Knowledge Centered Support: What’s it all about?

KCS is a methodology and set of practices and processes focusing on knowledge as a key asset for any customer / technical support organisation. Developed by the Consortium for Service Innovation*, its' objective is to capture, structure, and re-use technical support knowledge.

Knowledge Management (KM) has always been an important part of Service Management, in particular in the creation of a Problem Management database for use by those involved with Incident and Problem Management.

With the advent of V3 of ITIL, Knowledge Management is a process that extends across all of ITIL and therefore its role in much larger. Whilst ITIL advocates the use of KM it does not provide a lot of assistance in how to implement a KM system. KCS provides the "how to".

In relation to ROI, setting up a Problem Management database is still a good place to start, as it increases the first time fix rate and reduces the effort and time required, but it is no longer the only place to start.

A number of organisations have been using KCS for some time now, and are seeing tangible results:

Wellington City Council have implemented KCS:

“In June 2008 a decision was made to implement Knowledge Centred Solutions (KCS) within the Application Delivery team. KCS was initially implemented as a 3 month pilot to gather information regarding the workload impact and to be able to clearly identify and document the benefits. Within 1 month the benefits of KCS were quickly apparent and a move to fully implementing KCS within the team proceeded.
The implementation of KCS has had the following benefits:

  • Sharing our knowledge means that the Service Desk can solve more calls at first point of contact and when the information is published to the Customer Portal the customer can even solve their own calls.
  • "Increasing our knowledge amongst the team members means that we all have an opportunity to learn.
  • Getting anecdotal and undocumented information into a system where it can be easily accessed by others means that we do not create "silos of information".
  • "Having access to pre-defined solutions means that we do not have to "reinvent the wheel" each time and our efforts our focused on developing and sharing knowledge.”
    - Stephanie Mardell - Wellington City Council

KCS defines a set of principles and practices, enabling organisations to improve service levels to customers, gain operational efficiencies, and increase the organisation's value to their company.

ProActive has developed a one-day training course designed to add further value to your ITIL initiatives. This is the only course certified by the Consortum for Service Innovation currently available in Australia and New Zealand that is aligned to ITIL V3!

Whilst KCS is across the board of IT and beyond, the training provides participants with a high level overview of KCS and identifies the interfaces to ITIL, in particular, to Incident and Problem Management

In today’s economic climate, organisations are looking for ways to capture, structure and reuse knowledge…. KCS provides a strategy to do just that.

Choose from a cost-effective on-site training option, take advantage of our public schedule, or take a look at our “Fast Track” Programme, designed to take advantage of ProActive’s considerable expertise in implementing Service Improvement Programmes and have organisations up and running with KCS quickly and effectively.

It’s designed for service desk and support centre professionals, supervisors, managers and directors responsible for managing their support centre’s resources, so contact us if you are interested in saving your organisation money AND improving service.