Knowledge Management in Service Desk Environment: An Overview of

Methods, Tools and Techniques

Michal Dost

and Jan Skrbek

Department of Informatics, Faculty of Economics, Technical University of Liberec, Czech Republic

Keywords:

Knowledge Management, Service Desk.

Abstract:

Knowledge management and Service Desk are both important topics for successful companies. Good knowl-

edge management practices in Service Desk can improve the quality of delivered service and therefore improve

the competitiveness of the company. Based on the literature research followed by analysis we describe and

propose methods, tools, and techniques that are or could be used in the Service Desk environment. The meth-

ods, tools, and techniques are described according to the phase of knowledge management and the Service

Desk activities. This research paper presents a part of work-in-progress research and represents a good base

for follow-up research on this topic.

1 INTRODUCTION

Knowledge management is a vital part of a prospering

company environment. This discipline connects and

impacts many departments and activities in the com-

pany and if done successfully, it can improve the com-

petitive power of the company. Service Desk is one of

the areas in the company which also beneﬁts from im-

plementing good knowledge management practices.

This position paper focuses on the knowledge man-

agement methods, tools and techniques that are or

could be used in the Service Desk environment. We

take into account the knowledge management phases

and types of Service Desk activities performed by the

Service Desk staff.

As (Aradati et al., 2019) notes, there are not many

academic studies concerning knowledge management

in the domain of IT support. This paper presents a

part of work-in-progress research on the knowledge

management methods in the Service Desk environ-

ment and involves research of possible ways of their

optimization.

2 METHODOLOGY

The research presented in this paper is based on lit-

erature research and analysis. Through literature re-

search, we were able to overview knowledge manage-

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6398-624X

ment methods, tools and techniques, which were then

analyzed for their suitability to be used in the Service

Desk environment. As knowledge management has

certain phases, we divided the methods according to

those and the types of activities that they relate to.

3 STATE OF THE ART

There are many reasons why managing the knowledge

in the Service Desk is important. According to (Dav-

enport and Klahr, 1998) knowledge is the real fac-

tor that separates companies, thus it has an impact on

their competitive power. By managing knowledge of

their support the company can improve customer loy-

alty and satisfaction. This means fewer calls to the

Service Desk but also reducing the service costs.

Service Desk, as deﬁned in Information Technol-

ogy Infrastructure Library (ITIL), is a single point of

contact between the customer (or user) and IT sup-

port. (Long, 2012) Within the ITIL framework ser-

vice lifecycle, Service Desk belongs in the Service

Operation part. In the Service Operation, there are

certain subcategories of processes, which the Service

Desk attend to:

• event management,

• incident management,

• request fulﬁlment,

• access management,

196

Dostál, M. and Skrbek, J.

Knowledge Management in Service Desk Environment: An Overview of Methods, Tools and Techniques.

DOI: 10.5220/0010142201960203

In Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Knowledge Discovery, Knowledge Engineering and Knowledge Management (IC3K 2020) - Volume 3: KMIS, pages 196-203

ISBN: 978-989-758-474-9

• problem management,

• IT operations control,

• facilities management,

• application management and

• technical management.

Through Service Desk a user can place queries, re-

quests, or tickets about incidents. The requests can be

related to any process listed above.

It is also important to note the difference between

the Service Desk and Help Desk as they may seem to

mean the same thing. Cambridge dictionary (Cam-

bridge, 2020) deﬁnes help desk as “a service that

provides information and helps to people, especially

those using a computer network”. Service Desk is

more complex and provides more complex services

to its users and customers. It is usually a part of its af-

ters sales service complementing the product. There

are certain levels of IT support in the Service Desk.

(Windley, 2002) describes ﬁve levels. In the ﬁrst one,

there are customer support and help desk, which re-

solve only simple and non-problematic tasks, queries,

and requests. The rest of the requests are escalated to

higher levels. On the second level is technical sup-

port with more technical and more complex knowl-

edge needed for incident resolution. On levels 3–5 are

specialists such as systems engineers, administrators,

network admins, or database admins. An interesting

addition is a 0 level of IT support, which (Hertvik,

2015) deﬁnes as self-help or trying to resolve the re-

quest or query by oneself - through documentation,

FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) or service cata-

log.

