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ITIL + KCS = ITSM Success Back to Top

07.15.10
The Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) is the only consistent and comprehensive documentation of best practice for IT Service Management. Used by thousands of organisations around the world, a whole ITIL philosophy has grown up around the guidance contained within the ITIL books and the supporting professional qualification scheme.

Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) is a set of practices that integrates the creation and maintenance of knowledge into a set of clearly defined customer interactions. As a result, these practices specify a powerful process for continuous learning and improvement that is driven by the customer experience. These practices have been developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation, a non-profit alliance of organizations focused on innovation for the support industry.

Clients have leveraged Knowlysis experience in combining these best practice methodologies into a single package to help them become a knowledge driven organization and transform the help desk into a profit center.

Knowlysis has further expanded its ITSM practice area into the mid-market by offering services for the LANDesk Service Desk solution. Through a tight integration into the Incident Management process, analysts will soon recognize that knowledge content is a by-product of solving problems and that knowledge management is not something done in addition to solving problems, it becomes the process for solving problems.

To be clear, knowledge management is a process not a tool or technology. Knowlysis technology implementation services and workshops are designed to align organizational knowledge management processes, centered on ITIL and KCS best practices.

Addressing User Expectations for Search Back to Top

05.17.10
Anyone who spends much time online continues to encounter new and improved methods for finding the information they seek. Expectations now go far beyond basic keyword search for document retrieval. Consumer product sites present users with a column filled with options to create a more granular results list in order to find specific products of interest. Notice that when Microsoft branded their new consumer web search portal, it was presented as a “decision engine.”

In a recent EContent Magazine, Nancy Davis Kho titles her article “Search: It’s More Than Finding, It’s Doing.” She accurately observes that search expectations have moved from finding information to taking action with information. This changing perspective certainly has implications for the success rate for the use of search within any organization.

Knowlysis has assisted organizations with the many aspects to realizing success with search. We provide data cleansing, tagging, and conversion services to help ensure the quality of content available. As important is the user interface to search, including options for presenting search results. Where applicable, search results within the context of a business process or presentation of related content within the results help distinguish a contemporary search deployment from a standard document retrieval experience.

No matter how sophisticated the search tool that is implemented, one of the keys to maximizing the value to users comes in meeting the expectations of not just finding, but doing.

Knowlysis becomes Value Added Reseller of Heiler Software Back to Top

03.04.10
Detroit, March 4th 2010 - "E-Commerce can only be a success with perfect product information. With high quality data, the potential of up-selling and cross-selling can actually be achieved”, says Greg Wong, CEO at Heiler Software Corporation. To meet this demand Heiler and Knowlysis formed a partnership. Knowlysis becomes a Value Added Reseller of Heiler’s Enterprise Product Information Management (PIM) Suite. Heiler can be established as the central data management platform for E-Commerce solutions.

Knowlysis will work on selling and implementing both the Product Data Management and E-Commerce solutions with one face to the customer. “We recognize Heiler as a leading provider of a key infrastructure component missing in many businesses,” said Chris Worsley, CEO of Knowlysis. “Their robust Product Information Management platform allows us to offer our customers a more effective way forward for growing their online business.” Heiler’s Enterprise Product Information Management (PIM) solution is a standard solution for the management and communication of product data from one single central and controllable data source. Retailers, wholesale distributors, mail order businesses and manufacturers can increase marketing productivity and sales figures by utilizing the central Enterprise Product Information Management (PIM) solution. For the third year in a row, Gartner has named Heiler one of the top 10 worldwide leading providers of Master Data Management (MDM) solutions for product data and PIM.

The Value of Knowledge Flows Back to Top

01.29.10
In a recent New York Times Op-Ed piece, Thomas L. Freidman contrasts what he sees as the opposing forces that exist today in China between the very traditional state-owned enterprises and the independent entrepreneurial enterprises. He cites how these two groups approach the use of knowledge as a key differentiator.

