for and find existing KCS articles
- Review and either link or flag articles in the problem-solving workflow
- Modify their own KCS articles
- Frame new KCS articles (Work in Progress or Not Validated) which will be reviewed or finished by a KCS Contributor or KCS Coach
Responsibilities
- Follow processes for creating and managing tickets (structured problem-solving)
- Search for related articles
- Link and reusing matching articles
- If no article found, then create/frame an article
- Capture the customer's experience – customer context
- Follow content standard guide
- Fixing articles you created, others flagged
- Flagging others articles that should be fixed
Refer to the Roles Matrix for an overview of the use it, flag it, fix it, add it rights UFFA
KCS Candidate Range of Knowledge
1. Call/incident management and knowledge management functions
- Call management is for the incident related information needed for call administration; knowledge management is for the reusable elements of the problem-solving experience
- Document:
- Customer name, contact, contract/entitlement, severity level are all call/incident related
- Issue description, relevant environment, answer/fix to the issue and cause information should be documented in the knowledge base
2. Knowledge and the purpose of a knowledge base
- Knowledge is actionable information; it is a collection of data that describes activities that would produce a desired outcome
- Use of a knowledge base requires judgement and skill, and a support responder should never deliver an article to a customer that they do not understand
- A knowledge base is a collection of information that is of value to an organization's customers, combined with means of accessing that information in order to answer questions and solve issues
3. The concept of a knowledge article
The knowledge article:
- Place to capture the problem-solving experience
- Contains the issue description as experienced by the customer, information about the environment in which the issue occurred, and answers, fixes, or work-arounds for the issue and cause of the issue
- Has a life cycle – at the outset it may only contain a description of the issue (work in progress). When resolved, it contains the answer/fix and the cause (verified)
- Dynamic – constantly being updated through use
- Complete when it is obsolete
4. KCS and the incident resolution process
- KCS in a problem-solving methodology that includes searching and updating the knowledge base
- Capture individual experiences when solving problems to create a collective / organizational memory
5. Capturing the customer's experience in the incident resolution process
- Capturing the customers experience in their terminology is critical for future findability
- A literal element of the structured problem-solving process
6. Searching techniques
- Capture customer perspective
- Search using customer language
- Use own words to refine the search
- Keyword search and Boolean commands
- Queries-look for criteria fit, date range, created by, status
- Natural language searching
- Associative searches
7. Content structure – the power of context
Identify good content structure in the context of the customer.
- Correct – Separate issue content from environment
- Concise – complete thoughts, not complete sentences
- Clear – independent thoughts, not multiple thoughts – the goal is findable, usable knowledge articles
8. When to initiate a search
- Gather sufficient information, a description of the issue and a few words / phrases about the environment
- Search early, search often – this ensures you are not working on an issue that has already been solved
9. When to STOP searching
Stop searching when the search statements have been refined, the issue statement is complete, and you have collected 2-3 characteristics about the environment that are believed to be relevant, then it is time to move into the analysis phase of problem-solving.
10. Concepts of the content standard and article structure
Basic types of content:
- Issue description – symptoms, unexpected results, error messages, goal or description of what the customer is trying to do
- Environment – products involved (e.g. hardware, software, network) and release, version, or recent changes to the environment – environment statements do not change when the issue is resolved
- Cause – background reasons for the issue or question (optional)
- Resolution – the answer to the question, a work-around, circumvention or by-pass, fix
- Metadata – knowledge about the article, author, create date, knowledge state
11. The concept of reuse and the value of tracking reuse
Reuse of articles in the knowledge base drives identification of:
- Content that should be made available to a wider audience
- Issues that need to be addressed by product or application development
- Process failures
12. Structured Problem-solving (SPS)
Key elements of the Structure Problem-Solving (SPS) process are:
- Manage the call / incident – deal with the administrative elements at the beginning (call initiation) and end of the call (wrap up) - allows for focus on the customer's objective of problem-solving
- Literal... Diagnostic... Research...
- Application of a methodology for collecting, organizing, and analyzing details which develops a constructive outcome; the end-point should be an understanding of the situation and a resolution or answer
13. The dynamics of article reuse
The reuse of articles is generally a good thing; however:
- Low levels of reuse can be an indicator that the articles are not findable due to structure issues or problems with the search algorithms
- High levels of reuse can be an indicator that the sources of the exceptions are not being removed from the environment
14. Create a new article vs reuse an existing one
- Article creation should occur when a unique entity is required to address a set of circumstances not yet documented in the knowledge base
- A newly created article may or may not be complete, but it adds value to the knowledge sharing process
15. Article metadata and concepts of the knowledge article life cycle
Knowledge article creation involves adding attributes to an article that help organize the knowledge base content; control visibility and assess the value of article entities. Managing both data and metadata is required for effective knowledge article creation
16. Understand the organizational value of KCS
Benefits to each of the three stakeholders:
- Knowledge Workers
- Less redundant work
- Recognition for problem-solving skills
- Individual learning and the learning of others
- Confidence in working on new areas/technologies
- Customers
- Speed, accuracy, and consistency of answers
- Organization
- Cost savings through operational efficiencies
- Increased customer loyalty