A succinct introduction to Instant Knoweldge, and to the background and objectives of the Workshop.

A June 2010 report from the Future Foundation, on behalf of Google, predicts a decade of change in enterprise working practices, with new technologies supporting creativity and change. Their report found an 81% correlation between collaboration and innovation, yet also found many organisations are yet not implementing technologies to enable collaboration, with only 12% of employees surveyed expressed satisfaction with the technology available to them.

The importance of knowledge and collaboration to the enterprise is not new information to practitioners in the field. However, advances in technology mean that at last it is possible to address these issues and transform the way that business works. Examples, such as rapid creation of ad hoc work teams and instant access to the right knowledge and the right person, represent an opportunity to deliver business transformation, an opportunity of huge value to the business community, and one that Telcos cannot afford to ignore.

‘Instant Knowledge’ is a service concept designed to deliver secure autonomous business collaboration, harnessing the tacit knowledge of employees (their business connections, activities, skills and expertise) which flows daily through their PCs, netbooks, and phones/smartphones. This information can be used to infer an employees business linkages (or ‘social network’) and thence deliver immediate answers to others within the company – an automated, rapid, “I know a man who can” service.

For such services to find commercial success they must be implemented so as to be transparent to the employee, they must ensure privacy and security, and they must place no usage burden on the user - the service needs to just “be there”, offering help when needed, in an unobtrusive manner. This talk will introduce the Instant Knowledge service concepts, describing example use cases, with the help of videos.

Delivering an Instant Knowledge service requires the use of information owned by different players – the end user, his employer and the service provider / telco – respecting the sensitivities of each, in terms of information ownership and control. Such sensitivities may differ between large, medium and small enterprises, and also between business sectors. Company size will also impact deployment, and may favour centralised vs decentralised implementation.

We could envision service software running on the users’ PC and phone provisioned by various means – provided by the telco, by the enterprise, or potentially made available as downloadable freeware via an App Store, with provision in the extreme delegated to the end-user himself. Such self-provision options could reduce the overhead for telcos, allowing them to focus resources on a (relatively) low number of high value enterprise customers, whilst still securing substantial new revenues from a large number of low value SME customers. The latter model could even potentially be extended to support a consumer grade service, of information sharing amongst friends.

Such possibilities suggest that variety of different deployment and service provision options could exist, each with their own constraints and business models.

In considering the opportunity for provision of such knowledge-based services, it is important to consider all the normal business parameters – the size of the market, complementarity of existing services, potential competitors’ strengths and weaknesses, and the various different provisioning approaches, and much more. For example, a corporate multinational may prefer a fully managed service, whilst a small company may prefer hosting on their own server.
The aim of this discussion session is to brainstorm a range of options for service provision, and begin to explore possible business model drivers associated with different market segments.

A key part of the Instant Knowledge programme is the demonstration of the technology being developed to potential users and service providers, in order to identify and avoid barriers to acceptance and deployment. Whilst still some way from a deployable service prototype, it is intended to make prototype equipment and software available in the near future to members of the Business User Group community that has been created, in order to undertake ‘friendly user trials. This talk will outline the opportunity for companies to get involved.

In parallel with the friendly user trials, the ongoing programme is exploring a range of possible next steps to move the service closer to commercial deployment. This could be done in various ways with various end-user types – large corporate, mid-sized and small companies. This final session will outline the options and challenges available, and what is needed to overcome several important challenges, including:
• transition from demonstration to development grade software
• implementation on commercial servers – whose ?
• deployment on operational communications infrastructure
• involvement of large scale end users
• funding
The talk will explore these challenges and possible approaches to overcome them.