Archive Blog From Knovel

Knovel Happenings

John Patrick is a Knovel Board member, former vice president of Internet technology at IBM, and one of the leading Internet visionaries as a founding member of the World Wide Web Consortium at MIT in 1994. Most importantly, John is a tremendous asset to Knovel in helping to guide our strategy. His blog is closely followed by many thousands of readers and I am sure he will blog about being a Key Note Speaker at the Special Libraries Association annual meeting in Washington on June 17, 2009. One of his most successful on-going blog posts is IBM Happenings and he has suggested that Knovel’s many followers will benefit by our delivering an update on Knovel every month or so – so here it is…Knovel Happenings.

April and early May have been busy at Knovel. We are focused on implementation of our Design Partner and Strategic Accounts programs. The Design Partner program has us engaging “on-site” with users from 15 client partners to guide product development; during 2009 we expect to grow to 25 partners, so please contact me at [email protected] if you would like to know more. Our Product Management team sits with engineers in their work spaces to see how they work with information which allows us to understand how we can improve their research by improving the user experience. Expect to see changes in the coming months driven by this program.

 

Our Strategic Accounts Program is bringing us closer to all our accounts helping us to better understand the impact of the economy and ensuring that clients get high value from their investment in Knovel. Knovel account managers are in continuous touch with all our customers through training, on-site visits, webinars and a range of other touch points to ensure we are listening to and growing our customer relationships. If you would like to discuss this program please do get in touch through [email protected] .

 

We were thrilled to introduce a new subject area Industrial Engineering and Operations Management  and see so many of our customers eagerly adding it to their subscription. Based on customer requests Knovel will introduce 2 more subject areas before the end of 2009.

 

Knovel has seen some good coverage in a wide range of communication channels ranging from Desktop Engineering to Twitter Chatter in French to Enterprise Search Blogs and back to more traditional media sources like Design News.

 

The next 6 weeks promises to bring a raft full of announcements around our product and marketing alliances that will bring tremendous benefits to our users and we look forward talking with you about new Knovel Happenings next month.

 

Chris Forbes

CEO

Content Reduces Productivity!

Can “content” cost engineers time and money? Yes, because there are stark differences between delivering a highly tuned service that provides answers rather than generalized search engines and other content sources that sap productivity (time) from engineers! Let’s contrast Knovel against the way many engineers find answers to mission critical questions[1]. While the content itself is important (after all the “right” content is what the user needs), users tell us it is most important to seamlessly deliver the specific content required (e.g., the flexural modulus of a particular material under specific conditions or the required math to solve a problem) to the point of need. Without the tools to find, sort, manipulate, and import digital objects or “answers” into their work users tell us they often find the content itself to be more trouble (and time) than its worth.

 

So what’s the difference between casually expecting access to the content you need (e.g., Google) and knowing you can import a problem solving answer into your work when required. Independent research and our customers tell us it is worth $5,000 to $20,000 per year per engineer (up to one day per week), depending on how much research each engineer does. We publish stories about productivity gains each month (RSS feed); BP recently shared a story about one of their field engineers solving a problem and saving many hours. This is confirmed by our own quantitative analysis of engineers using tools at work – see a recent study done in partnership with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers (ASME).

 

Let’s consider some of the other factors that sap productivity and ultimately morale from engineers. Many engineers are asked to rely on generalized search engines for research (e.g., spending hours wading through pages and pages of “non-validated” results) vs. going to a highly tuned tool that allows you to find exactly the data you require and import it directly into your PLM environment. The figure above takes the value of the time gained into consideration but gives no value to employee satisfaction and morale (e.g., does management value me highly enough to provide tools to make my job as easy as possible?) and data validation (e.g., how do you calculate the value of validated data vs. results where the source is questionable?). So many of our customers are not only making the choice to invest in Knovel because of measurable productivity gains they are also valuing data quality and the work environment of their most valuable asset – their people. This is especially important to engineering teams that are forced to deliver on the same (or tighter) schedules with less resource in current economy.

 

If you have examples of tools or situations that have made you more productive or taken away from your productivity, please comment here or email me at [email protected] so we can learn from your experiences and pass them along to others.

 

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

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[1] Knovel’s mission is to deliver exactly the data an engineer requires to her or his point of need; our tool set is constantly optimized through user feedback to achieve this mission.

