A Guide to Building and Maintaining Your ITSM Knowledge Base

In the world of IT Service Management (ITSM), knowledge is more than just power—it's a strategic asset. It unlocks faster issue resolution, aligns your team with business objectives, and elevates customer service experiences. At Servicely, we thrive on making work flow seamlessly, and a solid ITSM Knowledge Base is the cornerstone of efficient service management.

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What is an IT Service Management Knowledge Base?

An IT Service Management (ITSM) Knowledge Base is a centralised library for knowledge assets – organised, searchable information assets – that are used to store and share information essential to your IT Service Management processes.

This repository includes FAQs, training guides, troubleshooting guides, standard operating procedures (SOPs), and best practice guides. By centralising this information, your ITSM knowledge base becomes the go-to resource for IT staff, customers, and stakeholders to quickly access the documentation and solutions required for effective service delivery.

Key features of an ITSM knowledge base include intelligent search capabilities, user feedback options, version control and multimedia assets to support knowledge assets, including videos and imagery.

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What is Knowledge Management in IT Service Management?

In the context of ITSM, Knowledge Management is the process of strategically capturing, curating and sharing valuable knowledge assets in a knowledge base within an ITSM platform. Effective Knowledge Management ensures that every piece of data not only resides in the system but also actively contributes to improving IT service efficiency, solving recurrent issues, and supporting decision-making processes. By nurturing a knowledge-centric service culture within ITSM, organisations can reduce repetitive troubleshooting and align closely with best practices outlined in frameworks like ITIL.

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Why You Need a Robust ITSM Knowledge Base

Implementing an ITSM knowledge base is crucial in delivering a high level of service to your end-users and is a foundational element of best practice in IT service delivery. Here are a few key reasons why you need an ITSM knowledge base:

• Improved service agent productivity – With instant access to knowledge articles that detail troubleshooting and resolution steps for a range of issues, IT service agents can resolve issues faster, resulting in reduced costs and increased agent productivity.
• Enable end-user self-service – An ITSM knowledge base gives end users the information they need to resolve issues independently, lightening the load on your service agents. Many end-users prefer to resolve issues via self-service, and meeting this need will both increase end-user satisfaction and the speed of issue resolution.
• Streamlined onboarding and training – New team members, or any agents who are a bit rusty on a given area, can leverage the knowledge base to get on-demand information on internal processes, guides and best practices. This helps speed up the onboarding and training of new staff, ensuring they can be productive sooner.
• Knowledge retention – By capturing knowledge in a centralised repository, crucial information and expertise is not lost when employees leave the business.
• Identifying problems – High-volume knowledge assets may be an indicator that an issue is being caused by an underlying problem that the IT service team need to resolve, so that the number of incidents for the problem can be squashed.
• Powering AI – An ITSM knowledge base can be a valuable asset in training and powering AI models embedded in your platform, enabling you to use AI virtual agents and AI copilots to supercharge IT service productivity.

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Building Your ITSM Knowledge Base

When you’ve identified a need for an ITSM knowledge base, these steps lay out a framework of how you can start building your knowledge base.

1. Define purpose and scope

Determine the purpose of your content and how it aligns with your objectives. Is it for internal use, customer use or another purpose? Having a clear goal in mind that you can build towards is crucial to determining the content and structure within your knowledge base.

2. Identify content requirements

Determine what kinds of content you need to create valuable knowledge assets that are going to fulfill your objectives. Do you need in-depth guides, FAQs, troubleshooting tips, manuals? Start with the most frequent issues and those that are easy for end-users to solve themselves with help from an article and branch out from there. If you follow the 80/20 rule, you’ll see 20% of your content covering 80% of incidents and delivering value quickly.

3. Structure the layout and organisation

Determine how your users find knowledge and the best way to categorise and structure your ITSM knowledge base that makes it easy for users to find the knowledge they’re looking for quickly. The longer it takes them to find answers, the higher probability that they’ll give up and log a ticket instead. Use logical structured categories and folders, with keywords and tags that make finding answers easy.

4. Develop your content strategy

Chances are, you’re going to need A LOT of content to complete your ITSM knowledge base. Setting up processes for how you produce content is critical. Assigning ownership and setting performance measurements (including KPIs) for knowledge asset creation creates accountability within your IT service team. It’s important to ensure that your service agents understand the value of the knowledge base and that the outcome will be fewer repetitive tickets assigned to them. To avoid knowledge feeling like a burden, we recommend adopting a Knowledge-Centred Service approach, whereby your agents create knowledge assets as a normal day-to-day part of completing service tickets. Ensure you set up regular reviews to ensure that you stay on track and your knowledge stays up-to-date.

