Autonomy Systems Ltd

Collaboration & Expertise Networks - CEN

Overview
Large organizations continue to struggle with the fundamental issue of 'how do we know what we know?' Until recently, it was customary for the enterprise to place a higher value on explicit information - whether codifying knowledge in manuals and procedures or capturing it in databases - than in implicit information. However, a drive to increase the yield and return on investment of I.T. is fuelling a growing recognition that implicit skills, experience and 'know-how' - are just as vital when it comes to getting the job done. On its own, explicit information remains divorced from the relationships and associations that make its inherent value attainable and useful. For example, executing the instructions in a set of design blueprints held in paper or digital form, can be greatly accelerated or enhanced by the additional unwritten information that its author might add or that someone familiar with the plans might provide. Yet, expertise is hard to identify in the first place, let alone manage on a regular basis without burdensome bureaucratic or manual support. In small companies, finding an expert can be as easy as asking a question over a cubicle wall, but in large, dispersed companies, numbers can easily hide the experts. In addition, the sheer volume of explicit data, combined with the effects of a fast changing environment, make the problems of identifying and brokering connections between employees particularly acute. Yet the rewards of identifying and managing expertise, or managing 'know-who' as well as 'know-how' are potentially the most significant the enterprise can capture, offering opportunities for driving down costs and increasing revenues via innovation and collaboration.

CEN Functionality
Personalization
Automated Explicit User Profiling Automated Implicit User Profiling Cross-device Profiling

Expertise Networks
Expertise Location Communities of Practice

Collaboration Networks
Virtual Communities Collaborative Feedback Virtual Libraries Proactive Document Recommendation

Alerting
Alerting via E-mail, Internet, SMS, Mobile, PDA Desktop Suite Peer-to-Peer Auto-Answer

Enterprise Performance Management

CEN Cluster Mapping Network Profiling CEN Visualization

the current modes of operation. do not reflect the way people work [computers], must gain an understanding of the content they store and serve, including its context. More importantly, computing devices must gain an understanding of context related to their users.
Dan Rasmus, Giga Information Group

Legacy Integration
Integration with legacy collaboration systems

www.autonomy.com

Autonomy Systems Ltd

If your organization wants to get more of a handle on the value of information, then Autonomy is probably the only company you should be talking to.
Martin Butler, Butler Group Autonomy - Not a Technology Company, October 2002

Traditional Approaches
Expertise management is concerned with making connections between information and people, and between people themselves - in effect creating Collaboration and Expertise Networks (CEN). Traditional techniques to achieving these networks fall broadly into three main categories. The first, and perhaps most familiar technique depends on someone asking a question and an expert providing the answer (Q&A). This connection of users searching for expertise goes only part-way towards a solution, is dependant on the user 'asking' a question and the expert answering, and discovers only the 'known' rather than the 'unknown'. The second technique involves building a user profile based on an analysis of a user's description of him or herself or worse, analyzing a user's 'click-through' record. Such techniques only identify people willing or able to describe themselves, are always outdated and again are heavily reliant on people's willingness to participate, or personal perception of what they do. In addition, users roles, experience and interests change with unpredictable frequency. 'Click-through' records are even more impotent and convey massive amounts of 'noise', which conveys little useful information. The third technique is based on community management - linking people who participate in communities using workspace tools and applications. This may work well where administration is in place to support such an endeavour but it is again manually dependant and relies on people proactively connecting, long before any valuable relationships are established. The key problem with traditional technology approaches is that the successful enterprise does not simply want to implement a software application that locates experts or drives collaboration for the sake of it; they want to solve a specific business problem. Implementing a legacy collaboration technology that is reliant on people moves the organization further away, not closer, to such an objective. If the solution needs to be configured manually, perhaps by being 'told' the meanings of words specific to a production process, or has to be maintained, (e.g. the definition of a word has changed - World Trade Centre = Ground Zero), the result is a defocused business. Such technologies also lack the subtly to identify nuances in content that may contain a plethora of ideas, but only be labelled by a single heading. A viable solution must be less costly than the alternative of doing nothing, must be fast enough to keep pace with a normal business environment and flexible enough to meet the needs of a changing business.

