February 12, 2001

http://www.informationweek.com/824/lotus.htm

Mine Your Intellectual Assets

Lotus attempts to bring cohesion to knowledge management with its Knowledge Discovery System. The Discovery Server and K-station offerings provide a sophisticated and easy-to-implement platform that can help companies uncover and share expertise.

By Ron Copeland   (rcopeland@cmp.com)

ne of the hardest lessons to learn is how to share. So it should come as no great surprise that one of the most difficult tasks companies have to master is how to encourage and enable their employees to share their knowledge and expertise. Most companies are able to follow through on this kind of organizational commitment--culturally and technically--only with great difficulty, if at all.

Whether Lotus Development Corp.'s first-quarter delivery of its Knowledge Discovery System will act as a catalyst for this cultural shift within companies remains to be seen. But what it should do, particularly for those companies that already have made a Notes-Domino commitment, is provide a sophisticated set of relatively easy-to-implement tools that can help companies expose and share their knowledge assets.

Royal Philips Electronics NV, an electronics maker in the Netherlands, made the Lotus commitment by standardizing on Notes and Domino as its messaging and collaboration infrastructure. Philips also deployed Lotus QuickPlace and Sametime to find more-effective ways to connect its far-flung engineers and business managers. Philips has indicated that it will plug the Knowledge Discovery System components into its existing collaboration infrastructure.

"We had no real choice," says Frank Butstraen, Philips' VP of corporate IT. "We absolutely needed to be able to put teams of engineers together to work on projects, and the Lotus knowledge-management products allow us to do that."

It hasn't always been easy for Philips to pursue this goal, but Butstraen has worked diligently to get buy-in from his users. The benefits of collaboration are slowly making converts of those who were initially resistant.

The Knowledge Discovery System, which runs on the Microsoft Windows NT/2000 platform, has two primary components: the Lotus Discovery Server and the K-station Server portal. The Discovery Server includes advanced data-search and information-organization capabilities. The K-station Server provides a personalized Web interface for retrieving and organizing information as well as for collaborating with co-workers and people outside the company.

The Discovery Server has a three-tier architecture: Discovery Server clients, which include the taxonomy editor and the client applications; Discovery Server application server objects, which comprise spiders, clustering, and client objects; and the IBM DB2-based Discovery Server database.

Lotus officials note that you don't need the Notes-Domino platform to derive benefits from the Knowledge Discovery System, but early adopters will likely be existing customers.

The richer the metadata, the more benefit you'll derive from Discovery Server, according to the system's architects. "Start with rich content, like Notes, then add Web and file content," advises Dave Newbold, lead developer for the Discovery Server project at Iris Associates, a wholly owned Lotus subsidiary, and the project's original architect. The quality of the metadata that describes the content and its creator enhances the discovery project. Notes-Domino exposes this descriptive data. Current data types supported include Notes databases, HTML files, Microsoft Exchange, and the operating system's file system. Domino Directories and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol directories also are accessible.

Short-term goals for extending Discovery Server include a Discovery Server Java API, Unix support, DB2 table replication, component packaging and delivery, and performance optimization, Newbold says. These enhancements are expected to trickle in during the next 12 months.

A big part of the Knowledge Discovery System's as-yet-unrealized promise will be its ability to mine the information stored in customer-relationship management, enterprise resource planning, material-requirements planning, and other types of business applications. It's clear that the ability to reach down into legacy applications is on both customers' and Lotus' agendas. But that will have to wait for upcoming versions.

"Knowledge management doesn't come in a box," says Simon Hayward, Gartner's VP and research director. But Lotus has created a product that otherwise could only be obtained by a mix of products from mostly small vendors, he says.

According to Scott Cooper, VP of the Lotus Knowledge Management Products Group, a handful of core technologies provides the foundation for Lotus' overall knowledge-management system: business intelligence, collaboration, knowledge transfer, knowledge discovery, and expertise location. Lotus Discovery System combines the last two components, knowledge discovery and expertise location (with privacy control), while providing a viewing and organizing mechanism in the form of the K-station portal application.

Gartner's Hayward cautions, however, that while Knowledge Discovery System raises the bar on what companies can expect in an advanced collaboration and knowledge-management support environment, such capabilities require careful drivers. Companies need to recognize that exploiting such capabilities will require significant thought and design, he adds. That said, the Knowledge Discovery System together with Domino .doc, LearningSpace, Sametime, and QuickPlace, lets Lotus offer a fuller range of products relevant to collaboration and knowledge management than its competitors, Hayward says.

Lotus has identified three basic categories in its knowledge-management organizational structure: things, people, and places. "Things," in Lotus' nomenclature, refers to all of the data, documents, and even business processes within or available from the corporate network that can be electronically cataloged. "People" includes employees, partners, customers, suppliers, or other individuals who generate documents and data or supply analytical content of some form or type. "Places" refers to virtual locations where people can electronically congregate, such as portals, which, in conjunction with other Lotus collaborative technologies, let individuals accumulate and share information about particular topics and themselves.

