Given the ever-growing access to information and new ways to connect with employees, you’d think providing them with the information they need would be easier. But could all of that information be too much of a good thing?
Consider the SharePoint portals used by many organizations. Although meant as a way to provide information to employees, those sites can quickly devolve into an unmitigated mess with no governance and no cleanup of old documents. New content layers on top of existing documents, obscuring the source of truth when employees search for something they need. The more content generated, the higher the likelihood of employees finding incorrect, out-of-date or conflicting answers.
Although IT service management (ITSM) knowledge articles are intended to help employees address common technology challenges, this documentation can make the problem worse if not managed appropriately. ITSM requires a tremendous amount of labor to create and organize documents.
Often, the organizational structure of information in an ITSM will be counterintuitive to employees who see IT as a foreign language.
The result is that after all that hard work of categorizing the IT content, employees continue to struggle because answers aren’t governed or routinely cleaned up, the available information is hard to find and is written in a technical language. Eliminating out-of-date content through ongoing governance in ITSM can be a tremendous amount of work and overwhelming to maintain. Compare that to Simpplr’s Virtual Assistant, which gives straightforward answers that are easy to audit, update, and precisely see what the organization is telling its workforce.
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How current processes lead to more trouble
That long-expected digital transformation, where employees benefit from a seamless and paperless process, can’t happen if they have to deal with a jumbled mess of documents to get the answers they need. Despite being online, without a clear way to organize your ITSM knowledge articles, ensure employees know which is the most recent, and make the information they contain easy to understand, your teams might as well be searching through an overstuffed filing cabinet (we call this digital hoarding).
If employees don’t get the answers or can’t understand them, they’ll go right to IT for help anyway, negating the whole point of these articles.
Giving employees easy access to essential IT information has become even more important post-pandemic. With many employees still working from home, the pressures on IT have only risen as they must address the influx of connectivity issues in addition to the everyday requests. Without easy-to-find and easy-to-understand information, the requests for help will keep coming in, taking up even more of IT subject matter experts’ already limited time.
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Making ITSM information more valuable
So, are ITSM knowledge articles a thing of the past? Not necessarily. The information they contain is still valuable; it just needs to be presented more intuitively.
Rather than expecting employees to search through vast online libraries to get what they need, imagine if they could type a question and have the most recent and relevant response delivered in seconds.
Instead of having to find, read and understand the right article, the knowledge it contains could be distilled and delivered to them in real-time and in conversational language that they can act on immediately.
Such a situation is possible with Simpplr’s Virtual Assistant. Our solution transforms your intranet site, replacing the need for lengthy searches with instant and readily understood answers. Not only does this increase employee productivity and engagement, but it also removes the burden on IT so they can focus on their most challenging cases and not on the common issues that employees can address themselves. It can also bring your business closer to the promises of a digital transformation.
How Simpplr can help
By unifying employee engagement, enablement and services using cutting-edge AI, Simpplr’s vision is to deliver a seamless and personalized work journey for every employee, no matter where or how they work. Request a demo to see how Simpplr’s Virtual Assistant can help you revolutionize employee self-service with AI-powered workflows and assistance.