Collaboration & Expertise Networks - CEN

Autonomy CEN
Autonomy approaches the challenge of identifying expertise and driving collaboration by avoiding manual dependencies and therefore, the costly overheads incurred by other technologies. By forming a conceptual understanding of text, voice and people's behaviours online, (analyzing what a user is reading, writing or sharing), Autonomy's technology identifies tacit experience automatically in context. Automation provides a rapidly deployable solution that can easily be administered by either the user or at the backend, to serve an individual, team or entire organization. In addition, Autonomy also drives a multifaceted range of information operations in the background including aggregation, categorization, tagging, hyperlinking, retrieval, alerting, clustering, visualization, summarization, profiling and personalization. Autonomy's technology also provides a full range of manual administrative tools, enabling customers to retain full control of the way in which results are generated.

Automation also fuses content from within the array of existing collaboration solutions already inside the enterprise, from instant messaging, chat facilities, and work flow to personal/team calendaring, each of which have their own incompatible proprietary expertise repository, non-uniform schemas and distinctive interfaces.

Whereas labour-intensive technologies and 'point/niche-solutions' are characterized by forcing the user to adapt to the technology by changing his/her behaviour, Autonomy's active-matching technologies help to ensure users remain on-task with minimal behavioural change and virtually no training costs. Point/niche-solutions also reinforce stove-pipe operations, to the possible detriment of operations in another area. Autonomy's automation enables a unified view of the entire organisation's assets and users to be continuously appraised and accessible without the manual effort otherwise required to stitch applications or repositories together.

But Autonomy's value doesn't stop there.

the fragmentation of the collaboration market has led to many ways of representing collaboration, which results in fragmented systems and an increasing reliance on people to bridge the gaps between systems
Dan Rasmus, Giga Information Group

Collaboration & Expertise Networks - CEN

Collaboration & Expertise Networks - CEN

Autonomy CEN leads the way in enabling the enterprise, regardless of size and complexity, not only to automatically identify expertise and drive collaboration, but also to visualize the results. Delivering a new breed of intelligent information technology to drive personalization, collaboration and expertise identification, Autonomy CEN leverages the benefits of Autonomy's Intelligent Data Operating Layer (IDOL), a data agnostic infrastructure solution that automatically combines the power of all the information assets in the organization, seamlessly facilitating interoperability between all isolated collaboration applications, data repositories and people. Autonomy CEN in turn helps organizations regain true insight and control of all the business activities, automatically networking experts and alerting users to collaboration opportunities.

Personalization
There is a direct correlation between the time it takes to make a business decision and the amount of time and effort needed to gather the data input for that decision. The ability of a knowledge worker to monitor, decide and act across the value chain faster than competitors creates a sustainable business advantage. CEN accurately links people & information in context, in real time, using concepts identified from:

Explicit Profiling - Registered explicit interests determined by individual using:

Natural Language Description Refine by example Keyword and Boolean Operators

Implicit Profiling Implicit behaviour, i.e. consumption of information inc. reading, creating, sharing of information adds further insight into each users activities and interests.

Cross-d device Profiling Profiling can take place across multiple devices. A profile generated through a user's interaction with Mobile Phone/ PDA content for example, can then be used to recommend Internet content on the Web or news content via email or SMS.

CEN Profiling Automatically recommends experts and employees with similar skill sets to the document in the active window.

Autonomy Systems Ltd

Expertise Networks
Employees in large-scale geographically dispersed offices typically have a limited view of what others are doing and who is best to address problems they encounter. Losing sight of the knowledge community weakens the entire business process, leading to duplication of effort and an overall reduction in productivity levels. CEN overcomes these limitations facilitating the recognition of highly focused experts within the knowledge community:

Expertise Location

Locate experts using example data (documents, e-mails etc.) Discover tacit knowledge through natural language querying Identify experts using Legacy Keywords and Boolean Rules Find experts based on geographic location, department, availability

Communities of Practice Each member of the community has the ability to proactively define their own expertise using natural language definitions. The information rich concepts identified from these definitions are updated within the users own profile and further contribute towards finding the right expert in that organization. The ability to define roles, skills and expertise can also be performed using keywords.

