Projects

Iknow identified and documented the current training activities across the Division and developed a set of recommendations to guide the transformation from classroom-based training to eLearning.

The consulting assignment consisted of three parts: (1) understand and document the current state, (2) review best practices reported in recently published articles and case studies, and (3) develop recommendations for establishing an eLearning environment.

The current-state assessment involved interviews with the division’s training staff and covered a broad set of training topics, including the breadth and scope of the training programs, sources for course content, and methods of delivery. Improvement ideas were also captured during the interviews.

Recommendations were developed based on a gap analysis between the Division’s current state and the leading practices identified from the secondary research. Recommendations included developing a two-year eLearning vision with aggressive goals and timetable; developing processes for selecting and migrating current classroom-based training to web-based training; developing a rigorous vendor identification, evaluation, and selection process; aligning the eLearning initiative with the corporate learning management system; designing knowledge repositories and portals that would contain content not available through online courses; developing competency models for both technical and nontechnical ladders; and designing and implementing organizational enablers that would reinforce and support continuous learning.

Iknow conducted a growth strategy assignment for the company. The project involved identifying and evaluating the most promising growth opportunities. Internally, Iknow conducted a series of interviews and workshops with the company’s executive team to understand their business needs, collect their ideas on new offerings, understand their acceptable range of potential options, and gauge their risk profiles. The internal assessment also identified the company’s core skills and competencies to help support the identification of related diversification options. In parallel, Iknow developed evaluation criteria for comparing and prioritizing the options. Externally, Iknow studied industry trends, interviewed a variety of thought leaders, and researched the company’s competitors to identify new opportunities.

Thirty-one potential new offerings were identified during the assignment. The opportunities included delivering synthesized industry content in both text and video formats, creating and selling a knowledge management portal and software tool suite within the industry, developing on-line education centers that could be integrated into their customers’ websites, providing data mining and market research services, and developing a platform for distance learning courses.

During a series of workshops with the executive team, the options were prioritized and the top three opportunities were selected for implementation. Iknow further refined the options and prepared detailed cost estimates to support the business cases.

As the first step in creating the knowledge-stewardship strategy and implementation plan, the Iknow project team conducted a current-state assessment to understand the consulting firm’s current capabilities, future plans, and cultural environment for managing intellectual capital. The team interviewed several dozen client staff across all organizational levels and thoroughly examined the knowledge-management processes and software applications that had been deployed across the firm.

Next, the team created an overall program roadmap and identified potential projects for an initial implementation phase. The project team conducted a day-long workshop with the committee to refine, prioritize, and select projects for this initial phase. The first wave of projects chosen by the committee included Intellectual Capital Strategy Alignment, Knowledge Audit, Governance Design, Enterprise Content Architecture Design, and Engagement Team Portal. Detailed project descriptions and activity plans were prepared for each project.

During this initial assignment, Iknow delivered a high-level business requirements document, a solution architecture, an organizational and governance model, an implementation roadmap, and a business case. Iknow started with a current-state assessment to understand the company’s existing business processes and the various software applications in use. The project team then performed a series of detailed business analyses. Specifically, the team documented the functional and content requirements needed for the Office of the Future, developed a set of comprehensive technical requirements and various future-state hardware and software options, and identified the governance requirements and optimal organizational model to support the Office of the Future. Based on these analyses, the business case was developed and a high-level program plan and implementation roadmap were created.

Iknow started by defining the specific business requirements regarding access to experts and content. The project team conducted extensive diagnostic interviews in Europe and the United States. Iknow’s deliverables for this work stream included detailed interview results and a requirements summary for future state. The requirements summary covered business requirements, content and content architecture requirements, functional requirements, and organizational, governance, and change management requirements. Iknow also outlined other characteristics of successful knowledge-management program implementations.

