Why is Knowledge Management still Overlooked in 2024?

The Same Conversation, Every Assessment

In virtually every ITSM assessment we conduct, Knowledge Management surfaces in the findings. Not always as a critical gap — sometimes as a developing capability, sometimes as a strength to build on — but almost always as an area where the gap between potential and reality is widest.

This is not a new observation. The ITSM community has been pointing to the underinvestment in knowledge management for twenty years. And yet here we are in 2024, having the same conversation.

Why It Gets Deprioritised

The reasons are structural rather than cultural, and they repeat across organisations of all sizes and sectors.

It doesn't create immediate, visible value. Unlike incident management — where the impact of improvement is visible in resolution times and user satisfaction within weeks — knowledge management improvements play out over months. This makes it easy to deprioritise in favour of more immediately rewarding improvement work.

It has no natural owner. Incident management has a process owner. Change management has a process owner. Knowledge management often has a nominal owner with no dedicated time, no quality targets and no authority to enforce standards. In practice, nobody is accountable for whether the knowledge base is useful.

Contribution is unrewarded. Agents are measured on ticket closure rates. Writing a knowledge article has no impact on that metric and takes time that could be spent closing tickets. The incentive structure actively works against knowledge contribution.

The knowledge base is often unusable. Organisations invest in a knowledge management tool, populate it with a burst of articles at launch, and then let it decay. Within eighteen months, most of the content is out of date. Agents stop using it. The tool becomes further evidence that knowledge management doesn't work — when the real problem is governance, not technology.

Why It Matters More Than Ever

Two developments have elevated the importance of knowledge management significantly in the last two years.

First, the pressure on service desk costs is intensifying. Self-service deflection — directing users to answers without human involvement — is the most effective lever most organisations have for reducing service desk cost. Self-service only works when the knowledge underpinning it is accurate, current and well-structured.

Second, AI. Every AI capability in ITSM — virtual agents, intelligent search, automated resolution suggestion — uses your knowledge base as its primary data source. If the knowledge base is poor, AI surfaces poor answers confidently and at scale. The organisations investing in AI without fixing their knowledge foundations first are setting themselves up for visible, expensive failure.

What Actually Works

The organisations that have genuinely cracked knowledge management share three characteristics. They have embedded knowledge creation into the resolution workflow — it is not optional, it is part of closing a ticket. They have assigned genuine ownership with quality targets and review cadences. And they measure use, not volume — the metric that matters is how often knowledge leads to resolution, not how many articles exist.

None of this requires significant technology investment. It requires process change, ownership and discipline. Which is precisely why it keeps getting deprioritised in favour of tool purchases that promise to solve the problem without the hard organisational work.