Wiki Cred

I was thrilled to see a Wikipedia entry for Knovel this week. It has been up for the last several months. Several times over the last couple of years I posted entries for Knovel. The entries were quickly removed by the community of editors that saw them as not meeting Wikipedia’s content criteria which demand that entries are “factual, notable, verifiable with external sources, and neutrally presented, with external sources cited.” Frankly, my entries were blatantly commercial, did not meet the objective criteria and should have been pulled down. My designs on “Wiki Cred” and SEO (search engine optimization) benefits were dashed. There is a transfer of credibility in becoming listed on Wikipedia as the content criteria are strictly and continuously enforced by the community, so the entries that “stick” are almost universally notable and verified. While search engine algorithms are a “black box”, there is no question that they value Wikipedia entries; when searching Knovel on Google the entry now shows up on the first page of results.

So how did the entry appear? As it turns out, the initial posting was created by a small team of Knovel employees with ongoing contributions being made by interested people outside Knovel; the more contributors – via editorial improvements and reference links – the better. The Wikipedia model works! So if you have an interest in certain topics and factual data about them, I encourage you to add to Wikipedia and improve the resource for all users.

 

 

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

Vertical

The first issue of PC Magazine back in the summer of 1981 was a thrill to read and it was sad news this week that Ziff Davis Media has decided to cease publishing the magazine. "The viability for us to continue to publish in print just isn't there anymore," Jason Young, chief executive of Ziff Davis, said in an interview. This was not unexpected as all of us know that the print media business has been in a ten-degree nose-down dive for a number of years now. The more significant aspect of PC Magazine has been the early and innovative focus on "vertical".

I got to know Bill Machrone in the early 1990's. Bill had been the founder and editor-in-chief of PC Magazine. I also had the pleasure of meeting Bill Ziff on a few occasions. Both "Bills" were early believers in "vertical". Ziff Davis had the approach of publishing magazines such as Car and Driver, Popular Electronics, PC Magazine, and Computer Shopper that entertained the "enthusiasts" -- people who cared a great deal about specific technologies and products -- not generalists but those who were passionate about a particular topic and wanted to go "deep". Today we would call such market segments "vertical".

You might say that much of the evolution of the web in the early years of the new millennium has focused on "horizontal" applications and content. Many millions of users swarm to sites that are a foot deep and miles wide -- Google search where you can find anything, eBay and Amazon where you can buy or sell anything, music and photo sites where you can enjoy any kind of media, and Facebook or MySpace where you can meet anyone. Enter Tony Tjan, CEO of Cue Ball Group, a venture and growth equity firm based in Boston.

Tony has put forth an interesting perspective in a posting at Harvard that the generation of the web now evolving will certainly be more "verticalized and editorialized". Tony says that current behavior will continue as we use use large, incumbent, generalist (horizontal) sites like Google and eBay, but at the same time, there will be a strong movement toward more specialized sites. He hypothesizes that this will allow a better balance between "authoritative, expert-endorsed content and broad, less bounded user-generated information". He adds that the advertisers will follow this trend as they sharpen their focus. See Tony's full story here.

One of the best examples of a truly vertical site I can think of is what has been developed by Knovel Corporation. When I entered engineering school more than forty years ago (is that possible?), I used a slide rule and engineering reference manuals. I think of them as the first of four generations of using engineering and scientific data. The second generation was web-based data with PC's for standalone and separate analysis. Knovel Corporation (pronounced nah-vil) introduced the third generation about five years ago -- "Knovelized" data with deep search and a high degree of interactivity. Knovel brings boring reference manuals to life and in the process saves engineers and scientists many hours of effort. It is a good example of an information service that is available "on demand". The fourth generation of Knovel's vertical site currently being launched includes Ajax-based interactive graphs built with Mathematica. With no software on the PC other than a standards-based browser, the new generation of tools allows the engineer and scientist to dive deep, find the most arcane of formulas and then interact with them deeply and graphically to solve a design challenge or fulfill a research project. For millions of engineers and scientists around the world, this will be the next generation of the web -- information and tools at their fingertips -- reliable, relevant, and fast.

Disclosure: Tony and I are both investors in Knovel Corporation and members of the board of directors.

Other references to Knovel on patrickWeb

Trust - The Lubricant for Success - Volume 1.0

Trust is a core value at Knovel and I intend to write about it with some frequency. In working with our team to build Knovel over the last 8 years I have come to understand the tremendous impact of building and loosing trust. It takes time to build and can be destroyed in the blink of an eye. Steven M. R. Covey has authored an excellent book called “The Speed of Trust” that I can unequivocally recommend to anyone that wants to understand the tremendous effects that both gaining and loosing trust can have on success. This is a book that I have read and re-read. If you are part of the Knovel family and would like a copy please let me ([email protected]) know or please order it on-line.