There are many deﬁnitions of knowledge manage-

ment in the literature. We present some of them.

(Becerra-Fernandez and Sabherwal, 2010) have a

simple deﬁnition: doing what is needed for getting

the maximum from the knowledge sources. (Dalkir,

2013) then deﬁnes knowledge management as a mix

of strategies, tools a and techniques of working with

knowledge.

Knowledge management is described by so called

knowledge management cycle, which according to

(Dalkir, 2013) has 3 phases:

• knowledge creation and codiﬁcation,

• knowledge sharing and dissemination,

• knowledge acquisition and application.

(Cerchione and Esposito, 2017) deﬁned different clas-

siﬁcation of the knowledge management phases:

• knowledge creation,

• knowledge storage,

• knowledge transfer.

4 THEORETICAL

FOUNDATIONS

In this chapter the foundations and list of knowledge

management methods, tools, and techniques are laid

out. The corresponding methods, tools, and tech-

niques are grouped according to knowledge manage-

ment cycle phases, which are based on the classiﬁca-

tions made by scientists in this research ﬁeld. The in-

dividual phases of the knowledge management cycle

are listed after each other in a corresponding logical

order.

4.1 Knowledge Creation

The creation of new knowledge may come from

within or outside of the organization. The knowledge

creation within the organization may be induced by

learning, research and development, experience accu-

mulation, and learning by doing (Dalkir, 2013).

The creation of knowledge from the external

source can be absorbed by interaction with suppliers,

customers, and competitors.

(Nonaka, 1994) suggested that the knowledge cre-

ation is gained via the interaction of implicit knowl-

edge and explicit knowledge.

(Gray and Meister, 2006) stated some knowledge

sourcing methods:

• published knowledge sourcing (publication, man-

uals, knowledge repositories, intranet, etc.)

• dyadic knowledge sourcing (e-mail, telephone,

mentoring) - based on the person to person com-

munication

• group knowledge sourcing (electronic discussion,

meetings, communities of practice)

(Rollett, 2003) describes knowledge creation as “de-

velopment of genuinely new knowledge” connected

with terms such as creativity, problem-solving, and

innovation. All of these are a part of the knowledge

management process of knowledge creation. Accord-

ing to (Rollett, 2003) there are several factors, that

inﬂuence this process or stage of the knowledge man-

agement life cycle. He states, that “mistakes must be

treated as learning opportunities” and that “creativity

is the bottleneck of the knowledge creation”. He also

lists several methods, that are supporting KC: check-

lists, synectics, assumption smashing, brainstorming

and brainwriting, concept mapping, thinking hats, di-

alogue. The technologies he lists are retrieval tools,

brainstorming tools, idea processors, expertise loca-

tors, groupware, visualization tools, simulation tools,

artiﬁcial intelligence, and authoring tools.

Knowledge Management in Service Desk Environment: An Overview of Methods, Tools and Techniques

197

(Kaba and Ramaiah, 2017) listed IT tools and

techniques used for content creation: authoring tools,

templates, annotations, data mining, expert proﬁling,

blogs, and mashups. They also listed IT tools for con-

tent management, which include: taxonomies, folk-

sonomies, metadata tagging, classiﬁcation, archiving,

and Personal Knowledge Management. In their pa-

per, they analyzed the usage of tools listed above and

their results show, that the most used tools are Per-

sonal Knowledge Management (e-mail, portals, news

aggregators), authoring tools, and templates.

Other scientists (Cerchione and Esposito, 2017)

presented a taxonomy for the knowledge management

tools and the practices. To the knowledge creation

phase belongs: data mining, data visualization, ex-

pert systems, social data mining, text mining, col-

laborative ﬁltering, crowdsourcing systems, mash-up,

idea markets, syndication systems, trust and reputa-

tion systems. Practices used for knowledge creation

consist of brainstorming, ideas, competition, knowl-

edge elicitation, interview, benchmarking, knowledge

ﬁltering, and rating.

4.2 Knowledge Capture

Capture of knowledge also belongs to the ﬁrst part

of the knowledge management cycle. The methods

for capturing knowledge, as listed by (Dalkir, 2013),

are: structured interviewing protocol, talk aloud anal-

ysis, observation, or simulations. Those are meth-

ods for capturing the tacit knowledge - the knowledge

stored inside the worker’s heads and the one which

is the hardest to capture. Other methods and tech-

niques are road maps, learning histories, e-learning,

learning from others through business guest speakers.

