Product Brief Autonomy Systems Ltd.

Collaboration and Expertise Networks

Introduction
Expertise is not easily identified and is even more difficult to manage on an ongoing basis, which leaves vast unstructured resources including tacit knowledge and experience untapped. There is growing recognition that these types of implicit information are critical to enterprise operations. For example, the employees of geographically dispersed organizations typically have difficulty determining what others are doing and which resources can best address their problems. Failure to foster exchange within the knowledge community leads to duplication of effort and an overall reduction in productivity levels. Autonomy Collaboration and Expertise Networks (CEN) build communities of expertise to promote collaboration and fuel innovation. A key part of Web 2.0 technology, these social knowledge networks overcome situational myopia and bring experts together to establish congruent goals, reducing duplicated effort and increasing productivity.

The Challenge
In small companies finding an expert can be as easy as asking a question across a desk, but in large enterprises numbers, languages, departmental segmentation and other structural barriers can easily hide the experts. In addition, the sheer volume of enterprise information, coupled with the effects of a rapidly changing environment make the difficulties of identifying and brokering connections between employees particularly acute. Workspace collaboration tools that are overly reliant on manual input prove inadequate since users searching manually are limited to the terms they already know exist, and to the few experts who are willing or able to maintain an ongoing record of their expertise. Consequently, tools like wikis only succeed where administration is in place to support them and maintain policies. Instant messaging can also be helpful, but its only relevant at the time of writing and relies on people making the effort to connect, often before their expertise has been established. Alternatively, techniques that use click-through records are hampered by massive quantities of noise which is useless in conveying expertise.

The Solution
By forming a conceptual understanding of user interaction with information as its consumed and created, Autonomy's technology identifies tacit knowledge automatically and in context. It builds a conceptual understanding of the relationships between experts and the content with which they interact, automatically clustering similar people and resources into related groups. In this way it identifies the point of intersection between the most active information and expert personnel. Rapidly deployed, Autonomy CEN incorporates content from the array of existing collaboration tools inside the enterprise, from instant messaging (IM), wikis and workflow applications to team calendaring, each of which has its own incompatible proprietary expertise repository, non-uniform schema and distinctive interfaces. Whereas labour-intensive technologies and point solutions force the user to adapt to the technology by changing his or her behaviour, Autonomy's implicit analysis ensures users remain on-task with minimal behavioural change and virtually no training.

Expertise management is facilitated through:

Implicit Profiling: recommends an expert automatically based on a conceptual understanding of the content they consume and create across all data formats including email, IM, documents, online and even voice. Explicit Profiling: users have the ability to describe their own expertise using natural language free-text as well as keywords. IDOL also leverages any metadata that has been assigned to experts either by themselves or by the administrator. Clustering: the technology clusters disparate pieces of information automatically by concept, matching them to the conceptual profiles of experts in real-time in order to highlight crucial information and expertise resources. Alerting: staff can be alerted to new information and changing situations automatically, and then connected to a network of experts the instant new information arrives. Location-Based Expertise Assignment: users can combine a conceptual search for experts with location-based information such as geographic location, department and availability. Virtual Libraries: not all the data within the organizations information assets will play a significant role in key business decisions. IDOL leverages "Collaborative Feedback" to create libraries of the most useful information. Document Rating: users are able to rate content either positively or negatively, as well as add comments to content that exists within the organization's information assets, allowing the most widely used information to appear higher in the library rankings. Document Scaling: tools that let users rate the usefulness of information using a sliding scale allow IDOL to determine the relevance of this data through the combined collaborative feedback of all users. Visualisation: Autonomys Spectrograph updates automatically and in real-time to illustrate the changing relationships between experts and the available information assets over time, allowing management to plan and respond effectively.

Return on Investment
Engineers at BAE Systems were alerted to a significant wing-design project being duplicated unknowingly by their civil and defence divisions. The company was able to repurpose the resources of an entire team, yielding a massive return on its investment in the technology. The South Yorkshire Police recently located a witness to a serious crime when leads went cold. Using Autonomy, detectives discovered the witness had been involved in other unrelated investigations and using the list of alternative addresses generated by cross-referencing statements from other cases, they were able to locate the witness, take a statement and arrest a suspect.

Features
Personalization Automated Explicit User Profiling Automated Implicit User Profiling Cross-device Profiling Expertise Location Communities of Practice Collaborative Feedback Virtual Libraries Proactive Document Recommendation Alerting via email, internet, SMS, mobile etc Enterprise Performance Management CEN Visualization Cluster Mapping

Benefits
Retain control of all business activities regardless of scale Locate experts within the organization and enable them to collaborate Build a culture of accountability Eliminate the threat of communication breakdown and duplication of effort React to changes more rapidly through timely delivery of relevant data Identify knowledge gaps within the community Integrate multiple collaboration tools and expertise repositories Understand the knowledge community

Autonomy Inc. One Market, Spear Tower, 19th Floor, San Francisco, CA 94105, USA Tel: +1 415 243 9955 Fax: +1 415 243 9984 Email: info@us.autonomy.com

Autonomy Systems Ltd Cambridge Business Park, Cowley Rd, Cambridge CB4 0WZ, UK Tel: +44 (0) 1223 448 000 Fax: +44 (0) 1223 448 001 Email: autonomy@autonomy.com

Other Offices Autonomy has additional offices in Boston, New York, Washington DC, Amsterdam, Buenos Aires, Beijing, Tokyo, Brussels, Frankfurt, Hamburg, London, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Oslo, Paris, Rome, Shanghai, Singapore, Stockholm, Sydney, Kuala Lumpur, Calgary, Dallas and Sunnyvale.

Copyright 2007 Autonomy Corp. All rights reserved. Other trademarks are registered trademarks and the properties of their respective owners. Product specifications and features are subject to change without notice. Use of Autonomy software is under license. [AUT PB] 09.08.07

www.autonomy.com