Planpower, Managing their Knowledge with ISYS 

Planpower is a Sydney and Melbourne based professional services organization, specialising in Project Management Consultancy and related products and services. The company is approximately 140 strong and has many notable clients including Ansett Australia, Macquarie Bank and Telstra. The Knowledge Management Domain of Planpower focuses on increasing the value of a business by assessing and managing its intellectual capital. Planpower has leveraged its knowledge centre installation experience in South Africa and Asia, as well as Australia.

Recently, Planpower embarked upon their own knowledge management project and are extremely pleased with the results. Combining their knowledge management methodology and ISYS technology, Planpower has reduced costs, increased value of the organization’s assets, (people, processes and customers) and achieved a return on investment in less than six months.

According to Mark Davis and Gary Dansie, both Managing Consultants in the Knowledge Management Domain at Planpower, knowledge management is all about intellectual capital management and driving the creation, reuse and transfer of knowledge to acquire a return on investment and effort. Planpower’s own knowledge management project began like all their knowledge management projects, with a situation analysis, questionnaires and surveys of the entire organization and focussed one-on-one interviews. From these questions, Gary and Mark established what the people at Planpower wanted from their knowledge management system and a wish list of 500 variables was finally normalised to nine major variables. With these firmly established, Planpower began to build their knowledge centre.

Planpower purchased an ISYS:desktop 50 concurrent user LAN from ISYS

Search Software ISYS:desktop sits on the server and updates automatically when new information enters the knowledge centre. The people at

Planpower use ISYS slightly differently from most. ISYS:desktop Version 5 has a facility called the Knowledge Warehouse. This icon sits on the desktop and is the vehicle by which Planpower manage their data.

Every employee in the company is classified as a “knowledge worker” (even the CEO) and they have one Knowledge Manager. Knowledge workers input new material into their knowledge base via the ISYS knowledge warehouse. When workers enter the knowledge warehouse, the database tree structure of the ISYS indexes is displayed. From this, workers are able to determine the best place for storing their information and whether the information they have just generated or acquired meets the Planpower knowledge creation criteria. From here knowledge workers can drag and drop part of a document or the entire document from any application into the correct database in the knowledge warehouse.

Whenever new material enters the knowledge centre, a profile form appears (with a date stamp) that must be filled in. With the use of this profile, which acts like an ISYS annotation and doesn’t corrupt the document in any way, knowledge workers fill in the author, subject matter and then grade the ‘knowledge worth’ of the information.

This is one of the most important parts. Knowledge worth grading is

available as ‘0’ - which means the author is unsure of the worth - and then from 3 - being the lowest - to 1 being the highest. Because the profiles (annotations) are indexed along with the information, a more focused search query is achievable. When searching for information, workers can specify the level of knowledge worth they want to retrieve.

The grading of information has been a learning curve for the staff at

Planpower, and with the knowledge centre still in its early stages, they are still improving. “It’s all about building the right attitude,” says Mark. “These people are knowledge champions. They have confidence in the process and their judgement is constantly improving. Sure, coding is subjective, but someone’s idea of what the information is worth is better than none. Without the attribution of worth, you can’t prioritise, therefore the knowledge worker is unable to deliver the very best profile, on time and in time for our stakeholders.”

Viewers of the information have the option to regrade the knowledge worth and are always asked to justify the regrade so that everyone can understand the changes in value. As the centre grows, the information will become of higher quality and sorted and qualified into what is most important and most useful to the company.

ISYS indexes all the material that matches Planpower’s knowledge

methodology. This includes company tools and templates, reports, guidelines, information on products and pricing, proposals, benchmarks, commodities, newsletters, marketing material and reports etc; all of which come in a variety of formats such as Word documents, e-mails, PDF and RDF files, excel and SQL databases.

Planpower also gets a lot of information from an external service provider. This external information helps to validate the information collected by the company. It also adds value and business intelligence to the knowledge base. It is an expensive process to commission reports from external sources and the advantage of the Planpower knowledge centre is that once someone commissions a report, it is then available to the entire company. “Our methodology creates reuse and therefore a better return on investment, in terms of our time and money,” said Mark.

Another major advantage of the ISYS system is the Intelligent Agent. Employees can set their own agents to watch out for information entering the knowledge centre. When knowledge appears that matches the criteria of the agent, it notifies its owner. The intelligent agent is regularly used for information gathering, which avoids regular manual searching for material. This is a real benefit when the Knowledge Manager places externally sourced material in the centre. If people are looking for that information, their agent will tip them off; the Manager doesn’t have to contact everyone.

The people at Planpower are very happy with their system. “The feedback has been wonderful,” said Mark. “We have committed, bright and highly qualified people who are practising the methodology and finding real benefit in that they have stopped reinventing the wheel and are able to deliver greater value add to their clients faster.”

“What we really like about ISYS is its flexibility. We can design ISYS to interact with our own methodologies, it doesn't dictate to us. That’s a very important part of knowledge management, you need to use technology tools that enable you, not drive you.”