Customer experiences with Notes have been a fertile source of knowledge management insights for Lotus and IBM.

In each of the four cases described above, Lotus Notes served as the foundation for the companies’ knowledge management efforts. Although these involved other critical success factors — culture, management support, and highly skilled staff — it is clear that Notes brings something unique to the knowledge management party. Lotus has learned much from these and other customers, as well as from our extensive research into knowledge and learning theory — and these insights are informing the our current product and service development efforts.

Lotus and IBM knowledge management solutions include equal emphasis on Notes as a platform, packaged applications, and services.

Lotus’ vision as a company is based on the premise that connected communities shrink the world and that access to ideas expand the world. To deliver on this vision, Lotus and IBM understand that to remain at the forefront of knowledge management, we must continue to focus on solutions. Solutions, of course, go beyond features and functions. Our approach to knowledge management solutions is to deliver a powerful platform with advanced services and features, to create specific knowledge management applications built on top of that platform, and to provide services to help introduce and institutionalize knowledge management practices.

The Notes Architecture

Notes has sound knowledge management fundamentals.

To understand the value that Lotus brings to the knowledge management equation, it makes sense to identify the fundamental aspects of the Notes platform and how Lotus is extending that platform and building solutions and services around it. There are several basic aspects of Notes that naturally lend themselves to knowledge management.

Notes documents are manageable, searchable.

Document database. All content in Notes — from reports to discussions to resumes — is captured in a document, a format that is familiar and intuitive to most users. This format is also useful because it helps put information in context, which for many is the definition of explicit knowledge. These documents can be managed so that users can easily find the right document at the right time. First, they are indexed for full text search. Second, they include user-defined fields (e.g., keyword, industry, topic area) so that a collection of documents can be sorted and viewed by meaningful criteria. Last, each document includes information on things like author, creation date, revision date, and size so that they can be managed and viewed according to these criteria as well.

Notes accommodates varying levels of confidentiality.

Security. Knowledge sharing does not imply that all knowledge and all users are equal. Also, innovation and learning thrives when contributors and students can begin a thought or a question within a known and trusted community before sharing it more broadly. Notes security is flexible, so that different documents within a single database, or even different sections of a single documents, can be secured at a variety of levels. This function is essential because it allows the technology to map to the culture and dynamics of a group, a division, or an entire company.

Notes is not an island. Integration with other information solutions is central to its architecture.

Enterprise Integration. A fundamental goal of knowledge management is to leverage corporate data and information — much of which resides in transaction systems. Notes has long shown its value in combining its strength in automating business processes with the data management strengths of back-end ERP systems such as SAP, Peoplesoft, JD Edwards, Baan and Oracle Financials and data warehouses built on DB2, Oracle and other RDBMSs.

Lotus Business Partners have created countless business process applications (e.g., sales force automation, human resources, customer service, retail management, health care management) that tie into the back-end transactional systems. Notes has also been used to extend the value of off-the-shelf, third-party business process applications by augmenting them with messaging and with desktop productivity tool integration for tasks such as proposal generation. Notes gathers all sorts of data and information together in context, and puts that knowledge in action through collaboration, messaging and workflow applications.

Notes applications move knowledge around so that it can be acted upon.

Application development and deployment. Knowledge management is purposeless unless personal and organizational capital is put into action. Notes’ infrastructure not only helps companies create, capture and share knowledge, but its application development environment allows customers to apply that knowledge to real business results. These applications are often best practices captured in automated workflows. For most Notes applications, the collaboration that occurs in them does not represent a fundamental change in corporate culture, but rather reflects or becomes a part of an employee’s natural way of getting things done.

Notes is a single infrastructure — no assembly required.

Notes is a single, unified infrastructure. As a platform for knowledge management, Notes gives an organization flexibility. It allows a company to begin knowledge management on a small scale and to grow that investment without constantly investing in separate, point solutions. It provides a company with a launch pad from which to respond to shifts in the market without having to start from scratch.

Extending the Notes Architecture for Knowledge Management

New Notes features will make knowledge management more likely to succeed.

With the insights Lotus and IBM have gained from research and customer

experiences, Lotus is developing new features that are specifically designed to

anticipate and overcome common cultural barriers to knowledge

management.

Notes will conduct

a search on all documents opened within a specified time.

Search. There are two aspects of search that the next version of Notes will support. First, users don’t always know the domain or the source of what they are looking for. That is, the “stuff” they want might exist in one or more Notes databases, on the public Web, in an e-mail message, and/or in a relational database. The search capabilities of Notes will allow a user to conduct a single search across some or all of these domains.

Second, users spend most of their search time looking for items they have already seen. That is, they know there was a piece of information that they have seen in the last day or two, but they can’t remember where they saw it. Notes will allow users to search against all documents opened (Notes documents, Web pages, e-mails, etc.) over a certain period of time.

Users will have a “roadmap” to guide them through different topic areas.