In reading this article, you hopefully will see the parallel in how your organization should be thinking about how to better leverage knowledge. Mr. Freidman writes:

There are actually two Chinese economies today. There is the Communist Party and its affiliates; let's call them Command China. These are the very traditional state-owned enterprises. Alongside them, there is a second China, a highly entrepreneurial sector that has developed sophisticated techniques to generate and participate in diverse, high-value flows of business knowledge. I call that Network China.

What is so important about knowledge flows?

John Hagel, the noted business writer and management consultant argues in his recently released "Shift Index" that we're in the midst of "The Big Shift." We are shifting from a world where the key source of strategic advantage was in protecting and extracting value from a given set of knowledge stocks — the sum total of what we know at any point in time, which is now depreciating at an accelerating pace — into a world in which the focus of value creation is effective participation in knowledge flows, which are constantly being renewed.

"Finding ways to connect with people and institutions possessing new knowledge becomes increasingly important," says Hagel. Therefore, the more your company or country can connect with relevant and diverse sources to create new knowledge, the more it will thrive. And if you don't, others will.

The future belongs to those who promote richer and ever more diverse knowledge flows and develop the institutions and practices required to harness them.

Knowlysis employs a number of technologies along with Knowledge Management best practices that can help your organization make the transition from building knowledge stocks to creating more valuable knowledge flows.

Knowlysis Presenation at Worldwide Remedy Users Group Back to Top

11.10.09
Alan Blake, Senior Knowledge Architect at Knowlysis, was selected to present at the recent Worldwide Remedy Users Group in Las Vegas on the subject of knowledge management. Through Alan's experience with Remedy Knowledge Management and experience with KM principles, he has led the development of Knowledge Management Best Practices, an offering provided by Knowlysis to help organizations gain the most value from their knowledge systems.

Below is the description of Alan's presentation:

"Every organization is required to resolve internal and external customer problems. But do you solve the same problem multiple times? If so, where would you begin the effort to improve your knowledge management system? Effective knowledge management requires not only the appropriate technology, but also proven, reliable processes. Learn the latest best practices in knowledge management using industry standard Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) to begin the way forward toward more efficient and effective problem resolution".
Click here for a link to his presentation

New Office Announcement Back to Top

10.25.09
Our new office Over the past seven years, Knowlysis has realized consistent growth through successful customer and partner relationships. We are pleased to announce a significant step forward as a result of this success – we have relocated to a substantially larger and more functional office facility. Click here for more...

Knowledge Support for e-Commerce Back to Top

08.25.09
There are many elements to the design and implementation of a high quality e-Commerce site. Understandably, the focus typically centers on the core components of product presentation and the purchase transaction – including the product catalog with search, merchandising and offers, shopping cart, marketing campaign management, and analytics.

There is another important element that should be considered a necessity for any world class e-Commerce site. The resolution of customer problems, questions, and incidents must be handled quickly and effectively. According to the Service and Support Professionals Association (SSPA), the most common customer complaint about service and support is the length of time it takes most organizations to resolve incidents. So in addition to the core e-commerce components mentioned above, a knowledge support system should be considered a baseline requirement.

The objective of the knowledge support system is to streamline and improve customer service, ideally combining knowledge management with customer and incident management into a single solution. By empowering agents with a comprehensive toolkit, increased customer satisfaction and loyalty will result, while reducing the overall cost of customer service. There is also the added benefit of reducing training time as well as the IT expenses of deploying and managing in-house solutions.

As a partner with ATG, a trusted, global specialist in e-Commerce, we have built a great depth of experience and have developed best practices around the implementation and use of ATG Knowledge, as a part of the ATG e-Commerce suite.

The implementation best practices developed by Knowlysis incorporate the Consortium for Service Innovation's Knowledge-Centered Support standards. These industry produced standards help to create benchmarks for the knowledge system. ATG has incorporated these same standards in the development of ATG Knowledge.

