Harnessing internal operational intellectual property should be a prime objective for every management team. A key tenet of incident management is the post-mortem process your operational team can use to prevent chronic problems from re-occurring. If you are capturing your operational knowledge, your sins of the past can be converted into the wisdom of the future – increasing operational performance. What you must do is set the team up for success. With the correct strategy in place everyone can participate and this priority can be accomplished with a positive result.
Social engineering needs to be at the core of your strategy. Capturing and use of incentivized operational knowledge should be the first focus. Attending lengthy post-mortem meetings and review meetings do not accomplish long term operational results. Leveraging a web 2.0 or ‘crowd wisdom’ approach allows real-time interaction between team members. The only team review should be when awards are given out on who adds the most high quality knowledge or leverages the most knowledge to accomplish better operational performance. Keeping team members socializing knowledge and communicating affectively will allow for lower learning curves and better team building. The more incentives operators have to use the knowledge management solution, the more likely they will participate.
Another focus should be on ease. Any knowledge management process that is going to be added needs to dovetail fully with common workflows. Operators are busy and getting them on the same page is difficult, unless it’s easy to participate. Instant messaging and text messaging are key examples of overcoming communication hurdles. Leveraging that same concept, capturing the knowledge needs to be embedded into your incident management process. Remember that any embedding should provide immediate benefit (as discussed above) to the operator. The ease of knowledge management will minimize the cost to the user and increase participation.
The last key pillar of harnessing knowledge management is centered on investing in content creation during product development and engineering. Operators need a base of value to start with; nobody wants to start with a blank slate. If a knowledge base is created in the early phases of product deployment then it will provide the proper example of operations to build from into the future. Such knowledge can also be leveraged during the pilot phase or for testing the new product as well. With AssureNow’s export features, that knowledge can be migrated to production with a controlled package version that’s easy to install. For operations to use knowledge it must exist to demonstrate the value; and doing so in development sets the right example to the business’s commitment to harnessing that knowledge.
Empowering operators to harness knowledge management is critical to increasing operational performance. Operators can only harness knowledge if they participate. They will only participate if properly incentivized, interaction is easy, and the knowledge base is not empty. AssureNow enables operations to harness that knowledge using the RID/HELP and KOALA concepts to drive operational performance.
Look for more blogs on this “Empowering Operators” series (using the tag on the left of the blog). If you are interested in learning more about this solution and are looking for a demonstration, please schedule a meeting with Monolith using this link.
If you are interested in learning how capabilities like advanced correlation help customers in a unified service assurance solution, check out this case study with Oracle here.
John Locke 