Fitting Best Practices Together: ITIL® and KCS℠

Blog Post • Best Practice Insights • [read_meter]

So you are the person responsible for developing the service management strategy for your organization. You know you cannot take a big risk by creating such an important strategy in a vacuum. While you are very wise, your experiences are not as valuable as the sum of experiences of your peers in the industry. You do not have time to interview all of your peers so you decide to leverage service management best practices.

Best practices for service management, also known as frameworks, methodologies, and standards, are produced by a number of organizations. These organizations take the time to collect the experiences of industry experts and practitioners and then document those experiences in a format that can be consumed by others. The problem is there are many service management best practices and you want to select the right one.

That would be your first mistake: thinking that you should select just one. These published best practices often have specific areas of focus. Your task is to learn from each of them and fit the pieces together to create the right service management strategy to satisfy your organization’s business needs. The information technology infrastructure library (ITIL®) is unquestionably the most commonly used source for developing a service management strategy. You will note I used the word source, as ITIL is a set of books. No organization does ITIL or adopts ITIL. Rather, they adopt a service management strategy based on the best practices defined in the ITIL books. You should leverage ITIL to define your processes, such as incident management, request management, and problem management. These would be core processes for every service desk.

Being the wise service management professional that you are, you also know that knowledge management is a core process for the service desk as well. In fact, it is considered more important to implement knowledge management successfully than incident management by many support organizations. Being wise, you know you need both and that is it not an option to do one or the other. However, ITIL is not the best source for knowledge management best practices. For knowledge management best practices within service management, you need to leverage the Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS℠) methodology.

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About the author

Rick Joslin
Enterprise Knowledge Management Strategist at Cigna

Rick focuses on improving service management by adopting the Knowledge-Centered Service (KCS) methodology. He leads the enterprise knowledge management initiative at Cigna and serves as the Experience Owner of the KCS / KM ART within Cigna’s scaled Agile framework. As the Knowledge Product Strategist with KnowledgeDesk, he worked with and guided an agile software development team in Vietnam. At HDI, Rick Joslin led the certification business and was responsible for the development, sales, and delivery of HDI’s certification, training, and services offerings.

Rick is a certified Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) instructor and has guided organizations with the implementation of KCS. He was also a certified instructor for the HDI certification courses. As a member of IHS Support Solutions, he provided consulting services related to implementing and enhancing support operations with a focus on knowledge management and self-service. Prior to joining IHS, Rick founded his own consulting firm, Joslin & Associates. Formerly, Rick was the VP of Customer Care for ServiceWare, VP of RightAnswers.com, and VP of Knowledge Engineering. Rick was responsible for the production of the industry’s leading third-party knowledge bases, known as Knowledge-Paks.

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