Remedy User Group Sponsor Back to Top

05.04.09
Every organization is required to resolve internal and external customer problems. But do you solve the same problem multiple times?  If so, where would you begin the effort to improve your knowledge management system?  Effective knowledge management requires not only the appropriate technology, but also proven, reliable processes.  Learn the latest best practices in knowledge management using industry standard Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) to begin the way forward toward more efficient and effective problem resolution.

It is virtually impossible to resolve a technical support issue without a good understanding of the problem.  Gaining that understanding can be a challenging, time consuming process; for both the end user and the technical support staff. Is there a better way to gather reported incident information?  The BMC Desktop Capture and Application Problem Resolution products use technology that is analogous to a black box flight recorder used in aircraft, that is deployed on demand to the end-users' computer.  It records screen events, sequence of user actions, configuration and performance information while the end-user is reproducing the issue, and attaches the recording to a Remedy Help Desk ticket.  Discover how you can replace your error-prone, manual collection processes with these automated, time-saving BMC solutions.

Less time to resolution with better use of a knowledge management processes and more effectively gathering incident information means increased customer and analyst satisfaction!

KNOWLYSIS will be presenting on the aforementioned topics at the following Remedy User Groups:
 
» May 12, 2009 in Salt Lake City, UT
(held at LDS Conference Center on North Temple from 8-1)

» May 22, 2009 in Austin, TX (details and registration found here)

Hope to see you there!

Jive Social Business Software Release 3.0 Back to Top

03.13.09
We have seen the Collaboration / Social Media software product marketplace evolve substantially over the past two years. With the announcement of Jive's Social Business Software (SBS) 3.0 release, that evolution has taken a major step forward. The new SBS platform provides a solution targeted for specific needs within the large enterprise, while maintaining the feature flexibility that has made Jive so successful to date.

At Knowlysis, we are excited about the new possibilities this will bring to our customers through our partnership with Jive. It feels to us like this market space has moved from its start as being perceived by many organizations as a curiousity or 'nice to have' to a high value enterprise solution to information sharing and gathering. Social software for the business has come of age!

Below is the press release issued by Knowlysis regarding this significant product development:

Knowlysis and Jive Software Partner to Provide Social Business Software to Customers

(Orem, UT) –- March 10, 2009 – Knowlysis and Jive Software today announced their support of Jive Social Business Software 3. Knowlysis and Jive, through the Jive Solution Provider program, have a strategic partnership to provide social business software and implementation services to mutual customers.

With an ongoing focus to help customers realize the value of information sharing inside and outside of the organization, Knowlysis has created a new social business networking practice area. This has resulted in the development of a holistic approach to implementations, ensuring integration with other information sources, increased user adoption, and shared best practices for long term success.

Jive is the creator of Social Business Software (SBS), the new business architecture that's helping companies break through bottlenecks, do more with less, and rapidly produce results. With Jive SBS, employees, customers and partners are instantly connected, problems are quickly solved, unrealized opportunities are seized, and priorities get aligned.  When businesses use Jive SBS to harness the collective intelligence and creativity of its social business network, revenues go up and costs go down, creating a Social Capital Marketplace underpinning improved performance and customer satisfaction.

"As we have seen increased interest in social business software, we are very grateful to have a strong solution provider partner in Jive to enable us to offer our customers an outstanding platform," said Chris Worsley, CEO of Knowlysis. "With a crowded field of products attempting to fill this need, Jive has emerged as a leader, offering a solid solution."

"Jive is strongly committed to our partners for helping drive customer success," said Robert Brown, vice president of client services at Jive. "We are very pleased to have a partner in Knowlysis who brings a tremendous depth of experience to this space, which helps assure the success of Jive customers."

