The purpose of the Knowledge Management process is to focus on capturing and exploiting the information and knowledge needed by personnel to work effectively.

Definition of Knowledge Management: "The Process responsible for gathering, analysing, storing and sharing knowledge and information within an Organisation. The primary purpose of Knowledge Management is to improve Efficiency by reducing the need to rediscover knowledge". ¹

Outcomes

 As a result of the successful implementation of this process:

• Organizational and individual knowledge and skills are improved
• All areas of IT are assisted in providing optimized IT end-to-end business services
• Technologies are leveraged for capture, location, and dissemination of knowledge and expertise
• Communities of practice are able to optimize the use of organizational knowledge
• Innovation is promoted and enabled 

Scope

The process emphasizes controlled but efficient access to assets across the organization, ensuring consistency and reuse as appropriate to take advantage of best practices and enable innovation.

Includes

• Management of IT knowledge and directly related business knowledge, including:
• • The full range of knowledge from technical to services
  • Knowledge gained from external sources as well as from internal activities
  • Interfaces to support any other IT process such as Incident Management
  • Life cycle management of knowledge, from development through retirement
  • Content management for knowledge data across all media and access mechanisms in which it resides 
• Working with other IT processes so that the relevant knowledge in their data and information repositories is made available and is actively managed
• Linkage to business-side Knowledge Management (if a program exists)
• Coordination with skills building and learning activities
• Knowledge linkage with service providers and suppliers
• Knowledge linkage with customers
• Intellectual property management, such as patents and external publications
   

Excludes

• Understanding and acting on the knowledge (outcome management is the responsibility of all other IT processes)
• Establishing and operating the data and information repositories associated with individual IT processes; for example, the Configuration Management database
• General Knowledge Management for the business
• Content management for business Web-based data (responsibility of the business, with support from Data Management)

Key performance indicators

• Average time to diagnose incidents
• Percent of errors related to user errors
• Percent of incidents and problems categorized as "lack of knowledge"
• Average number of accesses to the knowledge management system
• Size of knowledge management system
• Number of accesses per knowledge item

Relation to other processes

• Incident Management and Problem Management both depend on knowledge about previously encountered incidents and problems, as well as service documentation, to carry out their primary missions.
• Request Fulfillment relies on this process to provide knowledge about processing known service requests. 

Further reading

Read Knowledge Management in the ITIL® documentation.