Knowledge Sharing and Decision-Making Services

Business Decision Analysis, Mapping, and Documentation

Decision analysis helps organizations improve the quality, speed, and accountability of its decisions and includes a variety of procedures, methods, and tools for identifying, clearly representing, and formally assessing the important inputs and steps to decision making.

Business Value

The importance of business decision analysis and mapping cannot be overstated. At each level of an organization, hundreds of decisions are made daily. If the organization has defined processes and access to the necessary data inputs, then the company has a distinct edge over its competitors.

Deliverables

Iknow’s deliverables include:

  • Decision maps and qualitative analysis of the decision process
  • New decision-making processes and roles
  • Change Management plans to support changes in processes and roles

Communities and Social Networking

Communities are groups in an organization, spanning beyond a single group or department, who come together for a shared business purpose. Not necessarily tied to a business process or an organizational structure, communities are often created around a specific topic area where knowledge and expertise exist across the organization, and serve as a forum for community members to interact with other members. Communities can provide the forum for a wide range of business activities, such as information sharing, problem solving, idea generation, and training.

Business Value

Successful communities have the potential to drive process improvements, lower costs, improve quality, and create more engaged employees. Communities are a central contributor of knowledge sharing and “smarter working” in any organization.

Deliverables

Iknow’s typical deliverables include:

  • Community business case
  • Community strategy “blueprint”
  • Technology plan, tool selection, and tool implementation
  • Pilot community launch and feedback/learnings
  • Full community planning, “start-up toolkit,” and implementation.

Collaboration

Various case studies have shown that much of the business value from knowledge management comes from stronger “people-to-people” collaboration. While document and content repositories still play an important role in most knowledge management initiatives, shorter business process cycle times and the shorter “shelf life” of information drive the need for more rapid (and even spontaneous) human interactions.

Business Value

A successful social collaboration initiative has the potential to dramatically improve the efficiency and quality of work, accelerate innovation and new business generation, and build stronger employee engagement.

Deliverables

Iknow helps our clients across all aspects of a social collaboration initiative, including:

  • Use cases and the business case for social collaboration
  • Proofs-of-concepts to capture tangible testimonials and success stories
  • Software product selection, installation, and configuration
  • Governance roles and process
  • A cultural change management program
  • Metrics and reporting
  • Social collaboration program renewal.

Expertise Location

A common goal for any knowledge-based organization is to provide people with an easy ability to find others with relevant experience, skills, or knowledge (expertise) when needed. Delivering this in an efficient manner, enabled with appropriate technology, is an objective for most organizations. This capability is vital for such tasks as solving urgent problems and staffing new projects.

Business Value

Faster decision making, problem solving, and innovation; More productive teams; Stronger employee engagement and affiliation; Faster revenue growth and lower costs.

Deliverables

Iknow’s primary deliverables are typically:

  • Business and requirements documents for people information and expertise location
  • Technology strategy, product selection, and product development/configuration
  • Business process design related to the review and approval of the content published in the staff profiles
  • Organizational change management plan to support program implementation

Applying Text Analysis to Financial Compliance

Subtitle
Redesigning Knowledge-Based Processes and Implementing World-Class Technology

This financial services company provides background information on retail and institutional account holders to more than 4,000 financial institutions worldwide. Specifically, this company alerts its clients when new or existing account holders are found guilty of finance-related criminal activity or are included on lists published by the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) of the U.S.

Approach

The first phase of this effort focused on the data collection, data extraction, and data quality tasks. The approach involved four important steps.

  • Target source identification and clean-up. Iknow worked with the company to update their list of source content, including removing inactive content sources and updating their content licenses.
     
  • Build the connectors. Iknow built the individual connectors to enable the platform to collect information directly from more than 600 federal, state, and local government websites and indirectly from thousands of news articles published every day.
     
  • Create customized rules. Iknow built more than 200 custom rules for extracting names and other entities and for validating the extracted entities. This customization is essential because certain name spellings, complex sentence structure, punctuation variations, and other language-related problems cause the software to miss or misinterpret the desired content.
     
  • Load the outputs into the existing database. The extracted entities are converted into structured data and loaded into the company’s existing proprietary database.

Iknow designed and implemented the complete system. The SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis software was chosen as the core processing engine for natural language processing and entity extraction functionality. The system also captures and stores the full-text articles to provide back-up support for every entry in the database. In addition, Iknow performed overall system quality assurance testing and validation, prepared and conducted end user and administrator training, and prepared the technical documentation.

Results

The system’s output is captured in the company’s proprietary database of names of individuals and companies who have been convicted of finance-related criminal activity by regulators and the exchanges. The cycle time for data collection, analysis, processing, and loading is as short as five minutes. The Vice President of Operations summarized the new system by stating “The new platform enables the company to conduct comparisons of clients’ new account information with near real-time data in our proprietary database. We report back to our clients on the same day with any information on those accounts that requires further examination."

Project Summary No.
103

Knowledge Management for Managed Care

Subtitle
Creating the Knowledge Processes, Repository, and Performance Scorecard to Support Key Business Processes

The Managed Care Division of a top global pharmaceutical company was having difficulty facilitating the sharing of information across the various internal functions involved in supporting the managed care business. These separate functions included Account Management, Sales Management, Global Brand Management, Contracts/Procurement, Competitive Intelligence, and Managed Care Specialists. No central repository existed and information sharing was done exclusively through telephone calls and e-mails.

Approach

Iknow designed the new knowledge management processes, identified sources of information and tracked how they were used, and created a performance scorecard.

The project involved three work streams. The Process work stream documented current state business processes and knowledge flows and identified key performances measures. Over fifty interviews led to understanding specific managed-care related tasks and activities, the decisions they make related to managed care, sources and uses of data, and “future state” business requirements.

The Content work stream focused on content identification and acquisition. A Content Source Analysis was conducted to identify the types and sources of information used by each of the groups. A database was created that cataloged all of the managed care content.

The Scorecard and Technology Architecture work stream focused on creating a measurement tool that provided visibility over major account status and to the performance of his internal operations. Iknow developed a performance management framework and defined the performance metrics. The technology architecture documented the company’s technical standards and identified the data sources required for the scorecard application.

Results

The Division implemented many of Iknow’s recommendations. It achieved more effective contract negotiations, better monitoring of contract performance, improved quality of the business intelligence produced, faster and higher quality development of custom value-added managed care programs, and integrated managed care and product launch plans.

Project Summary No.
26
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