BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT

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FEBRUARY 2008

KM for legal apps

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Probing the knowledge market

BY STEPHEN E. ARNOLD Google (google.com), according to Credit Suisses (credit-suisse.com) analyst Heath B. Terry, is a company with an advertising operating system, as reported in the firms Nov. 20, 2007 report, Building Advertisings Operating System. With Nielsen (nielsen.com) NetRatings and Web pundits pegging Googles share of the Web search market at 50 percent or more, most people perceive Google as a Web search engine. Those experts overlook Googles disruptive probes into new markets. A case in point is Googles looming presence in publishing knowledge. For now, Googles probe is for general Web users. But integrating the new service into Google enterprise applications is trivial, not much more than flipping a bit from a zero to a one. When Udi Manber, a Google VP of engineering, posted Encouraging People to Contribute Knowledge to the Official Google Blog on Dec. 13, 2007, few people took notice. Thats an oversight that knowledge managers and others will want to correct. Heres why: ITEM: Udi Manber is not just a Google engineer, hes one of Googles super-engineers, responsible for the top-secret inner workings of Googles software infrastructure. After a stint at Amazon (amazon.com), Manber snapped into the Google brain trust with responsibility for core search. He joined Vint Cerf, Jeffrey Dean, Urs Hlzle, Peter Norvig and Sanjay Ghemawat in enhancing Googles next-generation application platform. His blog post (http://googleblog.blog stop.com/2007/12/encouraging-peo ple-to-contribute.html) makes explicit Googles publishing initiative. He writes: We started inviting a selected group of people to try a new, free tool that we are calling knol, which stands for a unit of knowledge. Our goal is to encourage people who know a particular subject to write an authoritative article about it. The system is a Google beta, standard Google operating procedure. Manber continues, The key idea behind the knol project is to highlight authors. Books have authors names right on the cover, news articles have bylines, scientific articles always have authorsbut somehow the Web evolved without a strong standard to
PROBING continues on page 3

Knowledge worker: Do you relate?

BY JONATHAN SPIRA Despite the fact that there are 56 million of us out there, people continue to struggle both with the definition of a knowledge worker as well as with self-identification. In a casual setting, such as a pub, a factory worker would have no problem introducing himself saying, Im a factory worker. But could you picture a knowledge worker making a similar introduction, saying, Hi, Im a knowledge worker? Few of us self-identify in that fashion, and even those who study the knowledge economy and knowledge workers seem to have trouble with the concept. The term knowledge worker itself is an overlay
KNOWLEDGE continues on page 26

ITIL 3: executive validation for KM

BY PETER DORFMAN Information technology is the nervous system of every enterprise. Supporting IT has matured from costly annoyance to major strategic component of corporate governance. There are objectively right and wrong ways to run IT. The broadly accepted right ways are called best practices. For the last 17 years, the gold standard for best practice in IT service management (ITSM) has been a framework developed under the sponsorship of the Office of Government Commerce (ogc.gov.uk), an arm of the British government. The framework, called the IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL), consists of a set of scholarly books laying out the best practices. A substantial, worldwide cottage industry has arisen for consultancies and training organizations teaching ITIL, certifying its practitioners and helping thousands of organizations to adopt the ITIL processes. In March 2007, ITIL saw the launch of the frameworks third major release. ITIL 3 significantly
ITIL continues on page 16

Top U.S. Priorities for KM Improvement in 2008

5% 8% 8% 9% 11% 11% 16%
Sourcing and Procurement Financial Processes (Invoicing, Accounts Payable, etc.) Governance, Risk and Promotion Advertising, Marketing and Promotion Decision Support and Business Intelligence Research and Development Sales or E-Commerce

18%

Information Worker Productivity and Knowledge Mgmt

Customer Service and Support

17%
Source: AMR Research

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ECM market 8 Retail inroads 24 Industry watch 28

