Few award-winning IT projects can have cost less than the knowledge
and information management system at business services company A
Recipe for Success. The overall budget for the system that won the
2000 Computer Weekly Knowledge Management Award was £10,000, and
the software development consumed just £3,000.
Developing a knowledge management system needn't cost the earth.
Philip Hunter traces the steps taken by A Recipe for Success
to capitalise on its critical informationIt is true that these figures are slightly illusory, in that the
company itself offers e-business consultancy and so did not have to
hire any staff or buy in expertise. For many bricks-and-mortar
businesses, the same system would have cost considerably more
because up-front consultancy would have to be hired - and £10,000
does not buy much of that. Such a company would also have had to
acquire new staff, retain external consultancy, or develop its own
in-house expertise through retraining, just to keep the project
rolling forward.
Jeff Hume, director at A Recipe for Success, says that through
an innovative use of technology the company was able to take on and
beat firms like British Gas, whose annual budget for paperclips
alone is probably bigger than its annual turnover.
A Recipe for Success already had the expertise and the £10,000
only had to cover the cost of software, hardware and staff time
actually spent on the project. Despite these caveats, it is still
an object lesson in how to design and build an effective system
within a small budget, with a flexible structure that allows for
continual growth in both functionality and scale.
Return on investment
In terms of return on investment, few projects will score as
well as this one. Being a small company comprising just 15 people,
all highly IT literate and committed to the project, there was
never going to be the common problem of obtaining the "user
buy-in". Therefore, the benefits of collaborative working and
knowledge sharing have come through quickly.
There is also likely to be direct financial benefits by selling
the system to clients. Events on this front have been galvanised by
the publicity surrounding the Computer Weekly award.
Tonya Hills, director of IT, explains, "After winning the award,
our clients have been asking us about it, and now many of them want
to buy it from us. So we're going to turn it into a product
set."
But this was not in the initial project plan, which was to yoke
technology to the cause of collaborative working within
geographically dispersed project teams. As Hills points out, A
Recipe for Success requires people with often scarce IT or business
skills often not available within the vicinity of the head office
in Ipswich.
"With 15 of us in 10 or 12 locations, all working different
hours, with some programmers working nights, we wanted to visit a
place online where we could all find out where we are with a
particular project," says Hills.
Therefore, the first phase was to establish a knowledge
management system enabling staff, as well as partners and
customers, to share information relating to projects as well as
more general expertise.
"It's almost like a little gossip area," says Hills. "For each
project, we've got a discussion board. Staff have access to it and
can put on informal things, such as contact details. Clients can
also go on and can see designs, progress made and all the latest
documentation, which was the main point of having a central source
of information. It has also meant we didn't have to send round huge
file attachments all the time and avoided the situation where we
never knew who had the right information."
Having this centrally controlled repository of information also
gives the company an added selling tool. "We can see when clients
haven't got something and can then try and sell it to them," says
Hills.
The system is surprisingly sophisticated, given the size of the
company and the budget. Access to information is segmented both by
project and users.
"There are varying degrees of information which only specific
people can see," says Hills. "For example, only directors and the
company secretary can see minutes of board meetings."
Information is held in folders, each of which is associated with
a list of users allowed to access it. Furthermore, such users,
again subject to their status, can update the folders and upload
documents to them.
In effect, there is a partnership between users and the people
in charge of IT to ensure that content is relevant and kept
up-to-date. This is really the only way of providing effective
information/knowledge management. The users with the relevant
information must be able to create and update content effectively
without having to liaise with the IT department every time. But
equally, there has to be some central control exercised over
content creation and management, to weed out rubbish and at the
same time ensure that gaps in the overall content are filled.
For this partnership to work, users as well as the IT staff need
to be fully committed. There was no difficulty selling the system
to staff, but more effort is required to bring all the customers
and partners on board, if only because they are not always aware of
its potential or scope.
Identifying activity
To address this issue, A Recipe for Success decided that it must
be able to measure each user's activity to identify who is failing
to take full advantage of the system's facilities. It would then be
possible to target those users, identify why they are failing to
take advantage of the system, and take appropriate action. Such
action might involve training, the provision of more relevant
information, or perhaps just provide a reminder of what is there.
This was an essential aspect of the project, whose success depended
on total commitment from all parties.