Content Map. Users frequently spend a lot of time just figuring out where things are before they even begin to think about what they are. That is, they need to have information put into context, alongside related documents. Notes will include a facility that groups documents together into logical “clusters” and then create a visual “map” that guides users through them. For example, a content map might include all the documents that have something to do with the development of a new drug, grouping them into “R&D” and “Clinical Trials” and “Government Oversight” and “Marketing” and “Competition.”

Notes will perform triage on incoming information.

Headlines Page. Every professional is familiar with the daily flood of information — e-mail, Web pages, calendar entries, ongoing electronic discussions — whose sheer volume can reduce personal effectiveness. The next version of Notes will include a customizable headlines page that surfaces the most urgent and relevant documents to the user’s desktop.

New usage metrics will give companies hard information on what knowledge is useful and what has grown stale.

Metrics. Today, Notes captures basic information from a document: author, creation date, etc. The next release will also capture the “living history” of the document: how many times has it been opened, who has opened it, when was the last time it was opened. This will give knowledge stewards the ability to more easily identify the gems and junk, and to build rules that automatically promote and demote (or delete) documents.

Metrics will also help management identify which employees are particularly adept at sharing, creating, innovating and shepherding knowledge. This can be a useful tool in helping to introduce new incentive and reward policies.

Packaged Knowledge Management Applications

Lotus and IBM are building packaged applications that support knowledge management goals.

The Notes platform, as it exists today and with the above enhancements, is an enabling technology. In the proper context, it has been used profitably for knowledge management. Of course, many companies will benefit from a packaged solution that focuses on one of the key business strategies of competency, innovation, productivity and responsiveness. Together, Lotus and IBM have developed a set of solutions that are applied to specific knowledge management challenges.

LearningSpace is used for distance learning.

LearningSpace is a tool for developing, deploying and delivering courses and for augmenting classroom training. In our research, it became clear that adult students do not apply themselves to a new course of study without some external stimulation, such as the presence of an instructor who defines — and grades — assignments. Therefore, LearningSpace course materials include not only a class schedule and links to readings, but also assignments and quizzes. We have also learned that learning is more rapid and complete when there is interaction between a student and the instructor, and among students themselves. LearningSpace encourages interaction through its facilitation of discussions among each other and with the instructor. Students work in teams and participate in public and private discussions. To help students “break the ice” and to foster interactivity, LearningSpace requires students to create a “home page” of information about themselves. Readers can learn more about LearningSpace, which is currently available, on the Lotus Web site: www.lotus.com/learningspace

People create, update and manage shared documents using Domino.Doc.

Domino.Doc. Domino.Doc is an application built upon Lotus Domino. It provides content management for any kind of object (output from word processors, as well as audio, video, etc.). Domino.Doc ensures that individuals and teams that collaborate on documents over a network are working with current documents, that they are working in context, that no unauthorized person has access to the documents, and that they will not be wasting time editing documents that are being edited by others in their workgroup.

Lotus Institute designed TeamRoom to structure the team process — from forming and

storming all the way to performing the task at hand.

TeamRoom. TeamRoom is the next generation of a Notes discussion database that adds structure and direction, and was designed for teams that come together for a specific project that has a defined endpoint. Teams use TeamRoom to define a shared mission. TeamRoom is also a repository to store common information such as business plans, reports, procedural information and meeting minutes. It can be used for discussions, brainstorming, and problem solving. Used as a planning tool, it aids a team in focusing on critical issues prior to a meeting. It can also be used for task management, such as assigning action items, tracking issues, and managing joint work on reports or presentations. The TeamRoom application is currently available for download off the Lotus Web site (www.lotus.com/home.nsf/tabs/institute).

In addition, Lotus is conducting research and development into a number of other knowledge management solutions, described below.

Team Network identifies relationships across multiple Teamrooms.

Team Network is a project under consideration that is designed to support the work of multiple teams who work in a similar field of practice and already share a relatively similar set of categories and concepts (e.g. client engagement teams in a practice area; product development teams working on phases of the same product). Team Network will also support managers who manage multiple teams and who need a rapid way to scan across teams to assess work status and flag urgent issues.

The SolutionSpace project is a discussion forum with specific features to aid innovation.

SolutionSpace is a Notes-based R&D project which supports continuous innovation in teams, departments and entire organizations. The project borrows from more than forty years of research into the process of innovation. For example, successful innovation seems to occur in groups that suggest many ideas at once, and then select the “best” from among these ideas. SolutionSpace accelerates the creation of new ideas. Solution Space reduces the quantity of content by archiving conversation threads automatically.

Expert Network will generate a “map” of individuals’ expertise.

Expert Network is a set of tools and applications that Lotus is researching and developing to automate the generation of profile listings of individuals’ expertise. These profiles can be used to create visual “social networks” that show connections and overlaps in interests, work history and expertise. This will enable large organizations to locate the right people to quickly respond to business opportunities.