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ITIL continues from page 1

changes the scope of the framework. One important change directly affects those in IT with a stake in the knowledge management discipline. KM frequently has established its first beachhead in organizations within IT and IT support. The concept is simple: Analysts at an IT help desk have access to one anothers troubleshooting smarts through an interactive knowledgebase tied into the incident management or call management system they share. Thus, each analyst can handle a wider variety of issues competently, and all analysts will tend to resolve issues and restore usersservices faster, more accurately and at a lower total cost. KM arguably has the potential to offer significant productivity gains beyond the service desk. Knowledge sharing enables more informed decision-making, and the people who provide and manage IT services make critical decisions constantly, about changes to the infrastructure, organization of projects and teams, adoption of new technologies, protection of IT assets from disaster or hacking, and other relatively strategic issues remote from routine, tactical PC support. Success at this more strategic form of KM is riskier than it is in the more prosaic application in help desk trouble-shooting. It is easy to quantify the impact of better problem resolution on productivity over a period of time. Outside the service desk setting, productivity gains may be real, but will be harder to recognize as they happen.

ITIL 2 PROCESSES
Service Support Processes

Service Delivery Processes

Service desk Incident management Problem management Configuration management Change management Release management

Service level management Financial management Capacity management Availability management Security management IT service continuity management

ITSM platforms of their clients, and some of what works for problem resolution will have a place in the larger ITIL 3 context. Best positioned are the vendors of the ITSM platforms themselves, the largest of which already provide their own KM solutions. ITIL 3 raises the profile of KM among executives who provide the sponsorship and funding for IT. For the first time, recognition of the strategic value of institutional knowledge is elevated to a fundamental best practiceat any rate, this is a first for KM within a framework that is widely adopted globally. KM adoption is a significant undertaking. Its ultimate sponsor is likely to be someone remote from the actual processes in which it is going to be applied, and who may have little personal involvement in its implementation. The manager seeking that sponsorship must convince the executive that funding the KM project will provide a benefit to the business and reflect well on the sponsor. The existence of a widely adopted best practice supporting KM helps to make the case that there is a

from the service desk up through the various levels of specialized owners of the processes by which the IT infrastructure is built and nurtured. Any interruption in service is an incident. The service desk is charged with resolving incidents and restoring service as quickly and completely as possible. Recurring incidents frequently stem from underlying problemsroot causes that ITIL views as errors in the infrastructure. Problem management is a process (typically owned by someone outside the service desk) for diagnosing and permanently resolving problems (i.e., correcting errors in the infrastructure). One of ITILs most ambitious prescriptions is that the IT assets of the enterprise assets be represented in a massive configuration management database (CMDB). Configuration items in the CMDB include the assets themselves (hardware, software, networks, etc.), as well as more conceptual objects such as services, documentation and the users who have rights to the assets. Many of the

The service delivery processes are designed to facilitate the overall management of the anticipated growth of the infrastructure, including planning to meet the growing capacity requirements of the business, building in disaster recovery measures to maximize the availability of assets, financing the growth of IT and managing the relationship between IT and the business so that business needs are met.

Higher heights
After seven years of application, the organizations responsible for ITIL recognized that building out the ITIL 2 processes, as in the chart above, would bring the enterprise to a static endpoint, in which the dozen distinct processes were often owned by separate teams and isolated in silos. ITIL 3 is intended to take the adopting organization to a higher level of process maturity, and among the explicit goals of the refresh are: To remove the process silos, To more closely integrate IT service management processes with the processes of the business, and To create a more dynamic framework that recognizes that businessesand IT infrastructures constantly change. ITIL 3 embraces the concept of the IT service life cycle, and the need to manage services through recurring cycles of design, implementation, adoption, operation, feedback and improvement. The dozen ITIL 2 processes are subsumed within five new life cycle stages, each represented by a new ITIL book, entitled as follows: Service Strategydevelopment of strategies, policies and standards for IT services; Service Designwhere new services or changes are planned and developed; Service Transitionmanaging the introduction of changes devised and planned during the service design stage; Service Operationthe day-today delivery of services and

