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

Live on Knovel – Information to support process improvement and risk reduction in operations

Today Knovel launches a new subject area, Industrial Engineering and Operations Management.

As one of my colleagues who trained as an industrial engineer recently told me, “Industrial engineers don’t make things, they make things better.” This content collection is built to support engineers and engineering management’s efforts to make things better.

During the content planning, we had the chance to speak with our customers about their internal systems for improving processes, reducing risk, and ensuring quality through programmatic changes. We thank all of the customers that provided input on content planning. Your opinions are important to us. In response to customer feedback, we added reference works about major areas in industrial engineering, systems engineering and operations management. In conversations we heard that people want to keep up-to-date on new strategies and to learn best practices for their work. So we added titles that included case studies and covered best practices in areas such as supply chain management, logistics and project management.

The new collection will launch with five subtopics: Human Engineering and Ergonomics, Supply Chain Management and Logistics, Project Management, Six sigma, Lean and Quality Management and Industrial Engineering and Operations Management.

This new collection will feature titles from new content partners Technology Perspectives, AMACOM, and DesTech. Knovel welcomes our new content partners on board.

We invite Knovel users to visit http://pages.knovel.com/IndustrialEngineering.html to learn more about the new subject area.

Meagan Cooke
Director of Content Strategy

On the Road – CP Kelco

I am excited to write about being “On the Road” with our customers and partners. The Knovel team is spending more time today “on the road” than at any time in our history. I will be spending 4 out of 5 days this week with customers and partners who serve our customers. Being an on-line business means it is even more important to meet face to face with our customers. Face to face contact is critical if we are to establish relationships, listen to what customers are saying, show that we really care and demonstrate that we can act on what they tell us. I’ve found that I learn something new from every customer call, so I want to use this “On the Road” series to highlight some of this learning.

I recently visited with CP Kelco who makes hydrocolloids, which in simple terms are substances added to products to improve their performance in everything from foods, pharmaceuticals, and oral care through, paper coatings and even oil field drilling applications. CP Kelco is a subsidiary of J.M. Huber Corporation a company that also helps other companies make better products such as: toothpaste that makes teeth whiter, paper for newspapers and magazines, the paint that brightens homes and the building materials that make them safe and sound.”

I am most impressed with the company’s focus on its mission and standards, established by their founder, as we at Knovel strongly believe that focus on success and respect for others are core values that drive our business. As we get to better know CP Kelco and J.M. Huber I am sure we at Knovel will learn from their example of success.

CP Kelco found our service through a referral and subscribed (lucky us!). That meant we didn’t go through the “getting to know you” process we go through with most of our new clients. Having made a trip, I now understand that CP Kelco uses Knovel to get fast access to detailed chemical data required in their work each day and this will help to guide choices we make around adding content to our data rich environment.

After our visit to CP Kelco and as a result of solving an issue I received a note saying “You are fortunate to have such qualified and diligent people working for your organization.” This is satisfying and a precursor of good things to come for both our organizations.

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

Productivity – How does Knovel help our customers measure it?

How do our customers justify their annual investment in Knovel or, for that matter, in any “productivity” tool? In every instance they think carefully about whether there are significant improvements in productivity, cost savings, and what their alternatives might be to get the same result. Engineering Managers and Information Professionals (the “decision makers” or “buyers”) tell us they make investments based on business cases showing how users (engineers) can save time by improving their productivity (reduce research time, accelerate time to market, faster processes, better technical service, more efficient warranty work, more cost effective designs…), providing reliable and relevant data (e.g., Google delivers too many spurious results), and cutting costs (e.g., dropping inefficient services, reduced “one off” content purchases…). These decisions are important as the dollars are often in the hundreds of thousands and sometimes millions.

 

A ‘trial” is widely accepted as the method for assessing the utility of a productivity tool, but measuring productivity is easier said than done. The conflict comes in setting useful productivity metrics and getting enough consistent data to measure. Managers will often agree to a “trial” for new software or an information service and find data from the trial is not gathered systematically and is qualitative and inconsistent (e.g., “the software is great and I think it can save me some time”). We help managers assess productivity by setting up “structured trials.” In addition, we have gathered a lot of data about the research habits of users from surveying thousands of engineers at corporations that have trialed Knovel. Using a well defined and repeatable process to assess productivity and historic data to set metrics goes a long way toward objectively measuring progress. The keys to which are:

 

• Setting buyer and user expectations before a trial begins
• Measuring productivity improvements quantitatively and qualitatively
• Careful design of survey questions that align with customer objectives
• A team with experience in trial process, survey design, and data analysis.

For instance, some of the measurements we might use include the level of survey participation, user estimates of time saved, and user’s views on the quality of their sessions. The real “art” is in crafting questions that yield a consistent and statistically significant set of measurable results. After a trial we work with our customers to analyze the data and compare to the agreed metrics to produce a report that will help guide their investment decision.

 

Traditionally we have focused this work on new customers but it is also important to gauge productivity gains over time and we are now beginning to survey long time users to gauge metrics and continuously assess the productivity benefit.

 

Thank-you,

Chris Forbes

CEO

Knovel

 

Social Media's Coming of Age as Authoritative?

Following a revamping of Knovel’s platform earlier this year, we received a number of complaints from our customers saying, in effect, “Shame On You,” for making a change that linked our site’s Periodic Table of Elements to, of all places, Wikipedia.  Responding as a responsible Product Manager, I instructed our IT team to restore the links to the officially sanctioned, authoritative site, the Los Alamos National Lab (lanl.gov). 