"We do statistical analysis of system activity and from that we
can easily identify who isn't using it and to what extent," says
Hills. "We can then say to them, 'look we're putting all this
information onto the extranet to help you, so why aren't you using
it?' Usually it's lack of understanding."
Feedback is sought regularly from all users, who are asked for
comments and suggestions for improvements. All the users, including
customers, staff and partners, are frequently asked what further
information they would like access to. Furthermore, the knowledge
management system, and the processes used to maintain it, are
revised constantly and discussed at every team meeting.
Overall, the system had a fairly unique set of requirements,
combining knowledge and content management with other project
specific functions such as scheduling, as well as user monitoring.
For this reason, says Hills, it quickly became clear that there was
no suitable package on the market.
"Being an e-commerce consultancy ourselves, we knew what was on
the market, and while some products fulfilled one or two of our
requirements, none met all of them. The other thing was we wanted
to expand the system in future, and to do this we wanted full
ownership of it to make changes ourselves," explains Hills.
In one important respect, integration of shared diary management
with the other knowledge and content functions, few products came
up to scratch. "We've got a diary on the extranet, and most
products that incorporated a diary didn't have file sharing," says
Hills. This would make efficient scheduling of project team
meetings difficult.
In any case, most of the available packages from the likes of
Broadvision, in content management or Autonomy in knowledge
management, are pitched more at larger enterprises, and tend to be
priced accordingly. There isn't much around for the £3,000 that was
allocated to initial development.
A major design objective was to ensure that the system was
sufficiently flexible to meet not just all current needs but also
anticipated future developments. The core component is an Access
database which is currently hosted by Vservers.com and accessed
from the Web site using Active Server Pages.
This arrangement satisfied initial requirements while avoiding
the burden of managing the Web site in-house. But there are some
limitations. One is that it is not possible to have both incoming
and newly created e-mails filed automatically so that they and the
information embodied within them can be accessed in future.
"At the moment we save e-mails manually into the shared Vservers
server," says Hills. "But we're going to buy our own server, and
then we'll look at things like e-mail, so that when they come in,
they can be automatically filed."
This will be a significant step forward given the pivotal role
e-mail plays for communicating between members of project teams,
and the enormous amount of valuable content embodied. But there
would still be room for further progress, given that an archive of
e-mails is hardly the best-organised repository of information.
There will be scope for more finely-tuned categorisation of the
information. This will require further effort by users and cannot
be entirely automated, though there is potential for intelligent
content-based automatic categorisation techniques.
Such techniques should ideally be capable of identifying when
e-mails should be deleted immediately, rather than filed. In some
cases, e-mails can be deleted as soon as they have been read. In
others, e-mails will need to be retained for a short time but
subsequently deleted, perhaps when the project to which they
pertain is finished. Sometimes, the e-mail will contain information
that will remain valuable for a longer period beyond the duration
of any specific project.
It is unlikely that the archiving management process can be
entirely automated and human assistance will be required. Without
this, the e-mail archive would quickly assume unmanageable
proportions.
A Recipe for Success has some e-mails that are just messages
about other documents, for example, to inform relevant users that a
particular file is now up on the system. Such e-mails can safely be
deleted as soon as they are read, and often would be better sent as
pager alerts or SMS messages. Indeed, A Recipe for Success is
looking at delivering such messages in SMS format. "Some clients
have asked for that," says Hills.
Another coming development is to allow access to relevant
summary information via Palm Pilots. Initially, this would be
achieved by synchronising the Palm Pilots with a PC or any other
device attached to the network, but this could be done in future
via dial-up mobile connections.
By the time such enhancements have been completed, the total
cost will be considerably greater than the current total of
£10,000. But a challenging benchmark has been set for cost in the
annals of award-winning IT projects.
Ready, steady, success!
A Recipe for Success succeeded in building an effective
knowledge management system for staff, partners and customers
within a small budget and with a flexible structure allowing for
continual growth in functionality and scale. The system also
supports collaborative working within project teams, with
integration between information and diary management.
The five key achievements are:
- Completion of an effective knowledge management system on time
and within the tight budget of £10,000
- Flexibility to expand and support new functions and also
different delivery channels, such as Palm Pilots and Wap
phones
- Support for collaborative working with integrated diary
management
- Complete ownership of the system without dependence on outside
software suppliers
- Potential for additional revenues by selling the software to
customers.