September 8, 1997

On The GrapeVine Amoco adopts intelligent filtering and cuts its data distribution costs By Richard Adhikari hen a company's got 30,000 computer users worldwide and news feeds from 600 sources, it isn't easy to get the right information routed to the right people. Doing it in a way that provides users with quick access to the information is even more difficult. These are problems Amoco Corp. has wrestled with. With revenue exceeding $36 billion last year, the Chicago company is one of the world's largest publicly traded producers of natural gas and crude oil. Like many large companies, it had gone the usual route to disseminate information-the news came in through E-mail, was scanned and sorted manually, and then E-mailed to users. About a year ago, Amoco staff consultant Joseph Jesson began looking for a better solution. He wanted all 30,000 users to have access to the news feeds at a lower cost. His search led him to GrapeVine for Lotus Notes, a knowledge-management package from GrapeVine Technologies LLC in Troy, Mich. After running an eight-month, 150-user pilot of GrapeVine between last October and June, Jesson was hooked. "It's not just your typical filter," he says. "It's the first commercial agent technology and more." GrapeVine eliminated cumbersome manual processes. Under the old system, Jesson says, "you have to know beforehand what interests people have, or you develop monster distribution lists that are unwieldy. Given our numbers of users, we have, like any large corporation, serious communications problems." Using Lotus Notes didn't resolve the issue, because only 11,000 Amoco users had access to that program. Also, "Notes databases grow like popcorn," Jesson says, adding that Amoco has more than 3,000 of these databases. And because Notes uses pull technology, users must know what information is available in a database before they can access it. The result: Users spent lots of time searching for data. Amoco was spending thousands of dollars on Notes databases. Jesson says the news feeds cost another "several thousand dollars per person" annually. These costs led Amoco to cap the number of news-feed recipients at 300. The Notes databases also raised the problem of how to ensure data security and still allow maximum information sharing. "The usual mind-set is, `Lock it down and secure the database,'" Jesson says. "But then how do you have an infrastructure for sharing information and finding things that you need?" GrapeVine for Lotus Notes works with a knowledge chart-a list of topics of interest to end users. News is filtered against this chart, then sent to Notes databases that are arranged by topic. Amoco designates experts for each topic who check the stories in the databases and classify them according to importance: regular, important, or critical. GrapeVine then automatically E-mails stories to the users' in-trays according to the level of importance indicated. "The beauty of this thing is, the experts don't need to know beforehand who wants to know this," Jesson says. Users set up their own profiles by selecting topics from a company-selected list. They also designate a level of importance for each topic. If a user wants all stories on, say, welding, he sets the threshold at routine; if he only wants to see something the experts say is important, he sets the priority all the way up to critical. What makes GrapeVine different from other knowledge-management vendors' products is that it uses the knowledge in the user's head to filter information coming in, says David Yockelson, VP and director at the Meta Group, a market research firm in Stamford, Conn. GrapeVine goes beyond other products that let users get information from different places, construct a map saying where the information is, and retrieve it, Yockelson explains. "GrapeVine takes it one step further-you've filtered it, classified it, now here's what it means to you." GrapeVine lets users form dynamic discussion groups and attach comments to a story that are sent to everyone who received the original, Jesson says. It will also automatically point to any relevant Notes discussion databases and, if users have rights to access those databases, they can point and click to get information from them. This approach solved Jesson's problem of fully utilizing the Notes databases. "Notes is passive; Lotus' strategy is to push all the information out and hope something sticks," says Yockelson. "With GrapeVine, you can designate what information is important and so you're making it active." Yockelson says GrapeVine's real-time collaborative approach adds further value to corporate processes. "The fact that everyone in the co mpany can access the information isn't so unique; what is unique is that everyone can participate in adding relevance to the information in real time," he says. Using GrapeVine for Lotus Notes has proved valuable for Amoco Pipeline, a subsidiary that collaborates on oil and gas pipeline projects with other energy companies. Pipeline had a highly trained staffer manually filtering news-wire stories and posting relevant ones on a homegrown mainframe bulletin board called CompInfo. Replacing CompInfo with GrapeVine for Lotus Notes has automated the process and saved the expert's time. He now has only to prioritize the stories according to relevance. Analysis and decision making is easier and faster, Jesson says. Pricing for GrapeVine for Lotus Notes starts at $2,500 for a basic package that runs on Notes Server version 4.x or Notes Domino 1.5 or higher under OS/2 Warp or Windows NT 3.5.1 or higher. Jesson wants to replace the Notes database in-boxes with personalized Web sites or hypertext-enabled E-mail to keep costs down and give more users access to data. This month he plans to launch a pilot project with the Web version of GrapeVine, called GrapeVine for Compass Server, that will work with Netscape's Compass Server. GrapeVine for Compass Server will automatically classify information brought up by a user profile, says Jim Arthurs, VP of operations at GrapeVine. "One of the wizards that comes with GrapeVine for Compass Server helps set up the taxonomy and the user interest profile," he adds. GrapeVine for Compass Server is scheduled to be available in the fourth quarter. "With a Web browser, I can give GrapeVine a list of URLs instead of a list of Notes databases, and it can go out and get the information," Jesson says. "It's not as good as Notes at getting databases-but it's a lot cheaper." Equipping every user with a Web browser also costs much less than equipping them all with Notes clients-giving more users access to information at a lower cost. Back to News in Review Send Us Your Feedback Top of the Page

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