According to Scott Elliot, Lotus' director of knowledge-management products, Discovery Server performs the following functions:

• Catalogs expertise and content;
• Discovers meaning, relationships, and assigns value;
• Personalizes and organizes knowledge for individuals and communities;
• Provides a place for communities and teams to work, make decisions, and take action.

Discovery Server scans company directories to build lists of people, seeks out documents residing in document-management systems such as Notes-Domino databases and on company Web sites, scours company databases, and even mines E-mail systems to inventory a significant amount of a company's knowledge assets.

The amassed data is then normalized into XML in the form of a full-text index, a catalog, and metrics. Since the value of this information would have a pretty short shelf life if it weren't constantly refreshed and re-evaluated, the Discovery Server continuously and automatically "spiders" data.

Metric analysis calculates the relative value of documents and colleagues' expertise, which Lotus refers to as affinities, by interpreting the frequency of authorship, citations, and access to the documents or data. Discovery Server then categorizes all of these data treasures into sort of an organizational taxonomy. It takes this content catalog and indexes and stores the results in its own dedicated DB2 database.

Perhaps the key issue relating to knowledge management is that people are always in motion. They are always learning, relearning, entering, and exiting. Whatever technologies IT managers put in place must be able to deal with an information universe in flux.

By making adaptation a part of the Knowledge Discovery System's DNA, Lotus has recognized that not only does information evolve over time, but so does the context surrounding the information also changes. What might be the most important document within a particular category this week or this month may be overshadowed or made obsolete by changes in the context of the information, if new experts are available, more complete treatments of the topics are published, or some topic becomes technically obsolete.

Iris Associates' Newbold says there are basically three key concepts and related technologies that make Discovery Server remarkable: affinities, metrics, and automation.

Affinities is how Lotus refers to the technology's ability to associate people automatically with their published documents, interests, and concerns and to make sure these associations adapt as those variables change. Metrics refers to the algorithms that sort information and provide the relative weights to affinity-related documents and data. Automation is key in that the relative value of documents and data changes and erodes over time, so it's necessary that spiders continue to search data sources to reassess patterns and relationships, and refine the taxonomies.

As early adopters of knowledge-management systems will tell you, knowledge management is as much cultural as technical.

"We need to shift from a need-to-know to a need-to-share environment," says Eugene Stein, CIO of Shearman & Sterling, a New York law firm with more than 860 lawyers located around the world. Shearman & Sterling represents financial institutions, governments, corporations, and other organizations in major transactions.

Before the Knowledge Discovery System, the legal firm developed its own knowledge-management strategy and was building custom applications. The goal was to give employees the ability to find the legal and regulatory data they needed. The company also wanted to deliver more services, more efficiently to its clients--a set of goals common to many companies.

One facet of the plan called for obtaining or building a taxonomy. Shearman & Sterling was looking at buying a taxonomy appropriate to the legal profession. The firm had looked at a number of offerings, from legal research providers such as CCH, Lexis, VNA, Westlaw, and many others, but it determined early on that it would need to build its own taxonomy specific to the firm's culture and needs. Stein charged the company's librarians with developing and creating one.

About that time, Stein became aware of the Lotus Discovery Server and decided to let the commercial product take first crack at generating the taxonomy. "We ended up tinkering with it, rather than building it from scratch, and that saved us a lot of time and resources," Stein says. "I know organizations where they have upward of 50 or 60 people doing nothing else but cataloging and indexing. I have four."

The K-station Server portal component of the Knowledge Discovery System provides personal and group workspaces to take advantage of the Discovery Server's knowledge-mining capabilities. It creates a browser-accessible interface that lets users organize and access personalized content and application functionality in the form of "personal places." The multipage place user interface also lets users create custom views made up of Notes-Domino applications, Microsoft sources, and Web sites, as well as other portals. Group places, or "community places," also provide a location and an organizing principle for sharing information and collaborating on projects.

The Lotus K-station Server lets IT departments easily deploy portals by taking advantage of the prefabricated template library and supplied access to HTML, URL, Lotus Notes, Domino.doc, images, text, Microsoft Exchange 2000, Hotmail, and Discovery Server data sources. Simple graphical user interface tools let users further customize and personalize their work areas.

The Lotus QuickPlace and Sametime collaboration technologies also are integrated with K-station, which lets workgroups create common work environments and have real-time communication. Initially, the Lotus K-station server will operate only on Windows NT, but additional platform support is scheduled for later this year.

In some sense, it would be great to be able to take a snapshot of employees' experiences and company intellectual property and make that information universally available. The technology to do this will probably never exist. But bridging the gap between "no repository of knowledge assets" and "complete brain-trust memory dump," there's a lot of distance that can be covered with products such as Discovery Server and K-station Server.