Yesterday, at the Gilbane Conference, I listened to the keynote speaker, Michael Edson, Chief of Information Technology, at the Smithsonian Institution, evangelize for a “Smithsonian Commons,” where valuable resources can be released and made available for the use and benefit of everyone. He cited the example of a search on Google for SpaceShipOne, the first privately developed, successfully piloted space craft.  The Smithsonian has the actual ship in its Air and Space Museum, and there’s a blurb about it on their website; but if you Google SpaceShipOne, the Smithsonian’s ‘authoritative source’ isn’t even in the Top 10 results!  Guess which site is right up there near the top?  Wikipedia, with hyperlinks, video clips, the works! 

It got me thinking about my reaction to restore LANL as Knovel’s source for ‘authoritative’ information on the Periodic Table. Was I too hasty?  Consider the fact that Wikipedia has become just about the most accessed Internet destination for encyclopedic information, and its self-policing, self-regulating policies are well documented and followed by its myriad editors.  Verifiability is one of Wikipedia’s core content policies, and editors are encouraged to challenge any material deemed unreliable.   If these policies didn’t work, Wikipedia would have  disappeared long ago into the noise bin of the Internet, and would never have risen above long-standing, traditional resources like Britannica* and World Book. And have you ever noticed that the WIkipedia community's response to errors is virtually instantaneous, while on institutionalized sites, update cycles may be in days, weeks or even months?  Is it time to stop resisting the value of social media and start contributing to its success?

I caught up with Michael at a break, and asked him what he would have done in my situation.  He was intrigued, and replied, “Hmmm, I’d put them both up, and see which one my customers liked the best.”     Maybe we will. Meanwhile, what do you think?

Carbon at LANL: http://periodic.lanl.gov/elements/6.html

Carbon at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon

 * a link to the Britannica site does appear in the External Links section of Wikipedia’s entry.

Diana Bittern
Director of Product Management

Giving Back During the Holidays

With the holiday season upon us, many of us are planning to spend time with our loved ones, exchanging food, gifts and laughter.

The holidays are also a time to think of those less fortunate, those who are struggling  – and to do what we can to help.  While Knovel is a business, Knovel is comprised of people, and we are all a part of the communities where we live and work.

In effort to give back this holiday season, Knovel staff will be participating in local holiday drives.

San Antonio is the base of operations for a number of Knovel team members including our Information Services, group.  Our San Antonio staff are participating in Adopt-A-Family  - a program run by the Family Service Association (FSA) in San Antonio, Texas. Adopt-A-Family connects “sponsors” with families in need.  Sponsors provide holiday gifts for the participating families, to help bring the holiday spirit to their homes.  Many of the participating families live below the poverty line and struggle with the bare essentials – which means they could really use the help.

Having sponsored a family, Knovel staff will provide that family with necessities such as baby wipes, household cleaning supplies, and a infant “bouncer” as well as the usual wish list items such as bicycles, coloring books and Barbie dolls.

Colleagues in our New York City headquarters have chose to support Bergen’s Promise Holiday Gift Drive.  Bergen’s Promise is a local organization which assists children with complex behavioral and mental health challenges and their families.

We’re proud that we were able to mobilize the Knovel team to make a difference in our local communities – and it feels great.  Both of these charities do great work and they can always use the help.  So as you plan for the holiday season, perhaps you can consider ways you might make a difference by contributing to one of these organizations, or a worthy organization based in your community.

Happy holidays.

DiAnne Garza
Director, Program Management

Adding the E for Engineering

Kudos to Christina for this post on the difference between scientists and engineers.  I've always found her to be a voice which truly gets it.

When considering information needs, too often engineering disappears under the STM (Science Technology and Medicine) umbrella - so I'm really fond of the "E" she inserted for Engineering to form the acronym - STEM. 

Engineers have different goals. They're problem solvers and problem solvers need different tools. Trying to shoe horn their needs in with scientists just doesn't cut it. The information marketplace has long recognized the practical, problem solving nature of medical workers. And the size of the medical information market reflects that.

Each of us at Knovel come to work because we believe that more can be and needs to be done to support engineering workers with information and aligning that information with the way engineers work. We've a long way to go to catch up with medical markets - but we plan to make sure that engineers have similarly useful information resources to help them problem solve in their work.

So let's acknowledge that engineering deserves to be called out on its own and stick with "STEM."

Search from here, there or anywhere

Is there anything more important than being where your users are?

The web is a big place and different users search in different ways.  Among the ways people get to Knovel are by typing in www.knovel.com, clicking a link on their company intranet, linking through from a library catalogue, or searching on Google.

The key for a information provider like Knovel is to find ways to be visible where our users are.  We need to remind folks that they have better options for finding technical information.  It's a lot easier than it sounds.

Knovel has always offered our customers buttons and banners so they could link into us. Buttons and banners are promotional, but we've been looking for ways to be more, umm .... useful.   So, starting with simple, Knovel is trying something new.

We've created the html search bar you'll find below.  It's a nifty piece of code that can be pasted practically anywhere - homepages, intranets, blogs - and used to search Knovel for engineering and technical information.  I've even used it on the left side of the Knovel blog.

If placing Knovel search somewhere might help you, please feel free to take this code and use it.  Knovel also offers other versions of Knovel search banners.

Companies need to figure out ways to ensure our products are there, where users need them.  In the coming weeks and months, I hope to introduce other ways that Knovel can be easily put where our users will find us most useful.

 

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<style type="text/css">

       #KNOVEL_SEARCH_BANNER { border: 0; height: 110px; width: 180px; }
       * html #KNOVEL_SEARCH_BANNER { width: 180px; height: 110px; }

</style>
<iframe id="KNOVEL_SEARCH_BANNER"
src="http://www.info.knovel.com/SearchBanners/blogbanner2.html"
frameborder="0"></iframe>