ITIL 3 finally puts KM on the IT executives map. It establishes a context for the management of institutional knowledgetranscending the everyday business of managing incidents, rooting out errors in the infrastructure and resolving recurring problems.
ITIL 3 finally puts knowledge management on the IT executives map. It establishes a context for the management of institutional knowledgetranscending the everyday business of managing incidents, rooting out errors in the infrastructure and resolving recurring problems. That is good for proponents of broad application of KMespecially process consultants. It is unclear what its impact will be on the current vendors of KM software tools, most of which are narrowly focused on problem resolution. Visionary vendors will find ways to build collaboration and community-building tools onto the proven and documented right way to do KM, and that the proposed project has a high probability of success because best practice will be adopted. aforementioned errors in the infrastructure will be configuration errors; the CMDB makes those errors explicit. A comprehensive and current CMDB allows the organization to view changes to the infrastructure in terms of all the interconnected configuration items affected. That goes for both scheduled and unscheduled changes. A release of new hardware, software or even process into the IT environment may be a major scheduled change; ITIL provides a dedicated process for managing releases in terms of their impact on the infrastructure.

ITIL refreshed
Earlier versions of ITIL described IT service management as a set of discrete processes. There are management processes for the support of the current IT infrastructureservice support processesand processes for evolving the infrastructure as it grows in scale and complexity, and financing that evolution. The framework describes the way information and responsibility flow

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implementation of the service delivery processes adopted by IT; and Continual Service Improvement monitoring and identifying structural service issues and development of practical ways to address issues and design service improvements into the next cycle of implementation. The stages are presented in a sequential order, but each stage is seen as feeding back into all of the previous stages. And continual service improvement is not an end stage of maturity, but a point in a continuous, recurring cycle of service evolution.

Ivor MacFarlane, published for the U.K. Office of Government Commerce by The Stationery Office (TSO) of the U.K. government, 2007) include many of the conventional benefits ascribed to problem resolution tools deployed in service desks: Better, faster, more accurate problem-solving; Higher first-call resolution rates or lower rates of escalation to higher-level subject matter experts; and Reduced training to bring agents to full competence.

of knowledge processinga general, portal view, as well as specific dashboards for business functions such as governance, quality management, asset and configuration management, and the service desk. A customer view, for self-service, also is proposed. Given the sprawling nature of ITIL, it is difficult to conceive of one system that supports the entire framework, but vendors have developed broad IT service management platforms and have ITIL thought leaders on their payrolls. BMC Software (bmc.com),

commitment of resources than would be involved in building a problem resolution knowledgebase. It also will entail an extensive executive sponsorship commitment, over a long period of time. In organizations committed to ITIL, Version 3 clearly is an opportunity to get KM onto executive radar screens, perhaps for the first time. Managers who have attempted to promote KM adoption may see this as a golden moment to advance a personal objective, and they may be right.

ITIL 3 and knowledge

Until now, ITIL never explicitly advocated development of a knowledgebase, although the known error database, presented within the ITIL 2 problem management process as a key repository for infrastructure errors and solutions to those errors, can be recognized as a knowledgebase. ITIL has never specified how a known error database should be composedit could be something as simple as a spreadsheet, or it could be a complex, enterprise knowledge management system. The incident management process includes a step called matching, in which the analyst compares a new incident to past incidents, to classify and identify it in reference to known errors, and to suggest the appropriate workarounds or fixes. Those conditioned to see that as an occasion to consult a knowledgebase can easily do so. KM can be a pervasive subprocess throughout IT service management, but ITIL has not specified how. It offers its first guidelines in the ITIL 3 release. ITIL 3 proposes development of a service knowledge management system (SKMS)a singular solution intended to capture knowledge from sources ranging from one end of the service management process life cycle to the other. Service Transition does not reference any particular design or vendor. But it clearly envisions an enterprise knowledge platform, as opposed to a point solution for problem resolution. Knowledge assets flow into the SKMS from a variety of sources and directions, including data, housed in the CMDB, about the organizations configuration items and how they relate to one another. Configuration data passes from the CMDB through a higher-level logical repository called the configuration management system (CMS). Metrics for KM, as defined in Service Transition (by Shirley Lacy and

