This article tries to share and examine the knowledge management of the IT support department in company A. As a result, knowledge management is the effective and innovative tool that the department uses to support their work process and services. However, implementing the knowledge management system is not easy as there are several factors that the department needs to consider.
In this paper, we aim to describe some of the factors that influence the success of knowledge management implementation, including the obstacles and problems faced by the IT support department. Knowledge management is a methodology for acquiring, distributing, acquiring, sharing and using knowledge in effective ways. Knowledge management is seen as an organizational tool whose content can create value for employees and customers.
Especially for IT companies, knowledge management should be up-to-date, as the world of technology is constantly changing rapidly.
LITERATURE REVIEWS
Knowledge Management (KM)
Knowledge management is a collaborative and integrated approach to the creation, capture, organization, access and use of a company's intellectual assets.” Historically, Knowledge Management is primarily about managing the knowledge of and in organizations, the process and methodology of which varies according to the organization's size, company vision, mission and strategy. Perhaps Knowledge Management is capturing the knowledge and making it available for others to use in the organization.
Knowledge management creates the possibility to capture, store, share and utilize the knowledge and experience of the organization. The three main aspects of knowledge management are data, information and knowledge, whose definition can be described as follows. Data contains basic facts, statistics and values, which are the purpose of collection for reference and analysis.
The data can be collected from both internal and external organizations, such as the number of issues or problems reported by customers, the types of problems or problems, and the number of customers who complain and are satisfied with the products and services, etc. Collecting information and providing the context of the data, which helps the organization answer management's questions, allowing management to use business planning. Knowledge symbolizes the understanding and awareness of information and the use of information in an effective way that allows it to support decision making.
For example, the time each employee spends on each case, how the employee handles the case, what skills he lacks and in which area he should improve in order to handle the case faster and more efficiently. So that the organization or management can provide employees with training or upgrading of skills in the area they lack. As mentioned above, a company can collect data from internal and external organizations and then turn it into information over a period of time, which allows the company to develop its knowledge and store it in the organization's database.
Core Process of Knowledge Management: Methodology of knowledge capturing, storing, sharing and applying
For presentation and sharing, it is usually used in medium or large companies that have several departments and are accessible to everyone in the organization from their computer or workstation. For the knowledge management in terms of system, this use for the big companies that have offices and departments in various places or countries. However, all users must have username and password, which is the authentication to access the knowledge database of the company.
It is an activity how knowledge is exchanged between people in the organization or community. Knowledge management is essential for creating the right knowledge from the right source and available to the right people at the right time. Perhaps the knowledge sharing and application processes are probably the majority process of the knowledge management as it will show how effectively the knowledge is utilized.
The way of explicit knowledge can be implemented in serval channels, which depends on the organizational perspective. To facilitate the sharing and use of knowledge, an organization must understand user requirements as well as the complexities of knowledge management.
RESEARCH METHODOLOGY
Research Methodology
Before conducting the interview, the researcher asked the management for permission, and the authorization was granted. The researcher can use internal information and can conduct the interview in this case study. The interview process started by sending an invitation to all the interviewees and asking them for a time that suits them for the interview.
The invitation included the questions for all of them to prepare and give them the time to provide answers in the meeting. After receiving the responses and feedback from all interviewees regarding their convenience time of the interview, the interviewer then established the meeting room and conducted the interview in which the time frame was targeted at one week. The interview was conducted with 5 stakeholders, which are manager, team leader, 2 operational staff and one staff from knowledge management team in company A.
It took 5 days in one week for this interview, as everyone was busy and their work schedule was set at different times. The interview lasted 45 minutes for the manager, 50 minutes for the team leader, 1 hour for the operations staff and 30 minutes for the people from the KM team.
Data Collection
Question Design
What makes you feel confident and trust the knowledge you have gained through sharing knowledge.
FINDINGS ANALYSIS
Interview Session and Data Analysis
Oscar is from the operational staff, they completely agreed that the knowledge management helps them a lot with the work process and shortens the time to solve the problems. However, they still feel frustrated in the way they push to accomplish this task. Delta said that “I know it's important, but they shouldn't push us in this way, I have to do routine work and keep searching and updating the knowledge.
Oscar also said that "The knowledge management helps me find some best practices and solutions to solve the problem faster, but I don't like the way the team leader pushes us. Oscar has worked in this team for 6 and 5 years, so they are quite familiar with the customer, the work process and the way to handle the incident in different issues. He said, “Knowledge is the asset of the company; our team is created to prevent knowledge from being lost, but we could not only find new knowledge from our team.
Judging from the questions asked to each specific interviewee and the outcome of the interview, the conclusion is that they all agree that knowledge management is quite important and has a direct impact on the work process and team performance. Operations staff are more confident in dealing with normal technical issues and critical issues. They can also provide the same information to customers with similar problem reports, this shows the quality of service the team has.
However, from the perspective of the knowledge management team, he was able to come up with good solutions and was able to show the benefits of how the knowledge management system will help the team to be successful and better manage the flow of of work within the service level agreement. The KM team always tries to find a way to encourage IT support staff to access and reference the knowledge, which is regularly stored in the KM database, and to persuade them to create new knowledge when faced with a new problem and find the best solution to fix that problem by giving a small shopping voucher for those staff. In addition, to ensure the outcome of the in-depth interview, the researcher uses the components of the knowledge management framework to present the most significant evidence and how the data relates to each particular statement.
Methodology of Knowledge Capturing, Storing, Sharing and Applying
- Knowledge Capturing
- Knowledge Storing
- Knowledge Sharing and Applying
- Identification of needs
- Identification of knowledge resources
- Stakeholder
The team members also managed its knowledge database in shared station, which everyone in the team can access from their specific computer or workstation. The knowledge sharing in this IT support department performed by the one who created the new knowledge will first send notification to notify all team members for the new knowledge by email and CC to his manager and team leader. After that, they will publish and announce the knowledge for other users to recognize and apply.
Management says that the knowledge management is necessary and that everyone in the organization must take into account. This is the reason why the manager asked team leader to put this task in the objective of performance appraisal for all staff. From the statistics that the manager shows to the researcher, within one year the team can reduce the number of customer complaints by 70% and only 10% of the cases that staff cannot resolve within the service level agreement.
They said that knowledge management helps them a lot when they confront the matter. From the point of view of the knowledge management center team, they completely agreed with these needs. They would like to encourage all staff to visit the knowledge management system regularly as some update information and knowledge is stored in the system.
In this case study of IT support department in company A, the knowledge mainly solved from solving old cases is the advice of expertise, documentation written by product development team, presentation created by expertise and knowledge delivery by trainers. Consequently, the acquisition of knowledge is from different types of sources, depending on the issues or incidents. People involved in this Knowledge Management are operational staff and KM center staff, dealing with knowledge capture, knowledge storage, knowledge sharing and knowledge application processes.
Obstacles
CONCLUSION & RECOMMENDATION
Conclusion
Recommendation
Management should provide training for all IT support staff to refresh their knowledge and regularly acquire new knowledge from the product development team and technical support team to keep all staff up-to-date and able to provide better customer service and compatibility with rapidly changing technology . .