A second work stream identified specific types of commercial software packages that enable various aspects of knowledge sharing. Specifically, the Iknow team analyzed the functional requirements, matched the requirements to commercially available technologies, developed selection criteria for knowledge-sharing solutions, and evaluated and recommended specific software packages. Iknow’s deliverables for this work stream included a software vendor analysis and an evaluation of commercial software products. The technology recommendations focused on an expertise and learning portal, an author/expert contribution portal, a content management system, and advanced search and content discovery tools.

A high-level design document and an implementation roadmap were also created.

The project team conducted a series of requirements-gathering sessions, where various end user and management groups were brought together to capture and document their specific business requirements. The requirements were analyzed, ranked, and compiled into a business requirements document. Results from a parallel, rapid prototyping exercise were incorporated into the design. Once the requirements were approved by stakeholders, Iknow created a detailed project implementation plan.

Iknow worked with the client’s IT division during the detailed design phase. The application design process required expertise in interface design, content management system architecture and implementation, search engine design and tuning, taxonomy development, and portal technology.

The resulting system was based on a commercial ECM product and customized to meet the client’s business and technical requirements.

The project team developed a comprehensive solution that addressed the content management processes and technical infrastructure. The solution involved four core elements:

• A robust content management process that was integrated with the new product development process. The enhanced process included all of the necessary business functions and departments for the creation, review, and approval of technical customer support knowledge.
• A taxonomy for simplified content indexing and retrieval.
• A technical environment that incorporated a leading commercial enterprise content management (ECM) application suite.
• A global content management organization, with both distributed and centralized functions. This organization was accountable for the global content creation, publishing, and delivery processes.

Iknow, working collaboratively with the SI and the client’s development staff, built the knowledge repository, content search, and content-display system. Four separate interfaces with specific functionality were created for the four end-user groups: customers, internal technical support staff, sales engineers, and business partners.

Iknow used the SAP BusinessObjects Text Analysis Suite, with its superior entity extraction and categorization capabilities, to analyze the company’s content. Iknow was selected because of its deep technical knowledge and experience with many of the leading enterprise search and text analysis products.

Iknow was given more than 50,000 scientific and technical documents drawn from three sources—the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), and the U.S. National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database. Each of the three data sets included a source-specific taxonomy, full text documents, and the document abstracts. The size of the input data exceeded 75 GB.

The processing and analysis was performed using SAP Business Objects Text Analysis XI 3.0, with the embedded Oracle XE database, Categorizer Workbench, and ThingFinder Workbench tools. The Categorizer Workbench provides an editorial environment for creating and maintaining taxonomies and contains both a learn-by-example (LBE) algorithm and a rules-based engine. The Thingfinder Workbench provides advanced text analysis that automatically identifies and extracts entities from any text data source.

Fifteen separate analyses were performed on the 50,000-plus document dataset, including various taxonomy creation and auto-categorization tasks. The Categorizer Workbench was able to classify the content into the PubMed taxonomy and a proprietary taxonomy with greater than 95 percent accuracy. The Categorizer LBE algorithm automatically generated a categorization rule set that could be reused, which met the company’s requirement for a reusable methodology.

Iknow started with a current state assessment. The project team analyzed the current system implementation, the business processes that interacted with or used the digital asset library, and the organization’s current role and responsibility assignments. Iknow conducted interviews with a variety of internal stakeholders and prepared process flow diagrams, information flow diagrams, and decision maps for the important business steps.

The project team developed a comprehensive set of 38 improvement recommendations covering content architecture/metadata design, user interface, connections between the assets, workflow integration, access by advertising agencies, asset expiration and asset archiving, search, content creation guides, and personalization.

Iknow created a comprehensive taxonomy framework for the DAM system. This deliverable included the metadata and controlled vocabularies for tagging the documents in the digital asset library and a taxonomy for browse and faceted navigation.

A three-phase implementation roadmap was developed. Phase 1 focused on content architecture and system enhancements. Phase 2 focused on content enrichment, implementing technical enhancements, and designing and implementing business process and organizational changes. Phase 3 expanded the company’s investment in and use of the digital assets and the DAM system.