ITIL 3 proposes development of a service knowledge management system (SKMS)a singular solution intended to capture knowledge from sources ranging from one end of the service management process life cycle to the other.
But the ITIL conception of successful KM, especially during the service transition phase, includes broader metrics such as: Successful, error-free adoption and implementation of new or changed services; Greater responsiveness to changing business demands, attributed to more successful information retrieval to resolve questions and issues; and Improved access to and adoption of standards and policies. HP (hp.com) and CA (ca.com) generally are thought to have the broadest ITSM platforms. Other notable players include IBM (ibm.com), Compuware (compuware.com), Axios Systems (ax iossystems.com), Infra (infra.com.au), Lontra (longtra.com) and FrontRange (frontrange.com). In a white paper for its Vantage platform, Compuware describes the SKMS as a system that integrates data from multiple sources including service desk data, change data, CMS, CMDB, release data, applications, user experience metrics, the critical business services and the IT service components that support them and any other relevant data including from mainframe. Vantage funnels data from those multiple sources, in effect federating the systems in a middle architectural layer Compuware calls the service model, and presenting the results in a dashboard featuring reports and graphical monitors. Presumably, other vendor-generated conceptions for the SKMS will emerge in coming months. But one piece of objective counsel in KM adoption does not change as a result of ITIL 3. The framework calls for a strategic vision for enterprise knowledge. But the best roadmap for success in knowledge management will get the adopter there in small increments. An effective KM adoption is a big win, and the way to win big is by repeatedly winning small. In other words, have a master plan for eventual development of a comprehensive SKMS, but leverage tactical returns on productivity gains in incident and problem management to build confidence in KM as a general practice. Extend what is learned to support processes like change and release management. Then start asking what if questions: What if we took the tools and processes we used in knowledge-enabling problem management, and used them to help users understand what services we provide and how to get the most out of them? What if we applied those tools to external customer questions about our products? What if we offered that kind of knowledge to people who havent become customers yet? This approach reduces the risk of the initiative, as well as the rate at which costs are incurred, increasing the likelihood of long-term commitment on the part of executive sponsors and rank and file beneficiaries.
Peter Dorfman is principal consultant at Leveraged Technology (lev-tech.com), a professional services firm focused on customer service and support for corporate clients. He is ITIL-certified, and has been involved in KM initiatives since 1990, e-mail [email protected]. February 2008

Technology issues
So what exactly is a service knowledge management system, and what does it look like? Service Transition provides a basic architecture that is simple enough on paper, but vast in its implications. At the bottom, data flows in from numerous unstructured sources, as well as structured databases, the CMDB (itself a large, federated database pulling content from multiple sources) and a variety of applications from across the enterprise. In the information integration layer, all of those data streams are subjected to mapping, normalization, reconciliation, synchronization, mining and the like, to become intelligible components of the SKMS. In the knowledge processing layer, data from the SKMS are processed into usable intelligence through query and analysis, reporting, monitoring, business analytic processes (e.g., forecasting, budgeting and planning) and modeling. The presentation layer provides multiple views into the end results

Current picture
For those of us who have been watching the gradual adoption of KM as a core service desk practice over the last two decades, ITIL 3 may represent the first real executive level validation for knowledge as a strategic asset. Then again, it may not. Many organizations have experienced measurable success in KM but generally in low-risk, tactical implementations in the service desk. The SKMS envisioned in ITIL 3 is KM at its grandest, and its riskiest. A full build-out will require a larger

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