5. Select the right tool knowledge management tool

Choosing the right ITSM platform for your knowledge base is one of the most important factors. Sure, you’ll want core features like multimedia support, version control, access management, multi-tenancy control, and analytics capabilities, but you’ll also want to look for a tool that has deeper integration between service processes and your knowledge base. Look for AI-native service management platforms like Servicely that use knowledge to drive self-service via AI virtual agents and recommend relevant knowledge to your service agents via an AI copilot while they’re managing incidents and problems.

6. Implement access controls

Access control ensures that only the correct audience see articles that are applicable to them. For example, we deployed Servicely for BUCS IT, a managed service provider who needed to make knowledge articles only accessible to certain customers in the customer’s individual tenant of Servicely. They used Servicely’s access controls to manage access so that only customers with a particular service can see knowledge assets relating to that service.

7. Create your knowledge assets

With objectives, structures, tools and controls in place, you’re ready to develop high-quality knowledge assets for your ITSM knowledge base. Have your team develop content with logical structure and multimedia support. If you picked an AI-native ITSM, you can use the embedded AI to identify knowledge gaps that need knowledge created, and use the AI to draft your content for you.

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Maintaining Your Knowledge Base

Once you’ve begun working on your knowledge base, you’ll hopefully see a level of buy-in from your team with this new process. But you don’t want to lose momentum or see your ITSM knowledge base waste away if it isn’t maintained properly. As your knowledge base becomes bigger, it becomes more time-consuming to maintain your knowledge assets and keep them up-to-date. You’ll

Just as with fine wine, a Knowledge Base improves over time with proper maintenance. Here’s how to ensure its ongoing relevance and accuracy:

• Regular updates – It sounds simple, but reviewing and updating your knowledge articles regularly is key. If there is long gaps between updates, the work piles up and creates procrastination about the volume that needs maintenance. Incorporating updates into day-to-day activities can ensure you’re always keeping your knowledge up to date.
• Seek user feedback – Actively encourage feedback from users to be able to refine and improve articles. Identify knowledge that isn’t explained clearly or is no longer accurate through user comments, rating systems and open communication with end-users who open tickets despite knowledge covering the ticket’s issue.
• Monitor analytics – Assess metrics to gain a deep understanding of which articles are most frequently accessed and where you may have knowledge gaps. Use this data to prioritise updates and new content creation.
• Promote usage – If your end-users aren’t using your knowledge, you won’t be seeing the benefits of it, but you also won’t know what works and what doesn’t. Remind staff on knowledge, train them on how to find and use knowledge assets, and have use knowledge as the first step in resolving tickets by having end-users attempt to follow the knowledge to self-service.
• Set expiry dates – setting regular expiry or review dates will ensure your agents come back to review articles.
• Hold your agents accountable – measure knowledge-related KPIs and incentivise staff accordingly.

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Knowledge Management Best Practices

If your ITSM knowledge base isn’t as easy-to-use and as helpful as possible, your end-users won’t use it. To ensure that your knowledge base is effective and delivers the expected outcomes, you should follow some best practices:

• KISS: Keep it simple, stupid – Use clear, straightforward language to ensure that it is easy to understand. Avoid overuse of jargon, provide glossaries if required, and lay out articles in logical formats.
• Include videos and images – Enrich your articles with diagrams, vidoes, screenshots or other media to clarify complex steps.
• Make it accessible – It should be easy to access the knowledge base, don’t tuck it away somewhere or make logging in to use it hard, put it front and centre where end-users go for service.
• Make it organised and easy to navigate – Establish logical categories and naming systems that make sense to your end-users.
• Optimise for searchability – You don’t want the search to be as (un)helpful as Microsoft Outlook’s search. Ensure headings have the right keywords, categorise properly, and include any tags to make articles easy to find.
• Solve common problems – prioritise knowledge creation for the most common issues. Make
• Keep knowledge up-to-date – Ensure your knowledge assets are kept updated and relevant. Remove any deprecated information and ensure timely changes.

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Start Building Your ITSM Knowledge Base

By spending time to build a robust ITSM knowledge base, you’re not just documenting how issues can be resolved; you’re creating a dynamic, evolving mechanism by which you can enable self-service, improve training and onboarding, and enable the use of AI throughout your service delivery processes. If you’d like help getting started with ITSM knowledge management, you can sign up for a demo of Servicely’s ITSM here to see our knowledge capabilities.

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