I will be addressing our company this coming Monday morning on an issue that is on everyone’s mind. Every time I talk to our team it presents an opportunity to add or subtract from the “trust bank” I have with each member of the team. I will be speaking about how the economy may affect Knovel over the next 15 months and I am one of thousands of leaders that will attempt to reassure our teams in this uncertain time. I am certain many leaders, given the economic situation, are testing relationships for both good and bad outcomes: businesses are drawing credit lines because they fear their bankers will not honor commitments, customers are hesitating to tell vendors “the bad news” until the very last minute, and companies are not fully revealing the “truth” either because they are unsure or don’t much like what they see. Ultimately their leaders have responsibility for these choices and each presents an opportunity to effect the balance of "trust banks" with myriad stakeholders.

I could tell our team that there will be little impact and try to re-assure them that our business and its future growth is 100% secure. After all we have a business that is growing, has a sustainable competitive advantage, has customers that value our offering and is supported by consistent data (e.g., very high renewal rates…). The fact is that I have some knowledge of what will happen in the 4^th quarter of 2008 and little knowledge of what may happen in 2009. So I will advocate prudence through careful analysis of the available data, belt tightening and making sure that we listen closely to our customers. This means that investments will be held to current levels and we are considering scenarios that include no growth in 2009 to ensure that we remain well capitalized. This is hard to believe for a company that enjoys a 35% compound annual growth rate. Perhaps we will be proven wrong and current and potential customers will so highly value our service that our growth rate will be sustained. It is more likely that a falling tide will cause all boats to fall and we should be organized to accept this for the next several years.

I will share these scenarios with our team and ask them to give careful consideration to controlling costs, making wise investments, preparing for flat results, and extending trust to each Knovel team member to be careful and innovative in their choices.

Thanks for taking time to read these thoughts,

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

“Time to Stash Your Cash – NOT!”

I read with dismay an article in today’s Wall Street Journal - “Time to Stash Your Cash” by Brett Arends. My initial reaction was to think it was satire. Sadly I think this is not the case. In a time of crisis anyone in a leadership role, such as Mr Arends, has an obligation to show people the way forward and not fan the fears of the crowd. He has not done so, rather he advocates cutting every possible personal expenditure. This is rubbish and a recipe to ensure that the United States goes into a deep recession. While we need to be prudent in our spending choices, we need to keep spending to drive the economy to maintain jobs and ultimately return to growth.

I am sure that many people who work for Knovel, our customers and our suppliers are wondering about their immediate job security and what the next months will bring. We are fortunate at Knovel to have a stable base of business that runs across many industries and much geography. While we will feel the effects of the current situation we are fortunate to have diversified revenue sources and good capitalization. This bodes well for us to weather a difficult time. It also presents us with a responsibility to re-double our efforts to maintain and grow our business for our employees, our customers (engineers, scientists, librarians…), and our suppliers (publishers, professional societies…). We will do this for all our stakeholders and I sincerely hope that each of them will take a similar approach and keep the World’s economic engine moving.

These are times that present substantial opportunities for growth. To illustrate Jack Welch at last week’s World Business Forum in New York suggested the following:

While he considers himself an optimist, the current economic news convinced him that we will see significant negative growth in Q4 and Q1 of next year (he is uncertain whether Q3 will be flat or down). He said this is what the companies in his private equity stable are doing to prepare for tough times and inaccessibility of capital:

-          Adjust your cost structure and de-leverage immediately

-         Take care of your top employees – in cases where the economy causes them to miss their numbers, put in place a new compensation pool to keep their pay reasonable and not risk losing them.

-         If you have access to capital, get ready to “bury or buy” your competition and consider using more generous credit terms to keep and gain customers during this period

I could not agree more and we have or will be taking every one of the steps Mr. Welch has advocated.

Thanks,

Chris Forbes

CEO - Knovel

Inaugural Post

As Knovel's Marketing Director, part of my job is to give voice to the company, so our customers, partners, associates and prospects can get a better picture of who Knovel is, what we're trying to accomplish,  the expertise we have to share and the things we care about.  This blog is no more than my attempt to develop and share this voice.

But it's people who have voices -  not companies.  So the people here at Knovel, will be authoring and posting - giving voice to Knovel the organization.  While I will serve as the editor and a key blogger, I will be encouraging my colleagues for across our organization to author, share and contribute.

It's my full intention that this "official" blog will address topics and challenges related to the effective use of information and its relationship to productivity. Special focus is placed against putting this into context as it relates to scientific and technical use - especially among engineers.  We'll do our best to offer expertise and learnings where we can, and hopefully provide for an interesting reading.