Making Premium Information Resources Count
Information is the lifeblood of business. In addition to being critical for business survival, information constantly needs to flow to the right individual at the right time. Yet, many of today’s knowledge workers experience information overload as they are bombarded with a variety of new information sources, both internal and external. This overload results in users spending a significant amount of time gathering and filtering information—time that should be spent analyzing and making critical decisions with the information.
According to an August 2001 report by Forrester, “the pursuit of external information ties up 14% of the typical knowledge worker’s week; internal information is responsible for another 11%.” This finding is consistent with other available market research, and indicates that management of external information sources is extremely important in any knowledge management initiative. The overall cost to an organization related to employees finding current, trusted external information is enormous in terms of time spent and resources used.
To date, knowledge management initiatives have focused on deploying internal content management, document management, collaboration and enterprise information portals. The overall vision is to harness the flow of internal information sources and efficiently deploy them to the desktop of individuals within an organization. However, seamless integration of premium external information and controlled distribution of highly confidential internal information has not been adequately addressed yet—and is becoming a top priority at many corporations.
Business Information Sources: A Key Concern for Corporations
The deluge of “free” business information on the Internet has created a new set of issues for information-intensive companies. According to Outsell, a research firm specializing in information use within corporate and knowledge environments, corporate end-users now utilize the Internet for their information needs 70% of the time instead of using information sources that are licensed to the corporation.
According to the Outsell study, end-users are turning to the Internet for two main reasons: (1) difficulty in locating premium information sources within their portals or intranets; and (2) clumsy management of the interfaces (passwords, search tools, etc.) that are specific to each of these resources.
A critical business concern is that end-users verify information they find on the Internet only 18% of the time. This implies that they may be making business decisions based on information that is not necessarily reliable or valid. Also, information found on the Internet is, on average, at least three months old, and is often stale compared to premium information sources.
Premium information providers have valid, timely and reliable information, but are dependent on their corporate clients’ intranets or portals for presenting their information interfaces effectively to knowledge workers.
For more than 20 years, premium information providers, such as Dialog, Lexis-Nexis and Factiva, have been invaluable sources of quality business information to corporate knowledge workers. Today, these information sources are an integral part of most knowledge management initiatives. However, from the perspective of the corporate market, the architecture of these vendors’ platforms is beginning to cause significant pain with its limited ability for flexible licensing arrangements, such as global department, pay-per-use, time-based or per-user licensing. These information sources often require knowledge workers to use custom interfaces to find information, and are limited in their ability to control information outside of their closed platforms.
In recent years, a new generation of information “syndicators,” such as Screaming Media, NewsEdge and Yellowbrix, have entered the market. These vendors provide sophisticated filtering of information and enable “real-time” population of intranets and portals with relevant news articles. However, even these vendors are limited in their ability to deliver premium business information, such as research reports, industry journals and financial data due to copyright and control issues.
Information buyers in the corporate market realize that these external information dynamics could have a negative impact on critical business decisions. Corporate information users are hampered by the limitations of licensing and access interfaces available from premium information providers. Conversely, information providers are hindered by a dependency on the architecture of the clients’ corporate portals or intranets for their information resources to be properly presented to users.
Requirements for Better Licensing Controls and Usage Reporting
To pay owed royalties to authors and publishers, external information providers require detailed data on how end-users use and share content within their peer groups. For external information providers, a recent successful case states that freelance authors are owed royalties for each use of their works in corporate environments and on Internet sites (Tasini vs. The New York Times). As a result, this need is becoming more critical than ever.
Today, most external information providers control end-user access with a password or IP-address. Managing passwords from many different information sources is a significant challenge for the information professional and other knowledge workers who do not want to have a list of logins and passwords to remember.
To complicate matters further, IP address control implies that the end-user needs to be inside the corporate firewall to access information. Many information providers address their inability to track usage across sites by requiring enterprises to purchase full site licenses for every facility. This causes significant frustration on the part of the corporations, which want to pay only for what is needed and used, with no dependencies on site locations. Once an end-user is logged in, it is difficult to prevent access to specific content items, as it is usually an “all-or-nothing” access methodology. Corporate clients are now asking their premium information providers for highly flexible licensing and access methods to their information. To maintain and expand the relationship and business with their corporate clients, information providers will need to address this requirement quickly.
Corporations also need detailed usage-tracking feedback in order to understand what information sources are most useful to their knowledge workers. In addition to better management of external information sources, usage control and reporting is critical for highly confidential internal information such as legal documents, patent works, research and development initiatives and company merger data. These usage metrics are a key component to collaboration initiatives, as information pass-along and recommendation data is directly tied to determining which information resources are the most appropriate for making critical business decisions.
Addition of Highly Confidential Internal Information
Content management vendors have focused extensively on managing internal information such as e-mail, web site content and document repositories. Access control lists (ACLs) are traditionally used to control unauthorized access to specific information items. However, ACL mechanisms only prevent access at the server repository level, and cannot adequately track usage and access to the degree that external information sources require. In addition, ACLs are not sufficient for tracking the use of highly confidential information, such as data about a merger or acquisition, research and development efforts or patent work. This is because ACLs cannot control information once it arrives on a user’s desktop or is passed along to other individuals.
Corporations need assurance that both internal and external information sources are seamlessly available as part of knowledge management initiatives, while providing content controls and tracking that are required for premium and highly confidential information sources.
An ideal knowledge management infrastructure should seamlessly combine standard internal information sources, news feeds, externally licensed premium business information and highly confidential business data into a single flow.
Corporations should be able to proactively present and deliver personalized, relevant information to end-users while minimizing the dependencies on access control list (ACL) mechanisms, IP addresses or password controls. Corporations need to leverage secure, desktop-based content management processes to present and deliver information needed by end-users, while ensuring controlled distribution within the organization. Adding this capability benefits both the corporation and the sources of these valuable information resources.
DigitalOwl enables corporations to securely integrate highly valuable and confidential information sources within larger corporate knowledge management and content collaboration initiatives.
The result is that knowledge workers and their communities of peers have personalized access to relevant sources of information, both external and internal, while ensuring the integrity and control of these information sources within users’ spheres of influence as well as on their desktops and wireless devices. They will spend less time searching for premium information from disparate sources, and more time efficiently utilizing these premium information resources for their decision-making needs.
Integrating, Managing and Tracking Disparate Information Resources
DigitalOwl’s KineticEdge™ can either be implemented as a standalone information management solution, or can be integrated with information portals, corporate intranets or other knowledge management initiatives.
KineticEdge delivers personalized premium external information and confidential internal information proactively to end-users’ desktops and PDA devices, while ensuring control of these sources at the desktop level.
KineticEdge ties personalized content collections made up of a variety of sources to functional groups of users, departments, project teams, or other user group assignments.
KineticEdge allows corporations to monitor and control the desktop usage of the content within their organization. Some examples of content usage monitoring provided include:
- Circle-of-influence—who recommends information to whom;
- Relevancy feedback from end-users via content item reviews;
- Number of people using an item and what sections they are using;
- Usage within functional groups of users or departments;
- Frequency and length of time specific items are accessed;