Objective: As a consulting firm, Predictive Systems’ greatest assets are its employees and the knowledge they bring to their clients. Most of the consultants spend the vast majority of their time at client sites. To make better use of their combined knowledge, they needed a better way to centralize, manage, disseminate, and reuse the information in their documents.

Volume of Information: Predictive Systems employs about 400 consultants and engineers, divided into four practice areas in over 14 regional offices in the U.S. and Europe. Information is spread out over 19 networked servers and over 400 individual laptops and workstations.

Problem Example: The first thing a new Predictive Systems employee does is to create a biography ("bio") of work experience, technical expertise, and educational background. This information helps management allocate the right resources to each specific customer account. Originally, Predictive Systems’ employee biographies were:

• dispersed throughout its regional servers and the 400 individual laptops and workstations.
• formatted differently in each region.
• difficult to track for proper review and approval.

With bios grouped by region, a practice area manager could not easily find additional employees with specific skill sets outside of their region.

Solution: Aviator’s feature set and integration with Lotus Notes/Domino provided the necessary tools to centralize, organize, and distribute Predictive Systems’ collective knowledge. Aviator:

• allowed Predictive Systems to centralize all bios in one location - a cabinet in the Aviator library.
• ensures employees use a standard bio boilerplate.
• uses Lotus Notes email for workflow to ensure bios are edited, formatted, reviewed, and approved by the proper individuals.

Benefits: Predictive Systems has realized many benefits from Aviator's deployment:

• All bios are globally accessible through a Lotus Notes client or Web browser
• Multi-level security ensures Predictive Systems corporate knowledge is safe - employees can only read their own bio, but managers can read and access bios relevant to their region or practice area.
• Aviator's workflow flexibility enables regionally defined document review and approval, so each region can work the way they need to.
• A pre-deployment ROI calculation resulted in estimated annual savings of $2.83 million.
• Aviator increases efficiencies, leading to greater throughput to execute more client engagements, thus delivering greater revenue and increased margin.

Aviator and Domino Functionality: Predictive Systems created one library for the entire organization. Domino and Aviator's database scalability accommodates vast amounts of information in each library cabinet. Because documents can be categorized by several criteria (for example, bios are organized by region and practice area), each user can navigate cabinets in the way that is most intuitive and effective for them.

Conclusion: Aviator now provides Predictive Systems' consultants with the ability to acquire, modify, and manage accurate, up-to-date knowledge resources quickly and easily, in order to meet the unique and time-critical requirements of each client.

Additional Comments: Aviator Software's eagerness to make the system work right for Predictive Systems’ specific needs, and their expert command of document management concepts and Lotus Notes/Domino technologies, have been unparalleled. Thanks to Bart Abicht, Knowledge Systems Design Director in Predictive Systems’ Corporate Consulting Group, for providing narrative for this case study.

• Lotus Notes/Domino R5
• Server OS: Windows NT 4.0
• Client OS: Windows NT
• 1 Domino Server
• Over 400 Users