To capture the explicit knowledge one could also use

techniques such as cognitive mapping, decision trees,

knowledge taxonomies, or task analysis.

(Dalkir, 2013) describes three key knowledge cap-

ture phases: identiﬁcation, conceptualization, and

codiﬁcation. In the identiﬁcation phase, it is deter-

mined, what knowledge would be beneﬁcial to cap-

ture. In the next phase, the knowledge is modeled in

order to conceptualize it. In the last phase, the knowl-

edge is organized and also externalized.

4.3 Knowledge Organization

The base purpose of knowledge organization is to or-

ganize the knowledge in such a way, that is most ben-

eﬁcial for later use. (Rollett, 2003) lists out the ben-

eﬁts of knowledge organization: it raises the effec-

tivity of later retrieval of the knowledge; it enables

displaying context with other documents through sub-

ject headings and related materials; it enables intelli-

gent processing such as reasoning or automatic ontol-

ogy building; and it facilitates communication with

the usage of controlled vocabularies so that everyone

uses the same terminology and everyone knows what

is talked about.

(Rollett, 2003) then declares types of structures

in which the knowledge could be structured: the-

sauri, semantic networks, taxonomies, ontologies, or

knowledge maps. It is then important to make a se-

ries of decisions when implementing knowledge or-

ganization: Do we use existing knowledge organiza-

tion structures or is better to implement new ones?

Do we use multiple structures or do we stick to just

one? Do we use manual or automatic approaches?

Each of these aspects, that we must consider has its

advantages and disadvantages and we must carefully

decide, what is best for our current situation in the

context of our knowledge management strategies.

4.4 Knowledge Integration and

Transfer

The process of knowledge integration is built upon

the aim of “making existing knowledge available to

an organization” (Rollett, 2003). We can take two ap-

proaches based on the type of knowledge we need to

integrate into our organization: internal and external

knowledge.

(Kraaijenbrink and Wijnhoven, 2008) deﬁned ex-

ternal knowledge integration as “the identiﬁcation,

acquisition and utilization of external knowledge”.

They also deﬁned three levels of knowledge integra-

tion heterogeneity: within the organization, within

the environment, and ﬁnally between the organiza-

tion and the environment. There are some character-

istics of external knowledge: external knowledge can

be valuable, but can also be a source of uncertainty

in the company; ownership of the knowledge must

be considered - can be public or private; and borders

of knowledge entities (open, closed, their heterogene-

ity).

(Rollett, 2003) states some methods and tools sup-

porting the integration of external knowledge. For

example buying knowledge products, which includes

purchasing research reports, market analyses, or ac-

cess to commercial databases. One of the tools is

skills management, through which are the skills lev-

els of employees monitored and managed. Thanks

to skills management the company can decide, which

employees will attend which training courses or the

HR department can determine which key skills are

missing in the company and therefore what new staff

need to be recruited.

KMIS 2020 - 12th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems

198

(Rollett, 2003) argues that a lot of knowledge ex-

ists in some form, but it is really not available to all

employees who would beneﬁt from it. So the aim of

integrating the internal knowledge is to make all the

kinds of knowledge available to whoever is in need

of that type of knowledge. It is important to con-

sider what to capture and deﬁne what is valuable. It

is also important to capture the context of the knowl-

edge, e.g. to be able to pass it through some automatic

processing later.

Knowledge transfer, according to (Argote and In-

gram, 2000), is the process through which one unit

(e.g. department, group, team,...) is affected by the

experience of another unit. The transfer of knowl-

edge in the organization is manifested through the

changes in the knowledge or, in its ﬁnal consequence,

in the change of the performance of the units. (Rol-

lett, 2003) then describes two types of knowledge

transfer methods: knowledge pull and push. In the

ﬁrst case, the transfer of knowledge is initiated by the

seeker of the knowledge. This can be done in the

form of knowledge fairs, where staff from different

departments are brought together and through infor-

mal interaction encouraged in the knowledge transfer.

Transfer of knowledge through knowledge pull is of-

ten facilitated through knowledge retrieval from elec-

tronic sources: searching and browsing.

