Mining Your Intellectual Assets

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February 16, 2001 (11:39 AM EST)

By Ron Copeland,

One 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 allow their employees to share their knowledge and expertise. Most companies are able to follow through on this kind of organizational commitment—culturally and technically—but with great difficulty.

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 current collaboration infrastructure.

"We had no real choice," said Frank Butstraen, Philips' vice president 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 current 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," advised 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 said. 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," said Simon Hayward, Gartner's vice president 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 said.

According to Scott Cooper, vice president 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 added. 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 said.