"Building Intelligent Content from 30 Years of Legacy Documents," Intelligent Content 2010, Paul Wlodarczyk

Copyright © 2010 Earley & Associates Inc. All Rights Reserved.

COPYRIGHT © 2010 EARLEY & ASSOCIATES INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Case Study: Building Intelligent Content from 30 Years of Legacy Documents

Paul Wlodarczyk

Director, Solutions Consulting

Earley & Associates


What do we assume about Intelligent Content?

We usually assume:

– Loads of systems

– Information design

– Structured content

– Tied to the business

– Personalized

– Semantic

– Etc.

We assume new.

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Case Study: Applied Materials

Global leader in Nanomanufacturing Technology solutions for the fabrication of semiconductor chips, flat panel displays, solarphotovoltaic cells, flexible electronics and energy efficient glass– Founded in 1967, $5B revenue, 8 Product Business Groups

– Produces the technology that helps produce virtually every semiconductor chip and flat panel display in the world

– Long-lived products – some in service over 30 years

– 2500 customer engineers (“CEs” – 20% of work force) maintain, diagnose, and repair their equipment in customer fabs worldwide

Business need: – Improve CE troubleshooting and repair performance in the fab through improved

information access

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What do we mean by Intelligent Content?

• In our client’s words:

– “Deliver the right information, at the right time, in the right format, to the right person.”

• In our words:

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right information

right information = Relevant, accurate, up-to-date, approved

right time

right time = In the context of work / business process

right format

right format = Accessible

right person

right person = Authorized


Information Challenge #1:30 Years of Legacy Content

• …and lots of it

– PDFs – manuals, drawings, some are scans

– Communities – forums, shared drives, bulletin boards

– Knowledge Management – tips, Best Known Methods

• How much gets “chunked”? How to convert it?

• How to search it effectively?

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Information Challenge #2:Point of need is in the clean room

• Physical Access for the CE

– Double / triple gloves

• Typing/pointing are difficult

– No place to set a laptop down

• Wireless / Internet Access

– Closest point of access to company internet may be across town

• Customer Information Security Concerns

– Protection of trade secrets

– Some won’t allow laptops in fab

– Some won’t even allow paper in fab

• “Tools” are all unique in the fab

– Need docs that reflect product “DNA”

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http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/4/4c/Bunny_suit.jpg


Information Challenge #3:KM is complicated by IP / InfoSec concerns

• Garden-walling Customer IP

– Have to be sure that when a CE shares a tip or asks for help that they are not exposing customer IP to other customers (with whom they compete)

• Protecting Company Product IP

– DRM for preventing piracy / reverse engineering of products, parts

• Preserving Company Services IP

– Assure that customers pay for value-added services

– Secure service IP from competitive service providers

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Information Challenge #4:An “archipelago” of content centric systems

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Tech Pubs Library

Drawings

PartsQA

Best Practices

Forum

ProductLibrary

Forum

Email Diagnostics

DRM

ProductLibrary

ProductLibrary

ProductLibrary

Forum

ProductLibrary

Forum

ProductLibrary

ProductLibrary

ProductLibrary

Forum

Forum

SAP

PLM

Search and integration are issues


Where to begin eating the elephant?

• Key observation:

“Last thing we need is another system”

• Need a balanced viewpoint –the “Four Pillars of KM”:

– People

– Process

– Technology

– Content

• Assess the current state

• Define the desired state

• Define the gap closing actions

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Technology

• Technical Publishing

– Authoring: Office, FrameMaker

– Team Center - Drawings

– Publishing in PDF, Live Cycle DRM

• ECM

– LiveLink SharePoint

• ERP

– SAP for service billing, parts ordering, etc.

• Various proprietary systems

– Parts, diagnostics, KM, etc.

