KM and IT Find Collaboration Productive
IT is typically the first contact for prospective buyers of Serviceaide. “They are looking for service management solutions for their companies,” commented Guinn, “and begin with that implementation.” They then realize that Serviceaide can be utilized for a wider range of purposes, which is the catalyst behind ESM. “We have a bottling company that uses our system for 150 departments,” Guinn stated, “and although critical, IT is only one department within the 150 use cases.” Major power utilities running nuclear power plants are using Serviceaide for change and asset management in a mission-critical, highly regulated environment. “The more repositories that need to be connected, the more the Serviceaide solution reduces the traditional burden on an IT team to deliver a solution, particularly with respect to agentic AI.”
The biggest issue Guinn sees with ESM implementations is the quality of data in existing systems. In particular, companies that do not have formal KM teams and follow KCS practices typically have issues with data quality and availability. “We have seen thousands of ESM systems and have found that often the data going into them cannot be effectively used in knowledgebases,” noted Guinn. “This is partly because support teams are not incented to provide detailed information about how they solved a problem, given that they are often evaluated based on how many requests they close.” Therefore, the notes might say, “Fixed the problem,” or something equally terse. “What we are focused on is a system that guides and assists the user or analyst in filling out a schema suitable for the domain; in the case of IT support, this would be one that explicitly identifies symptoms, root causes, and solutions,” explained Guinn. “ AI can then use well-formed data to continuously improve, especially in a self-service situation.”
IT plays a role in providing a port of entry for customer service solutions and for integrating them with the various repositories that form the knowledgebase. After that point, most KM solutions can be configured and managed by subject matter experts. But the infrastructure on which they are built, whether SaaS or on-prem, must provide the capacity and speed required to deliver their potential.