Knowledge push is of a different nature. The

transfer is initiated by the system, other person, or

group - not the receiver. (Rollett, 2003) deﬁnes two

types of knowledge push according to the participants

of the knowledge transfer: person–person or person–

computer. The former is supported by periodic meet-

ings or internal training courses. The latter can be

supported by internal portals, e-mail, or institutional

instant messaging.

4.5 Knowledge Acquisition and

Application

The application of knowledge is the next step after all

the knowledge management phases of the cycle. After

the knowledge is either created or captured, it is cod-

iﬁed and organized, and then made available to the

company. Now the knowledge is available and can

be applied. The knowledge application aims to ef-

fectively ﬁnd the best combination of the knowledge

and the right user of that knowledge (Dalkir, 2013).

(Dalkir, 2013) also states some knowledge manage-

ment tools and methods that support the knowledge

application process: learning taxonomies, task sup-

port systems, personalization, or expertise location

systems.

5 KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT

METHODS IN SERVICE DESK

The aim of the knowledge management in the Ser-

vice Desk environment is to maximize the availabil-

ity of information and knowledge to the employees of

Service Desk communicating directly with the users.

Users, in this case, could be customers of the com-

pany using their product or employees of the com-

pany, who are seeking some information, help, or ful-

ﬁllment of their request. Each group of users has its

speciﬁc types of requests. Customers are receiving

support, included with the product they purchased, in

the form of answering queries, resolving incidents,

or fulﬁlling speciﬁc requests. Employees or inter-

nal users are often contacting the IT Support in cases

that something they need for successful completion

of their work is not working correctly - the printer

stopped working, their internet connection is slow, the

computer does not turn on, etc. To successfully re-

solve all the tasks that are aimed at the Service Desk

staff, it is crucial they have access to the right knowl-

edge and preferably at the right time to ensure, that the

quick resolution and user satisfaction are achieved.

As is pictured in the previous section, knowledge

management consists of many methods, tools, and

techniques that can be assigned to a speciﬁc phase of

knowledge management. In this paper, we divide the

methods and tools into three phases - a combination

of classiﬁcations from (Rollett, 2003), (Dalkir, 2013)

and (Cerchione and Esposito, 2017):

• Phase I: knowledge creation, codiﬁcation, organi-

zation and knowledge capture.

• Phase II: knowledge sharing, dissemination and

transfer.

• Phase III: knowledge acquisition and application.

Methods chosen for its possibility to be used in the

Service Desk environment are categorized by the

phases listed above. This categorization is pictured

in the Table 1 and the methods are later analyzed in

this article. Analyzed methods are chosen based on

their current usage in the Service Desk or their pos-

sible usage there, and in that case, a proposal on how

they could be used is included. Methods and tools are

analyzed from the following aspects:

• digital form - is it already used in digital form or

could be used it that way?

• user experience - for both staff and the customers

• potential of enhancement by employing artiﬁcial

intelligence

• difﬁculty of implementation

Knowledge Management in Service Desk Environment: An Overview of Methods, Tools and Techniques

199

Table 1: Knowledge management methods in Service Desk according to knowledge management cycle.

KM cycle phase Categories of methods Methods

Phase I

Knowledge creation,

codiﬁcation,

organization and

capture

theory of inventive problem solv-

ing, expert proﬁling, lessons

learned, best practices, surveys,

questionaires

Phase II

Knowledge sharing,

dissemination and

sharing

apprenticeship, on-the-job training,

lectures, best practices, searching,

browsing, knowledge inventories,

expert interviews, knowledge fairs,

communities of practice

Phase III

Knowledge acquisition and

application

metadata tagging, automated tax-

onomy systems, expertise location

systems, community yellow pages,

expert systems, recommender sys-

tems, case-based reasoning sys-

tems, customization and personal-

ization, e-learning, computer-based

training systems

We can also classify the methods, tools, and tech-

niques based on the type of activities in the Service

Desk, to which they are related. We divide the activi-

ties accordingly:

• on-boarding of new Service Desk personnel

• learning new concepts of processes in the com-

pany (new hardware, methodologies or services)

which the Service Desk staff needs to understand

and be able to help with

• incident resolution and request fulﬁllment which

includes accessing information (knowledge) or

looking up whom to escalate the incident or re-

quest to

• logging incidents, which could also include their

archiving, creation of best practices, lessons

learned - in other words, to create a comprehen-

sive entry in the Service Desk knowledge base for

future use and reference

5.1 Phase I

Phase I includes knowledge creation, codiﬁcation, or-

ganization, and knowledge capture. If we consider the

types of activities stated above, then we can state that

incident logging belongs to this phase of knowledge

management.

