Dialog: Running Light One-On-One
Randy Clark, VP of marketing for Enigma,spoke to us about e-publishing as a critical component of knowledge management
RL: Tell me a little about Enigma, what you do, and how it fits in the knowledge management space.
RC: Enigma is a software company that has an e-publishing solution suite. We focus on automating the publishing process: getting content rich documents and data packaged up into Web applications that can be used by the customer's customer. All of our customers realize that they are not in the business of selling products, rather they are selling solutions, and a critical part of the solution is the knowledge surrounding the product. For example, SAP sells enterprise software. Part of the value of that software is the software itself. Part of the value is how to use that software.
RL: How does that fit into the knowledge management picture?
RC: First of all we look at our company and our solution within the context of a much bigger knowledge management puzzle. Right now, the knowledge management concept is too broad, too big, for any individual organization, whether it is Microsoft, Oracle, or SAP, to offer a complete KM solution. So we are focused on the intersection between the customer and their supplier and the exchange of content rich information. Accordingly, much of what we do is centered on publishing explicit knowledge contained in documents and facilitating the creation of communities of interest among the users of that information.
RL: Last week, for Dialog we interviewed Gerry Sutton of Eastman Software. As you know Eastman has been involved with imaging and other technologies for data capture and storage for years. How does publishing differ from data capture, storage, and retrieval?
RC: Good question. Publishing is more than just delivering data. I can give you 20 pages that have a bunch of content on them or I can give you twenty pages from a magazine and there is a difference in how you navigate them, how you relate to them, and how you discover information in them. Publishing intends that the end user receive the information in a compelling, intuitive, and easy way. The end-user shouldnít need training or prodding to find and navigate the data sources. Publishing takes the end-user's perspective, not the author's or data manager's perspective.
An interesting aspect of this is that the end-userís experience with the presentation of the information about the product can significantly shape his or her perceptions of product. Think about the maintenance engineer who is servicing a piece of equipment out in the field. He doesnít want to learn everything that the author of the maintenance manual knows, and he doesnít want to learn to search the Web, he just wants the information he needs effectively published. The quality of the publishing, his experience with the ìknowledge wrapperî for the equipment, can greatly contribute to the way the maintenance engineer feels about the quality of the equipment.
RL: Can you give me more examples of how your customers use your product?
RC: As I mentioned earlier, our customers are large organizations that sell solutions comprising a product with a large knowledge component wrapped around the product. A good example would be Rolls Royce, which sells jet engines. Their customers are commercial airlines. From the airlinesí perspective, the purchase of jet engines is not just about purchasing equipment to install in its fleet, but also about the costs to maintain that jet engine, supply its parts, and meet regulatory requirements. Enigma packaged up the documents where Rolls keeps this information into applications that maintenance engineers can use to find the explicit information they are seeking, and then also share their knowledge with a community of other maintenance engineers through annotations, bookmarks, other Web links. So Enigma has delivered a knowledge management solution to Rolls Royce, which published previously developed information to its customers. The customers have purchased not just a jet engine, but also the ability to decrease its down time, increase maintenance engineer productivity, and reduce parts inventory.
RL: What are some of the lessons you have learned by working with your customers as they deploy a knowledge base to their end users?
RC: One of the lessons learned is that applications need to be integrated. Approaching this from an e-publishing perspective or an ERP perspective or a customer relationship management perspective is not enough. The applications have to be tied to each other. Somewhere in the process, customers usually discover that the business processes they are focusing on are tied to a much larger business process that may have require their own best of breed applications. Another thing that we find is that customers are still facing tactical data management issues. Unifying different data formats for use by common applications is still a challenge. Standards like XML have not made a major impact yet. On the cultural side, we have learned that technology is not the answer. Technology plus people plus process is the answer.
RL: Where do you see Enigma headed in the next five years? Where is the major growth for your company in the market?
RC: Our major growth in the market is basically e-business as it relates to product support and sales. It involves making the relationship between the manufacturer and the customer. In five years we envision a complete solution for an organization to deliver product documentation and provide all of the links to support related business processes. So, for example, an illustrated parts catalogue could be linked to a maintenance manual, then linked to some marketing information, and from there, linked back to a customer relationship management system, a back office ERP system, and a training application. We can already provide the document publishing and authoring pieces of this kind of solution.
RL: If a business leader asked you where to start with a knowledge management solution, what advice would you give?
RC: The knowledge management market is in its infancy, and there are still very real and big explicit knowledge problems that we have not solved. As a starting point, I would suggest that he or she take a look at the knowledge the organization already has in-house that their customers could use to make their products more valuable and the experience of using their products better quality. There is an immediate ROI in that.
Running Light is a business awareness and advisory firm at the interface of business knowledge and information technology.
Dialog is Running Light's weekly interview series developed as part of the company's project on the State of the Knowledge Industry: Progress Report 1999 (SKIPR 99). For more information contact Michael Kull or visit Running Light's website