Retrieval is key to the new economy
The second of two articles on the knowledge revolution looks at the role of the large organisation

EXCALIBUR, which recently merged with Intel's interactive media services division, is one of the longest-established firms in the knowledge management market, deriving a quarter of its world-wide revenues from the UK.

Peter Doyle, European marketing director, sees opportunities to enter new markets as a result of a $150 million (£101.91 million) investment by Intel into the new company. He believes that visual retrieval technology has the greatest potential. He said: "The distinction between text and image, such as video and TV, will disappear."

However, Richard Doyle, managing director of dealer Esteem Computers, does not sense much demand from smaller companies and delivers mostly "departmental solutions for large organisations". Esteem uses both Excalibur's Retrievalware and also Verity, but Mr Doyle rates the former ahead on cost and retrieval technology.

Keith Phillips, chief technical officer at QXL, has also developed "covert and overt customer profiling" based on Excalibur technology.

Ken Pratt, operations manager at BG Technology, originally compared Excalibur with Autonomy, and preferred Excalibur's "built-in intelligence of retrievalware" to the "learning by repeated action" of Autonomy. Document security was a particular issue for BG, which rated Excalibur better than Verity and Autonomy for that. BG's system is available to some 16,000 desktop users worldwide via the organisation's intranet.

Simon Fletcher, Autonomy's European communications director, acknowledges that the commonest challenge is to persuade people to share information. But, he says, "if you can do it automatically, they don't even realise they are sharing the knowledge."

Autonomy was originally tried within the Virtual University at BAE Systems. The company reasoned in 1998 that it needed to construct a "one-stop shop for information", and set up a three-month trial to compare Autonomy with Excalibur on some 300 web sites.

Now, a year later, Autonomy has become "embedded in the management-development framework of the business". Farnborough, in turn, has become a reference site for Autonomy, with more than 60 companies having viewed the technology at work in the past year.

Mr Phillips explains that the system operates through "pattern-recognition technology and concept highlighting. It goes to a web page and brings back a block of text, and highlights in red those things that are of interest to you personally". At the hub is a reasoning engine that updates itself every hour.

BAE links that engine to 10 or 12 news-feeds, providing between 10,000 and 15,000 stories per day, in addition to 300 specified internet sites, Jane's Defence Archive and the entire BAE intranet, including shared drives and databases. Using a five-star grading system, it randomly selects colleagues interested in the same management issues, in effect creating "virtual networks - enabling the knowledge economy".

Mark McCluskey, chief knowledge officer of Logical, an international e-business outsourcing group based in Slough, explained how Autonomy has helped build communities of common interest for the 29 separate businesses acquired by Logical throughout the world in the last three years. He said: "We've transformed an organisation that's been very product-based, in terms of networking and infrastructure, towards a much more service and e-business solution focus."

Logical has extended this into recruitment, matching the personal agents of a new employee with the specific expertise of existing personnel. Mr McCluskey explains: "We can say, for example, to a new engineer, 'here's our typical set of agents you might want to use'. This accelerates the induction process and identifies, even more importantly, who within the organisation they should be talking to as a first priority."

Agent classifications are important, and Ashok Chandra, senior vice-president of development at Verity's head office in California, is one of two IBM veterans just hired. Mr Chandra's field of expertise includes databases and agent technologies.

He said: "Different agents are good for different things. We are building a society of agents such as notification agents, recommendation agents and personalisation agents. I think these 'digital slaves' will be the navigators of the networked world of the future."

Logical also has Autonomy linked into the Lotus beta product Quickplace, where it trawls the content of online discussions - often spread across several countries - looking for information that might be useful for feeding into best practice.

Logical has 2,500 employees worldwide, so managing content becomes very important. For example, the company recently imported 36 gigabytes of old information acquired over five years in Logical Australia and categorised it. Mr McCluskey said: "Tens of thousands of documents were categorised over a weekend. It tells you what you didn't know you had".

The other main UK vendor is Brightstation, newly created by a demerger from Dialog Corporation, which was recently sold to Thompsons. Brightstation's portfolio includes the respected Muscat technology, recently re-branded into product suites as Smartlogik and Infosort, as well as Discovery and Empower. These create directories under which information is classified, and are marketed by Brightstation as an "enterprise solutions suite".

Bill Thom, sales director, describes Smartlogik technology as "a neural network - the difference between the old way of doing it and the new way of doing it". Mr Thom, who used to be sales director of Excalibur, says that one of the key benefits to the end user is being able to reduce the number of hits, thereby reducing one of the internet's greatest problems - "search rage".

One of Smartlogik's customers is Phillip Fox, internet services manager at the United Nations Environment Programme World Conservation Monitoring Centre (UNEP-WCMC), which uses Empower to search details of endangered species. Mr Fox said that Empower provided better cost-benefit.

He also preferred the multilingual capability of Smartlogik to Autonomy, as it can search simultaneously across languages. As the agency is often conducting cross-queries in English, French and Spanish, it is important to cope with the large amounts of information that must be cross-referenced.

He said: "It's the ability to look at the same information presented in a different language that is a key benefit of Empower."

Mark Hynes, operations director at Lafferty, a producer of financial newsletters, has been a Smartlogik customer for four years. Smartlogik 'hosts' Lafferty's web site for e-commerce. Mr Hynes uses it to "manage the whole series of news wires, real-time news stories, and customise it".

A KPMG survey concluded that nearly two-thirds of organisations complained that they were suffering from information overload. Whereas, previously, those who ascended the corporate ladder had the social skills to get on with people, it will be those who can master new technology remotely and deploy it to benefit the enterprise collectively who will succeed in the new global economy.

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