When Service Desk staff performs incident log-

ging, knowledge about the task is either created or

captured - depending on the nature of the incident or

request. An example of the knowledge creation could

be: User detects an unusual error in the application

he is using, so he contacts the Service Desk to resolve

this error. As there is no entry of this error in the Ser-

vice Desk knowledge base and no available knowl-

edge on how to solve this error, the company must

ﬁnd the solution. When the error is solved and the so-

lution is deployed to the user, the Service Desk staff

must carefully log the solution into the Service Desk

knowledge base.

There could be several knowledge management

methods and tools used. When trying to solve a new

problem, Service Desk could employ theory of inven-

tive problem solving, which provides a set of tech-

niques and strategies of inventive problem-solving. It

can also be used to make forecasts and thus used to

predict the development in the Service Desk environ-

ment. This set of techniques and methods has a pretty

high level of difﬁculty of implementation, as this is a

more expert approach and should be used to solve a

problem of higher complexity and importance.

When trying to solve a complex problem that re-

quires expert knowledge, it could be also beneﬁcial to

utilize expert proﬁling. This should be done digitally

and it has good potential to be employed alongside

artiﬁcial intelligence. While creating expert proﬁles,

artiﬁcial intelligence could help with determining the

attributes of company staff from their recent success-

ful interactions with users and customers in certain

problem domains. Expert proﬁling should not be too

difﬁcult to implement in the existing solutions used in

the company. When done right, the user experience

- of both user and the Service Desk staff - should in-

KMIS 2020 - 12th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems

200

crease.

When it comes to logging the incident and its so-

lution, Service Desk could use lessons learned reposi-

tory containing new gain knowledge. In the long term,

this process could also include consideration of updat-

ing the best practices. These days the lessons learned

and best practices are best to be kept in digital form.

It is also very useful to consider the feedback from

the user or customer on his satisfaction with the res-

olution of the incident or request. Service Desk then

can gain new knowledge on what could be improved

and customized to ﬁt the customer’s needs. Meth-

ods to gain such knowledge are for example surveys

and questionnaires, carefully prepared to get the most

valuable information. Surveys and questionnaires

sent to the customer or user after the successful or un-

successful resolution of an incident are mainly sent

electronically. Service Desk may use some ready-

made solutions for the survey creation and evaluation

or develop their own if they wish to include some cus-

tom features. It would be possible to employ some

artiﬁcial techniques to infer useful information from

the survey results for the Service Desk management.

5.2 Phase II

Phase II includes knowledge sharing, dissemination,

and transfer. If we consider the types of activities in

the Service Desk, we can include the on-boarding ac-

tivities and adaptation to new features and concepts to

this phase.

During the on-boarding of the new Service Desk

staff, knowledge transfer is always occurring. Based

on the type of transfer, certain knowledge manage-

ment methods and tools could be used. When the

company is “pushing” the knowledge to the new Ser-

vice Desk staff, they may use apprenticeship, on-the-

job training, lectures or special internal courses to in-

troduce the best practices of the department. When

we are talking about apprenticeship in the Service

Desk, we are obviously talking about small scale ap-

prenticeship. For example, a new Service Desk em-

ployee or more employees are assigned to a senior

Service Desk staff member. They are learning all the

important things from the senior staff member. The

staff member is also considered their mentor. He or

she not only helps them with their on-boarding, but

also passes on all the tricks and tips learned from

years of practice in the area. Question is, could this

be digitized? Although the person-to-person contact

is better, there may come times, where that is not

possible. One option would be to use online com-

munication platforms. Another option could be the

automation of the whole process, as all of the knowl-

edge needed for the optimal work performance of the

Service Desk staff would be represented in a form,

which could some artiﬁcially intelligent computer en-

tity, such as virtual assistant, work with and under-

stand. The on-boarding staff could then consult with

it.

