Gilbane Panel on KM & Collaboration Case Studies

Two presenters on KM & Collaboration Case studies. The moderator, Glen Secor, Senior Consultant & Legal Analyst for The Gilbane Report, notes that legal departments always benefit from KM initiatives. The first presenter provided some good insight into structured collaboration in a highly regulated context (somewhat the opposite of Socialtext at this time) and the second provided some unconventional adoption marketing techniques for broad collaboration.

Charlie Sodano, Ph.D, Manager of Information Services, Berlex Biosciences, discusses Electronic Laboratory Notebooks (ELNs) in the Pharmaceutical R&D Environment -- which are key to increasing R&D productivity. They transformed a culture of writing in ledgers and using that information down the road for patents in Pharma and regulatory purposes with a new capability to create records. Evolution from laboratory information management systems (LIMSs) to a consortium on authentication of electronic records (ERC) to ELNs provided by commercial vendors -- snapshots of items in a work flow with comments and interpretations. In many cases its the first person to file patents that wins, so time stamping is essential. 250 scientists, 5k paper note books, difficulties with paste-ins, table of contents was inadequate, photographs damaged pages, illegible entries, originals were unprotected, difficult to find and retrieve information. Objectives: share information, improve record keeping practices, protect and preserve IP, simple architecture, minimal training and support. More complete information captured, retained and available, higher level of security, searchable, easier to share. Approach: use available supported software components, engage users immediately with developer, start with a dedicated user group, make improvements in a timely manner, rely on word of mouth to expand usage. Archived everything in PDFs, but also kept paper and microfilm copies because there isn't a definitive legal decision on submitting electronic versions to regulators. Started in 1997, 1999 approved as an alternative to paper, in June 2001 voluntarily chosen by 80% of Berlex scientists, June 2001 stopped using paper. Bought new transport capacity between California and Germany to enhance network performance in 2001 for a content servers in Japan, California and Germany; with a data server in Germany. Use Documentum as the content management system in the background. Word or Excel as the authoring tool, visual basic module that utilizes Documentum as ERS, standard, scalable and supported, printed experiments are official records. 300 current users in California, 500 in Germany and 40 in Japan. Similar to Tagging: Users like using keywords, not for the overall benefit, but for themselves, don't use a fixed vocabulary (went down that road before), wouldn't use it in a research environment. Form-based UI that then makes all records created transparent for others. 5 pages printed per experiment with 10k pages printed per month in 3 locations., 60k experiments and growing strong. Benefits: legible, better organized, more complete, less reinventing the wheel and repurposing for presentations and reports. Now approaching a terabyte of data, search performance is beginning to drop, restoring the server becomes a greater issue, going to archive more data and have a more distributed environment over time. Language issues: metadata in english and content in native language. Need global support. What's Next: E-signatures, upgrading Office and Documentum and long term archiving. Doesn't support collaborative authoring, because of patent issues, so someone is appointed to enter records.

Stéphane Ethier, Director Knowledge Management, Cossette Communication Group talked about Optimizing Knowledge Management with XML. Cossette is a MarCom company with 1,500 employees and multiple global locations. Uses knowledge as a tool for business development, a catalyst for teamwork, sharing and efficiency, as a creative force impacting our work. KM makes us smarter, more competitive and a better place to work. Enables us to be a truly convergent company (wonder what that means) and to be thought leaders in the industry. A new culture of sharing where you give a little and get a lot in return -- it develops new reflexes: is there anything on this in the Knowledge Center? Sharing cast studies, business development documents and tools, points of view and research. Profiles of all employees. Champions were their secret weapons, assuming three roles: journalists, thought leaders/cheerleaders and liaison officers (between the field and head office). Used IXIASOFT TEXTML server for XML (guess that's why it is capitalized) document management solution. Their requirements were search, customizable interface design, flexibility in the tool and licensing model, flexibility in bilingualism management, low acquisition and annual maintenance. XML so they could create their own meta tags and have structured documents, scalable and powerful search.

Used branding, design, profile collection and a launch campaign to further adoption (note they happen to sell similar services). Branding: called it The Fridge (because its cool, heh,) and the homepage actually looked like a fridge with notes and magnets. You open it to get stuff/sections on the door shelf and a document as the main section and search where the freezer is. For profile collection they used a contest to reward the best profile: What are you hungry for? contest with 8 $250 vouchers for the supermarket and a grand prize gastronomic weekend trip. Got 50% of the profiles within one week. Launch used posters in the lobby of each office, direct marketing piece with a drive-to-web CD ROM. In five months the Fridge became a household word and used for hundreds of documents, profiles, web sites and fresh ideas. Commitment of top management, sufficient content, decentralized network of champions, use of knowledge and contributions to the fridge as part of employee evaluations and other key success factors.