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

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.