Collaboration Networks
CEN overcomes business process myopia and focuses organizations on building communities of expertise, driving collaboration and bringing employees together into discussion forums to realize goal congruence, the reduction of duplicated effort and increased productivity levels.

Virtual Communities Build entire Collaboration Networks matching users with common explicit or implicit user profiles or even proactive expertise assignments.

Similar People in the Community CEN notifies users of other people in the community who have been consuming the same type of data as they have, utilizing either the implicit/explicit consumption of information or combining both, to discover synergies between people.

Collaborative Feedback Based on constructive collaborative feedback from the community, Virtual Libraries are created that ensure that only the most highly regarded information is biased in any results:

Document Recommendation using natural language citation Document Rating / Scoring

Collaboration & Expertise Networks - CEN

Alerting
CEN makes individuals and teams of people in the organizations more reactive to information utilizing the vital data captured to intelligently push highly pertinent information to each member of the network through any device e.g. E-Mail, Mobile Phone, Personal Digital Assistant, Internet, DTV, and Active Services (Autonomy Desktop Suite).

Desktop Suite Desktop Suite enables the individual to remain on-task, saving significant time and adding incalculable value by avoiding altogether, the inherent limitations that 'searching' entails.

Peer-t to-P Peer Desktop Suite provides Peer-to-Peer capabilities enabling users to connect to other people in the community to initiate collaboration and the sharing of tacit knowledge.

Auto-A Answer Questions posed by people are frequently unanswered due to time constraints or the inability to share tacit knowledge. CENs Auto-Answer feature automatically answers e-mail questions by identifying the key concepts of the query - returning the most relevant information that is shared within the Collaboration and Expertise Network.

Desktop Suite Relevant and related links to the concepts contained in the body of the email, independent of the links format (text, voice, images, video) or location.

Autonomy Systems Ltd

Enterprise Performance Management

In order to keep track of these organizational activities and monitor the business process, the automated enterprise needs real-time performance measurement tools to enable real-time analysis and management of its most valuable resources - information and the people that interact with that data. CEN presents EPM results as customizable graphics and displays the innumerable correlations that exist between the interactions of users and the information they process in a single field of view:

CEN Cluster Mapping - Spectrograph Illustrates in real-time, the concepts related between peoples interests (the information they are reading, writing and sharing), with available information assets.

Network Profiling Displays the network traffic of emails, based on the concepts within the content in order to automatically build profiles, that can then be used to drive collaboration and manage the business process.

Autonomy Systems Ltd

CEN Benefits
Retain control and true insight of all the business activities regardless of scale Understanding who the experts are in the organization and who should collaborate Build a culture of accountability Eliminate the threat of communication breakdown and duplication of effort React to information changes faster through automatic delivery and personalization of timely and relevant data

Identify knowledge gaps Integrate multiple expertise repositories Reconcile collaboration schema CEN Visualization Illustrates the relationship of one expert with others in the knowledge community and available information assets.

CEN Legacy Integration

CEN delivers the additional benefits of being able to integrate with a whole host of Legacy Retrieval and Collaboration Systems leveraging the existing user-document relationships while enriching definitions into fully conceptual user profiles. Enterprises are equipped with intuitive tools to import existing Collaboration and Expertise definitions including:

Keyword Expertise Assignment Any meta-data that has been assigned to experts e.g. Expertise, Location, Department etc. Explicit user profiles & attributes Implicit user profiles & attributes.

Autonomy Inc. 301 Howard Street, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA Tel: +1 415 243 9955 Fax: +1 415 243 9984 Email: info@us.autonomy.com

Autonomy Systems Ltd Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Rd, Cambridge CB4 0WZ, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1223 448 000 Fax: +44 (0) 1223 448 001 Email: autonomy@autonomy.com

Other Offices Autonomy has additional offices in Atlanta, Boston, New York and Washington DC, as well as in Amsterdam, Brussels, Frankfurt, Geneva, Hamburg, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris, Oslo, Sao Paulo, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney and Rome.

www.autonomy.com
Copyright 2002 Autonomy Corp. All rights reserved. Other trademarks are registered trademarks and the properties of their respective owners. Product specifications and features are subject to change without notice. Use of Autonomy software is under license.

[AUT CEN] 11.02