About Jive Jive is the SBS marketshare leader with more than 2,500 customers, including 15% of the Fortune 500.  In 2008, Jive recognized quarter over quarter growth of 20% and was named a Gartner Magic Quadrant Visionary and a Forrester WAV leader. Founded in 2001, Jive is headquartered in Portland, Oregon. For more information, visit Jive Software online.

The ROI of Knowledge Management - A Study by the SSPA Back to Top

02.24.09
With the introduction of a knowledge management system in a support center, there is an intuitive notion that increased quality of problem resolution, reduced time per resolution, and increased call agent/customer satisfaction will result.

As pointed out in a recent white paper produced by the Service & Support Professional Association*, "Measuring the impact of knowledge management (KM) initiatives is critical in order to understand the benefits received by the technology and to verify you are leveraging the implementation to receive the maximum return on investment (ROI)."

The calculation of ROI resulting from the implementation of a KM system presents challenges – perhaps more so than with other technology introductions that have a more narrowly defined function. However, this should not suggest that there aren't very good reasons to pursue a ROI analysis – the process of conducting the ROI analysis can expose further opportunities to drive value from the system .

The bottom line from the SSPA report:

"A thorough understanding of the impacts of knowledge management for support is critical in order to determine budgets for future projects and to calculate actual savings from existing KM projects.

Invest in metrics. Having a formal metrics program, including training for new supervisors on what the metrics mean, how to calculate them, and the impacts of each, is a baseline requirement for all support organizations.

Benchmark your performance against your peers. SSPA Research recommends identifying the metrics most out of line with your peers, and then understand what technology and processes can most impact these metrics. This approach can be used to segment a large KM vision into bite-size projects.

Look beyond ROI. The primary drive behind KM metrics is usually to understand the ROI for an implementation. Keep in mind that the impacts of KM are much broader than just agent productivity, and track longer-term impacts to customer satisfaction, loyalty, and revenue as well."

 

For the full SSPA report see – ROI of Knowledge Management

*About the SSPA
As the industry's foremost professionals association, the Service & Support Professionals Association (SSPA) is a key resource for the information and best practices needed to make better business decisions. It brings together the best minds from across the industry spectrum – from established companies with successful track records to the pioneering newcomers with out-of-the-box ideas. The SSPA also partners with thought leaders such as J.D. Power and Associates and the Wharton School to create programs that benefit the industry. The SSPA is a member of a global network of associations that includes the Technology Professional Services Association (TPSA) and the Association for Services Management International (AFSMI). For more information, visit www.thesspa.com

Improve Service Desk Efficiency with Automated Incident Data Capture Back to Top

01.28.09
Through its partnership with BMC, Knowlysis is now able to offer a new product with dramatic ROI for the service desk. BMC Desktop Capture is an exciting new technology offered by BMC aimed at increasing efficiency and adding capacity to the help/service desk.

 

Desktop Capture accelerates problem resolution and increases end-user satisfaction by reducing the time that support analysts and end-users spend on gathering incident information. The product implements the concept of a black box flight recorder to automate information capture and eliminate inefficiencies of traditional desktop support processes.

 

More specifically, the BMC Desktop Capture solution automates 80-90% of the manual process of information gathering during L1 support calls.  This reduces the length of each call, causes less of a disruption to end-users, eliminates the need to use remote desktop capture tools and because it automatically attaches to a Remedy trouble ticket, allows your support group to have a complete capture of the problem that can be escalated throughout your levels of support.   All of this allows you to significantly reduce the MTTR – Mean Time To Resolution of reported L1 support calls.

 

Key Benefits

Below are some of the benefits your organization will be able to realize through the BMC Desktop Capture solution:

  • Automate incident documentation
  • Minimize time-to-resolution
  • Enable self-service incident reporting
  • Minimize disruption to end-users
  • Reduce volume of support phone calls
  • Reduce support call length
  • Reduce ticket escalations
  • Eliminate finger-pointing
 

Please see the IT Service Management page for more information and to schedule an online demo.

