How to manage a way that makes it easy to capture experiences in Service Manager 2012

The reality proves that the comprehensive and up-to-date knowledge base is an essential and laborious tool. We can accumulate tons of the resolved incidents with detailed (sometimes not so detailed) resolutions but our knowledge base may stay a desert. Some of the ITIL implementers think that an ability to edit the knowledge article in the web browser can change the status quo but the experienced practitioners know for sure that only a complete and present-day “how-to-do” database can encourage the end users to search in the KBs before creating a ticket.

As soon as the new information about the resolution is available and verified, it has to be pushed in the knowledge management’s process. Preferably, Incident Resolvers have to be the first ones who promote the resolution information and then the manager of the process will qualify the data and update the knowledge database if required.

ITIL states, “The key Knowledge Management activity around information is managing the content in a way that makes it easy to capture, query, find, re-use and learn from experiences so that mistakes are not repeated and work is not duplicated.”
In the Microsoft System Center 2012 Service Manager the first part of “the key Knowledge Management activity” is definitely SCUtils KnowledgeTask that affectedly simplifies the process of the capturing the information. The console task lets you resolve an incident and in same time create a draft of a knowledge article.

Starting from version 1.2 the solution can create the knowledge articles from resolved and closed incidents. If the incident is already in Resolved or Closed state, you use the Resolve and Create KA task (as for unsolved incidents) and immediately get a new knowledge article populated with the incident’s title, description, resolution text and linked to the source incident. Two seconds and the experience has been captured!

The next screenshots presents the action.

The incident has the resolution category and detailed resolution description. Now we click on Resolve and Create KA task.

And in a moment we see a new knowledgebase article. In the form, we can edit the captured information, specify additional fields, set the article’s status, etc. The first important move of the knowledge management’s process is made.