One of the most common reasons why Service Desk teams have a weak or non-existent knowledge repository is that they don't know how to incentivize employees to create content. I've heard about competitions with incentives (pizza, money, days off) based on the number of knowledge documents (or articles) that an IT employee creates. But these efforts seldom produce the quality focused content that the organization needs. Additionally the biggest hurdle is convincing employees that sharing their knowledge is not only beneficial to the organization but also for their career. The old way of thinking is that if I share all of my expertise and make it publically available within the organization then I'm lessening my value and ultimately working myself out of a job. I think younger employees understand the value of sharing knowledge online based on the culture and mindset of "the millennials" (See Crystal Miceli's recent blog on digital natives). But changing someone's mindset around sharing their knowledge is not an easy one and one that can't be solved in a short blog.

Let's focus rather on a knowledge creation process that works by incentivizing groups in the organization with one of the most powerful tools - less annoying work. I don't have an officially branded name for this process but I like to call it "the escalation based creation process." The idea is to get the level 2 teams within the IT organization to create content that the level 1 Service Desk team can use to resolve the problems without level 2 assistance. I'll break down the process into a few steps below:

1. Run a monthly escalation trend report - Run a report on a monthly basis to see all the escalations from the Service Desk level 1 team to the level 2 teams. Look for trends of similar escalations. For example 20 escalations to the same team on a VPN issue and 15 to the Exchange team on a particular connection issue. Identify the top five to 10 trends.
2. Meet with the level 2 team managers - Sit down with the managers and brief them on last month's escalation reports and the top trends you identified. Ask if they can look into the trends in their specific area and if these could be resolved by a knowledge document written by the level 2 team for the level 1 team. The level 1 team could then resolve future incidents and not escalate them to the level 2 teams (i.e. the level 2 teams could focus on their day job and not incident resolution). Some of the trends may not be able to be resolved with a step by step knowledge document but the hope is that many can be. This may also be an opportunity to engage the problem management team to identify if any of these trends are problems that require resolution.
3. Level 2 teams create the knowledge documents - The level 2 teams create the content and follow the normal knowledge creation and publication process. Most importantly the content needs to be for level 1 analyst consumption.
4. Level 1 team uses the knowledge documents - The level 1 Service Desk analysts utilize the knowledge content from level 2 to resolve incidents at their level. This not only lowers the cost of resolving those incidents but it frees up the level 2 teams to work on other tasks.
5. Repeat - Repeat this process on a monthly basis and discuss new incident escalation trends.

I think this is a knowledge creation process that works without a lot of overhead and hopefully is a win/win for both the levels 1 and 2 teams. I look forward to your comments and feedback.

Pizza image used under Creative Commons License courtesty of florianrieder.