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

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.

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