The Growing Impact of Social Networks for Online Merchants Back to Top

12.30.08
The increasing connection of social communities around many areas of interest is having a real effect on online buying behaviors. There are an ever rising number of examples of online retailers increasing brand loyalty and driving additional business through the power of social communities built around their product category or product related activities.

In a recent posting on e-commerceINSIGHTS.com, ATG CEO Bob Burke references the recent Wall Street Journal article that has commented on this phenomenon:

The Wall Street Journal has recently run a couple of interesting stories related to customer loyalty, online marketing, and social computing. One of these articles (Marketing in the World of the Web, by Tom Hayes and Michael Malone) centers on the power of social networks to "reconfigure individual behavior." It argues that retailers need to leverage this social movement to help their efforts to create a more loyal consumer base, thereby increasing sales and profits. Offering their thoughts on a "Marketing 3.0" world, the authors focus their comments on 5 key themes:

  • Gaining customer attention before winning loyalty
  • Appealing to specific communities of interest vs. the general customer base
  • Targeting the "meganiches" of highly specialized, yet relevant, online communities
  • Exploiting the viral power of social communities
  • Making offline and online channels work in tandem

The complete text is available at:
http://ecommerceinsights.com/blog1/2008/12/08/the-wall-street-journal-says-to-online-merchants-put-social-communities-in-your-cross-hairs/

This dynamic represents an important trend in how online merchants can tap into areas of interest around their products, build topical conversations among customers, and grow sales opportunities.

Knowlysis experience with social software and e-Commerce applications positions us as a valuable resource for exploring how to best keep your online competitive edge in this area.

Knowledge Management Best Practices Back to Top

11.21.08
Has your organization invested in Knowledge Management, but you are unsure of its effectiveness?  Knowlysis has developed a suite of best practice offerings that will provide you with the confidence you need to successfully implement the processes and practices used by top companies today.

Knowledge Management Fundamentals Workshop To effectively train and help organizations implement Knowledge Management best practices, Knowlysis has taken the Knowledge Centered Support (KCS) methodology and structured it into the following five areas of focus for the Knowledge Management Fundamentals Workshop:

  • Organizational Alignment
  • Problem Solving
  • Quality Assurance
  • Rights and Visibility
  • Performance Assessment

Knowledge Management best practices can help you streamline your Knowledge Management processes, increase your service center's capacity and knowledge throughput, and empower your analysts. Implementing Knowledge Management best practices will reduce your overall service center costs, increase customer satisfaction, and improve your company's bottom line.

Knowledge Management Maturity and Progression Analysis An in-depth analysis of your help desk/service center to help you understand your organizations current level of Knowledge Management maturity within the context of the Knowledge-Centered Support (KCS) best practices methodology for Knowledge Management. The following methods are used throughout the analysis process to provide you with an accurate and complete Knowledge Management picture of your organization:

  • Surveys
  • Interviews
  • Live-Action Observations
  • Data Analysis
  • Analysis Report

This analysis can provide you with the information you need to move your help desk or service center to the next level and continue to enjoy the benefits of implementing sound Knowledge Management practices

Knowledge Management Best Practices Implementation Coaching Because Knowlysis understands implementing these best practices can be very challenging, they offer coaching, particularly for the help desk manager, to bridge the gap between understanding and implementation, and thus reduce and eliminate the frustration of trying to forge on by yourself. Knowlysis utilizes the following methods throughout the coaching engagement process to provide necessary and sufficient help in implementing Knowledge Management best practices:

  • Knowledge Management Maturity and Progression Analysis
  • "Next Steps" Training
  • Implementation Training
  • Follow-up Observation

Knowlysis' goal is to enable the help desk manager and analysts to carry the Knowledge Management best practices forward on their own. Knowlysis is also aware that each organization is different, with different needs, which is why each coaching engagement is tailored to each organization specifically.

FREE Evaluation
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