When the new employees are “pulling” the knowl-

edge, they might use some methods of self-learning

through searching and browsing in available knowl-

edge inventories. The materials in those inventories

are probably already digitized or it could be easily

done so. The user experience for the Service Desk

staff members depends on the implementation of the

knowledge inventory, which shouldn’t be very difﬁ-

cult - it is probably already used in some form.

The second type of Service Desk activity in the

Phase II of the knowledge management cycle also in-

cludes knowledge transfer. When the company starts

to sell new products, use new software, or practic-

ing new methodologies, the Service Desk staff must

be adequately prepared to react to new requests and

incidents. Because of this, it is essential to transfer

the knowledge from competent sources through for

example apprenticeship, expert interviews, lectures,

and training. It could also be useful to organize some

knowledge fair or community of practice events to fa-

cilitate the transfer - both in a formal and informal

manner. A possible use for artiﬁcial intelligence in

knowledge fairs or communities of practice would be

if they are held online. Based on the participant’s pro-

ﬁle and the professional interest of the seeker of the

knowledge, the system could automatically offer con-

tacts of participants to which one could be interested

to talk to.

Lectures and training courses held online offer its

participants the possibility to complete the course and

get the needed knowledge any time they ﬁnd suitable.

This makes for a better user experience. Also, the im-

plementation is not difﬁcult as it becomes more com-

mon to use online training courses and other training

tools.

5.3 Phase III

Phase III includes the knowledge acquisition and ap-

plication. Into this phase, we can include the inci-

dent resolution and request fulﬁllment. We can also,

in some form, include part of the on-boarding activi-

ties.

When is the Service Desk staff trying to solve

some incident or fulﬁll a request from the user or cus-

tomer, the knowledge application process is in place.

In the example of resolving an incident, the staff uses

their current knowledge of the problem or tries to look

Knowledge Management in Service Desk Environment: An Overview of Methods, Tools and Techniques

201

up the solution in their knowledge base. There are

many tools and methods to help with this process.

When looking up the knowledge in knowledge base,

a metadata tagging practice may come in handy and

speed up the process alongside with some automated

tools such as automated taxonomy systems or exper-

tise location systems, which can help with ﬁnding the

right solution or the right person, whom to escalate

the incident or request. To this, we may also add a

tool called community yellow pages to speed up the

process and extend the possibility of ﬁnding the right

person to consult with. If the knowledge base is struc-

tured and organized in a way, that could be under-

stood by the computer, expert systems, recommender

systems or case-based reasoning systems may be of

great help. Those already function in digital form and

use methods of artiﬁcial intelligence. The user expe-

rience of working with these deeply depends on their

design. Their implementation may be a bit difﬁcult

and time-consuming as they need to be well designed

and programmed to function properly and effectively.

Customization and personalization may be also

very useful during the incident resolution or request

fulﬁlment. According to (Zaslavsky et al., 2007), per-

sonalization in the IT service desk did not yet receive

much of the attention that it deserves. If the Service

Desk staff has the opportunity to personalize and cus-

tomize the environment they work with, it enables for

faster and more efﬁcient resolution, as the worker is

more comfortable using the tools at hand. It could be

brought up to another level if the Service Desk em-

ployees would be assigned certain types of requests

and incidents based on their knowledge domain and

level of expertise. For example (Baysal et al., 2009)

proposed a framework for effective assignment of the

developer who will solve a certain bug. This could

also be implemented in the whole scale Service Desk.

Their proposed framework takes into account: the

level of expertise, problem domain preferences of the

employees, and also their schedule to ensure no one is

overloaded with the task to solve. With the software

personalized for the employee’s knowledge domain of

expertise, the Service Desk department can optimize

the process of resolution. It would be good to employ

some artiﬁcial intelligence methods in this process.

Those methods could help with the process of assign-

ment of the requests and incidents to the right Service

Desk staff members.

We also mentioned the on-boarding process. Dur-

ing that the new Service Desk staff may come into

contact with some form of e-learning or computer or

web-based training system.

