In the Know: Knowledge Management Case Study

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October 14, 2002 (Computerworld) -- It's one of those blue-sky goals to which many big companies only aspire: capturing the seemingly infinite amount of intellectual capital that's carried by tens of thousands of employees around the world and using it to achieve competitive advantage. But it's a flight that's well under way at London-based BAE Systems PLC, formerly British Aerospace, which is getting solid returns on a knowledge management intranet. Thousands of BAE engineers scattered across five continents in 110 offices are using the system to search for information that may be vital to big initiatives and to identify and eliminate redundant project work.

Like other far-flung multinationals, the $20 billion-plus aerospace and engineering giant suspected that its engineers and other workers might be wasting a lot of time searching for information scattered across the enterprise. So in early 1999, BAE Systems invested roughly $150,000 to study its global operations to see whether "we had the right information to support decision-making processes and if people had the right learning systems to help them support their day jobs," says Richard West, BAE's organizational and e-learning manager in Farnborough, England.

Richard West of BAE Systems PLC

The results, says West, "were certainly eye-opening." BAE Systems discovered that nearly two-thirds of its top 120 decision-makers didn't have the right information at key stages. The company also found that 80% of employees were "wasting" an average of 30 minutes each day trying to find the information they needed to do their jobs. Another 60% were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others.

"In an organization as massive as BAE Systems, we seemed to be working in silos where we didn't seem to know what was going on elsewhere," says West.

One of the problems BAE Systems officials discovered through the study was information overload on its intranets. The information itself was often unstructured, and the search engines were inadequate for conducting keyword searches to find information, says West. The company decided to test two or three of the top intranet search engines over three months and compare their ability to find information, says West.

One of the search engines BAE Systems tested was from San Francisco-based Autonomy Corp., whose "ability to retrieve information was second to none," says West. What sold BAE Systems on the technology was its ability to flag whether other people in the organization are searching against similar information and, perhaps, working on common problems.

That kind of matching identification helped the Windows NT-based Autonomy system pay for itself just seven months after it was installed in late 1999. One of the system's first big payoffs came soon after, when two disparate groups of engineers in the U.K. were working on wing construction issues for the company's Harrier 2 military aircraft. After using the Autonomy system to search for wing specification information across the company's intranet, one of the engineering groups discovered that the other group was working on the same problem. Catching the redundancy early in the cycle helped save the company millions, which ultimately paid for the licensing and maintenance of the Autonomy search engine, says West. He declined to say how much BAE Systems paid for the search engine.

90% Faster

A year into using the Autonomy search engine, BAE Systems evaluated its performance and determined that it was able to reduce the time needed to retrieve information from its intranet by 90%. Christopher Tree, a systems engineer in Farnborough and one of 20,000 regular users of the search engine, says it is "helping me do my day-to-day job."

For instance, the central IT organization at BAE Systems is conducting a software Capability Maturity Model audit throughout its global offices over the next several weeks. Tree plans to use the software to "determine where the audit has taken place before and assist me in preparing for it," he says.

One of the features Tree likes best about the search engine is its ability to "scan the network and draw upon that information" so he doesn't have to log in and send engineering or project information into the portal himself.

Using previous search engines on the company's intranet, Tree says, it would often take seven days out of a monthlong project to search for and find best-practices information. Using the Autonomy system's matching identification capabilities, "I can now literally find a name and contact information within minutes," he says.

In fact, because it took so long to find that kind of information before, Tree says he rarely invested the time to do the research. The upshot was that a lot of intellectual capital was never tapped.

According to a recent analysis of thousands of customer case studies conducted by Wellesley, Mass.-based Nucleus Research Inc., content management systems and portals typically yield poor financial returns because they're rarely tightly focused or well integrated with other systems. BAE Systems considered those issues before installing the Autonomy system, says West.

For a knowledge management portal to succeed, "it's got to form part of a measurable process," says West. "You can have a whiz-bang solution, but if you say, 'Here's a great search engine; use it if you want to,' will they come? Not likely."

AT A GLANCE

How It Works Step 1 A BAE Systems engineer logs into the Autonomy search engine and uses natural language to initiate a search for "Harrier 2 wing specifications," for example. Step 2 The Autonomy search engine integrates information from multiple repositories across BAE Systems' global IT infrastructure through an "understanding" of content. Step 3 The software then identifies and ranks the main concepts within the retrieved content and automatically categorizes, links, personalizes and delivers that information to the engineer.

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