Counting on Continuum

Storing and organizing the humongous amount of data flowing in and out of organizations has become a Herculean task. To tackle the issue, Prayag Consulting deployed Continuum, writes Nikita Upadhyay

Organizations today generate massive amount of data from various sources such as e-mail messages and documents. Straining through the dispersed information available and gathering business critical data for decision-making is laborious, time consuming and cumbersome. Quadyne Technologies wanted to create a system so that employees could store e-mail messages, Web pages and local documents with access to the same with 'one-click' and search the data store as quickly as searching on popular search engines while at the same time restricting access to internal data.

To find a solution that pools and analyzes this scattered information, the organization came up with a system called Continuum. This system ensures that the right information is available to the right person at the right time. Prayag Consulting, a Bangalore based IT outsourcing firm, providing marketing solutions to companies in the technology industry, has deployed Continuum.

Need for Continuum

One of the predominant issues confronting users of information systems has been the ease and ability to store and search for data within them. Specifically finding important e-mail messages and Web pages (such as competitive information from Web sites, critical information in some ever changing discussion forums, etc.) is a time consuming task.

Constantly increasing and diverse information has made it difficult to search and even harder to keep track of relevant information like reviewing a proposal, sending the quarterly sales report, recording details about the competitor's product, sharing a process improvement technique, retrieving a vendor's agreement, searching for an old e-mail, etc.

Most individuals have their own way of sorting and storing important e-mail messages in personal folders or Web sites as bookmarks. However, these are personal to the user and not sharable easily. It is tedious to search for such information across a team.

Continuum comes to the rescue in such a scenario. It alleviates the problems pertaining to unstructured information in any organization by providing an easy storage and tracking mechanism that enables storage of information from various sources. Its classification and search mechanism enables users to correlate seemingly unrelated pieces of information and retrieve it quickly.

"Continuum from Quadyne Technologies acts as our knowledge management system. It enables us to store articles, Web pages, industry reports, relevant documents and e-mails and our customer deliverables in a common repository," stated Jayanthi Badrinath, Senior Principal, Prayag Consulting.

Adding to it, Arjun Chaganty, CEO, Quadyne Technologies, said, "The main thrust while implementing Continuum at Prayag was to enable the reuse of their earlier research on related or similar topics and to increase user adoption of a knowledge management system to increase collective knowledge and reduce costs."

Prayag operates in the market research space. Therefore, it was critical for the company to get hold of a solution that enables it to reuse existing knowledge during projects to reduce time, improve quality and provide a common mechanism for employees to share and learn from each other's work.



Implementation phase

To streamline the knowledge management system at Prayag, a robust knowledge repository was critical. Therefore, the company deployed Continuum-a knowledge management system, in January 2008.

"Continuum can help you and your organization keep pace with vast volumes of data, reduce decision-making time and improve overall productivity, so that you and your organization can spend more time in doing what is important-growing the business," stated Chaganty.

The implementation took about two to three weeks. The first step of the implementation was to get existing data moved and ported into Continuum. Using its bulk import tool, Quadyne Technologies uploaded about 3 GB of their existing data into Continuum in less than an hour.

The second step of the implementation was to ensure that all users were trained properly and using the system completely. "This took a few meetings and follow-ups to ensure that all our employees were fully acquainted with the solution and its benefits," stated Badrinath. Last step, which is an ongoing process, is providing feedback on the product and enhancements.

Prayag meets with Quadyne Technologies periodically to raise issues, talk about gaps and issues that they have observed with Continuum and suggest improvements that can enable them to use it more effectively. Quadyne Technologies is implementing features that enable the organization to not only see ROI on their investment into Continuum, but also use it to manage and analyze business critical information. This also falls in the category of the third ongoing step.

How it works

The base version of Continuum took about a year to develop. All the data stored from these applications is centrally stored on the Continuum server. The information is fully indexed to enable quick search. Through the administration module, the organization can control access to various folders and workspaces. Continuum has fine-grained access control, which enables read, write and delete level control over the folders and documents.

"At Prayag, the main knowledge workspace is marked for read and update only, with no delete privileges to the entire organization, thus ensuring that no knowledge data is accidentally erased," stated Chaganty.

Documents can also be optionally tagged with additional attributes (called meta-tags) to enable quick search. Continuum search not only retrieves results based on file names or text within the documents, but can also search for the last comment on a version change or meta-tags assigned to the document. This functionality becomes critical in organizations handling large amount of content, which needs to be reused.

Challenges-before and after

Before Continuum, Prayag had an existing industry leading content management installation that they were not happy with and was cumbersome to use. "Retrieval of information was slow and not at all intuitive. As a result, the team was not using the system, which was not the desired outcome. This put more pressure on senior resources to ensure that the required information was made available to the client," explained Badrinath.

"It was always easy for us to get access to Quadyne Technologies staff to resolve any issues and get quick response on issues," Badrinath added. The move operation (which enabled them to move documents across or within workspaces) was a little cumbersome. They addressed this issue and fixed some of the shortcomings in the next release, which was installed a few months after the implementation. No upgradation has been done until date.

"One of the major challenges we faced was ensuring that everyone using Continuum fully understand the benefits it brings to them. We overcame this challenge by constantly educating our customers on its features-benefits and listening constantly to Continuum users on product issues and ease of use. Second was the slow adoption curve when using a system like Continuum," expressed Chaganty.

Since any new solution changes the status quo, its slow adoption is the biggest challenge as it makes it hard to demonstrate ROI. "We are cultivating internal champions who can prompt Continuum benefits internally within the organization to mitigate this. This not only ensures that we get more traction on the usage of the solution, but we also get more feedback on resistance to its adoption," Chaganty added.