6 OUTLOOK

Thanks to the determination of methods that are used

or could be used in the Service Desk environment

we will be able to further develop our research in

this area. Achieved results pose a good base for fu-

ture research, which will be focused on optimiza-

tion of analyzed methods and research of possibili-

ties of improvement and modernization by employ-

ing advanced methods of artiﬁcial intelligence. Ap-

propriate knowledge management methods, tools, and

techniques used in Service Desk could be further de-

scribed and analyzed to discover possible weak links

in the process of their usage in common Service Desk

practice.

7 CONCLUSION

In this paper, we presented a part of our work-in-

progress research on the topic of knowledge manage-

ment methods, tools, and techniques used in the Ser-

vice Desk environment. We described three phases

of knowledge management and analyzed the corre-

sponding methods and tools based on the different

types of activities performed by Service Desk person-

nel. We also laid out some possibilities for future re-

search in this domain.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This work was supported by university-speciﬁc re-

search project SGS-2020-1047 Analysis of Advanced

Knowledge Management Methods and Tools for Op-

timalization of Service Desk Environment.

REFERENCES

Aradati, M., Bilal, L., Naseem, M. T., Hyder, S., Al-

Habeeb, A., Al-Subaie, A., Shahab, M., Sohail, B.,

Baig, M., Binmuammar, A., and Altwaijri, Y. (2019).

Using knowledge management tools in the Saudi Na-

tional Mental Health Survey helpdesk: pre and post

study. International Journal of Mental Health Sys-

tems; London, 13.

Argote, L. and Ingram, P. (2000). Knowledge Transfer:

A Basis for Competitive Advantage in Firms. Orga-

nizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes,

82(1):150–169.

Baysal, O., Godfrey, M. W., and Cohen, R. (2009). A bug

you like: A framework for automated assignment of

bugs. In 2009 IEEE 17th International Conference

KMIS 2020 - 12th International Conference on Knowledge Management and Information Systems

202

on Program Comprehension, pages 297–298. ISSN:

1092-8138.

Becerra-Fernandez, I. and Sabherwal, R. (2010). Knowl-

edge management: systems and processes. M.E.

Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y. OCLC: ocn320622185.

Cambridge (2020). Cambridge Dictionary. Library Catalog:

dictionary.cambridge.org.

Cerchione, R. and Esposito, E. (2017). Using knowledge

management systems: A taxonomy of SME strate-

gies. International Journal of Information Manage-

ment, 37(1):1551–1562.

Dalkir, K. (2013). Knowledge Management in Theory and

Practice. Routledge, 1 edition.

Davenport, T. H. and Klahr, P. (1998). Managing cus-

tomer support knowledge. California Management

Review; Berkeley, 40(3):195–208. Num Pages: 14

Place: Berkeley, Berkeley.

Gray, P. H. and Meister, D. B. (2006). Knowledge sourc-

ing methods. Information & Management, 43(2):142–

156.

Hertvik, J. (2015). Help Desk Management: What is Level

1, Level 2, and Level 3 Help Desk support? Library

Catalog: joehertvik.com Section: IT Management.

Kaba, A. and Ramaiah, C. K. (2017). Demographic differ-

ences in using knowledge creation tools among fac-

ulty members. Journal of Knowledge Management,

21(4):857–871.

Kraaijenbrink, J. and Wijnhoven, F. (2008). Managing het-

erogeneous knowledge: a theory of external knowl-

edge integration. Knowledge Management Research

& Practice, 6(4):274–286.

Long, J. O. (2012). ITIL

 2011 At a Glance. Springer-

Briefs in Computer Science. Springer New York, New

York, NY.

Nonaka, I. (1994). A Dynamic Theory of Organizational

Knowledge Creation. Organization Science, 5(1):14–

37.

Rollett, H. (2003). Knowledge Management. Springer US,

Boston, MA.

Windley, P. J. (2002). Delivering High Availability Services

Using a Multi-Tiered Support Model. Windley’s Tech-

nometria, (16):1–9.

Zaslavsky, A., Bartolini, C., Boulmakoul, A., Alahakoon,

O., Loke, S. W., and Burstein, F. (2007). Enhancing

the IT service desk function through unobtrusive user

proﬁling, personalization and stereotyping. In 14th

Workshop of the HP Software Univesity Association,

Garching/Munich.

Knowledge Management in Service Desk Environment: An Overview of Methods, Tools and Techniques

203