• Connectivity and access to laptops in the fab

– Ranges from “none” to “near” to “Nirvana”

– Need to support a low-tech solution

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People

• Several key user groups:

– CEs (content consumers and contributors)

– Support (content consumers and contributors)

– Tech pubs and training (content publishers)

– Engineering teams (content contributors)

• Understood roles, expectations, alignment, barriers to change

• Key findings: – Content authors had well-defined needs and

were extremely engaged

– Content publishers had good alignment for change and good orientation around topic-oriented content

– Strong need for governance over technology projects

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Process

• Service Work / Business Process

– CEs spend lot of time searching – mostly during diagnosis

– Business value is not in reducing search time; it is reducing product downtime.

• Content Lifecycle

– Authoring, Publishing processes fairly traditional

– More engineering contribution and editing than authoring

• Collaboration

– KM starting to hit its stride. Sorting the IP issues

• Program Governance

– Service IT programs were stove-piped

– Coordination needed for true intelligent content

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Content

• Monolithic PDF needs to be “chunked”

• Terabytes of content

– Most relevant content is PDF, tagged to corporate taxonomy, in a CMS

– Some scans of 30 year-old manuals

• Sales-oriented Taxonomy

– Needs to reflect the service view (failure modes, symptoms, function, etc.)

– Taxonomy governance process neglected

• Info Security

– Access Management and DRM is essential

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Phase 1: Foundations for Intelligent Content

• Service Technology Council

• ECM implementation

• Faceted search

• Federated search

• Taxonomy development• Modular content, tagged• Continuous Improvement

for other service systems

Phase 2: Access at Point of Need

• CE Platform for Fab Access

• Intelligent work packages

• CE training, certification

• XML Pilots

Phase 3: Intelligent Content Platform

• Common client platform

• SOA-based application integration

• Interactive Electronic Technical Manual (IETM) viewer • XML content

• “Smart art”

Roadmap to Intelligent Content

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Project deployment

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Five Core Activities

• Service Technology Governance

• Modular Content Strategy

• Taxonomy and Metadata Development

• CMS IA and User Experience

• Search and UX Technology

Production Pilot

• Several divisions, several products

• Real users, active service data, “live fire” trial

• Collect data, evaluate, and refine

Scale and Migrate

• Plan for what to migrate and how

• Get to an 80%-ish solution


What about XML?

• Can publish component PDF without XML

– Largely maintain components at the source level today in Word and FrameMaker

• Chunking and tagging legacy content will inform a content model for XML

• No near-term drive for XML

– No real reuse – little “transcluded” content

– No multi-channel publishing

– No localization

• Need for XML in 3-5 years

– Emerging need for localized content

– Need to integrate XML content into IT systems for real service dashboard – dynamic publishing

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Intelligent Content Myths

• You need XML for intelligent content.

– We can get there with well indexed component content. The key is relevant semantic markup.

• We can just find everything with enterprisesearch / Google.

– Taxonomy and component content strategy are essential for relevancy and contextual navigation.

• We can justify the project with the time we save by not searching.

– In the real world, projects can only get sponsored with a real ROI at every phase, and buy-in of all stakeholders.

• Intelligent Content is futuristic.

– We can get there TODAY.

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Advantages of the “four pillars” approach

• Comprehensive view of the issues, benefits, and constraints

• Achieved buy-in at all levels of the organization

• Yielded a clear roadmap to Intelligent Content

• Clarified potential phasing of a large, complex project

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Paul Wlodarczyk

Earley & Associates, Inc

585-598-6050

[email protected]

www.earley.com

Questions/Discussion

mailto:[email protected]

http://www.earley.com/


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• Focus: Information Architecture (“IA”) Services

• Founded: 1994

• Personnel: Twenty core team consultants, plus a network of other top industry experts• ECM and KM experts• taxonomy specialists• search experts• information architects• usability professionals• technology consultants• business process experts

• Headquarters: Boston, MA

About Earley & Associates, Inc.

• Consulting Philosophy: • Organizing Principles based on

business context and goals• Four Pillars - People, Content,

Process, and Technology