CASE STUDY Astrium Accelerates Research and Design with IHS Goldfire Sponsored by: IDC David Schubmehl Dan Vesset May 2014 IDC OPINION The challenges facing workers in most organizations today are immense. The amount and pace of information that workers have to deal with on a daily basis are increasing dramatically, in some cases more than doubling on an annual basis. At the same time, organizations are realizing that to be effective and to make the right decisions, they must improve how they empower their workers to make those decisions with proper data and information analysis tools. Big data in all its forms and associated technologies, skills, and processes promise to radically change how information is utilized to make better decisions, to interact with customers, to optimize operations, and to provide services. A big part of realizing this promise is dependent on efficient access to unstructured content and analysis of such content in addition to and in conjunction with structured data. Although unstructured content accounts for 90% of all information according to IDC, organizations have to date overinvested significantly in technology and processes for structured data management. Yet unlocking the value hidden in unstructured content is more critical than ever. How organizations deal with this information is still somewhat fragmented. IDC's latest research indicated that 61% of knowledge workers access four or more systems on a regular basis to get the information they need to do their job and 30% of knowledge workers need to access seven or more systems. This unstructured information is locked in a variety of formats, locations, and applications made up of separate repositories that don't talk to each other. Providing unified access to varied unstructured and structured information is still not easy for many organizations, but 77% of knowledge workers surveyed indicated that a single, unified information access point to all of the information they need for work would be beneficial or very beneficial. Indeed, organizations are making strides in this area, with 78% of knowledge workers surveyed reporting that their organization has seen tangible benefits from its unstructured information access and analysis capabilities. In this case study, we examine how one organization has overcome this information challenge and has harnessed the pervasive use of unified information access. As part of this case study, we look at how this manufacturer makes use of unified information access capabilities to satisfy the needs and requirements of its employees and internal users. May 2014, IDC #248707
METHODOLOGY This case study is part of a broader research study titled Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information. The study identifies the challenges faced by organizations looking to leverage technology to access and analyze structured and unstructured content, and it provides recommendations for overcoming such challenges. The goal of the study is to identify methods and technology that can improve knowledge workers' productivity and unlock the value hidden in unstructured information, thereby enabling improved communications and decision making as well as optimized business processes. The methodology included a survey of over 2,000 knowledge workers from private and public sector organizations in 5 countries and in-depth interviews with 11 organizations. IDC defines knowledge workers as employees who are connected to the Internet and use a computing device to find, create, share, access, or enter information or data electronically in the course of performing their job. Skilled task workers, researchers, salespeople, analysts, managers, IT staff, executives, and professionals are all included as knowledge workers. One of the organizations interviewed was Astrium, a leading defense and space research and development group within Airbus Defence and Space. The company and its managers who were interviewed by IDC analysts were recommended to IDC by IHS, which is one of the cosponsors of the Unlocking the Hidden Value of Information study. SITUATION OVERVIEW Organization Airbus Defence and Space is a division of Airbus Group formed by combining the business activities of Cassidian, Astrium, and Airbus Military. The new division is Europe's number 1 defense and space enterprise, the second largest space business worldwide, and among the top 10 global defense enterprises. It has some 40,000 employees generating revenue of approximately 14 billion per year. The company's business encompasses launch vehicles, manned space activities, satellite systems, and related services. According to the company, Astrium boasts some of the most advanced design, manufacture, and test facilities in the space industry. It has unrivaled expertise in the techniques and key technologies required for the development and delivery of major space systems. The company's highly skilled, motivated teams ensure that Astrium offers its customers civil or military, national, institutional, or commercial the very best, most efficient solutions for all their requirements, combining quality, costeffectiveness, rapid delivery, and constant innovation. Requirements As part of its overall mission to conduct space- and defense-related research, Astrium needed to be able to quickly locate, identify, and evaluate research from a wide variety of information sources. Astrium sought a solution that could combine its internal research information with open source information to provide analysis, insight, and recommendations around major research efforts in various stages, from initial idea to completion. 2014 IDC #248707 2
As part of its research activities, Astrium subscribed to many information sources, each with its own log-in, access, and search facilities. Knowledge workers can spend as much as 42% of their time seeking, processing, collaborating, and sharing information time that they could use to solve problems. To streamline and optimize its research process, Astrium wanted to centralize and unify the process of going to many external sources and internal systems multiple times to collect information with a single, centralized tool backed by world-class search technologies. Astrium's senior management expected the research organization to use open source information including outside research journals, patent filings, chemical and engineering information, and other resources to facilitate this mission. Once external information was collected, it needed to be critically analyzed and correlated to the existing research that Astrium had within its organization. Specifically, Astrium had to relate academic research to its own product designs and documentation as new versions of products were contemplated. Astrium needed to do this for two reasons: first, to ensure that it had a good review of all the knowledge about a particular subject or project that existed either within or outside the company for due diligence purposes, and second, to keep this information as a form of insurance that could be analyzed if and when problems with the project occurred. Finally, senior management wanted to have this information available so that they could use it as part of their decision-making process when deciding on courses of actions relating to new products or services within Astrium. The ability to generate reports and presentations about this information was required by management. Specifically, the ability to aggregate, summarize, and report on information coming from multiple data sources was a key requirement. Solution After an extensive evaluation process of the numerous search, document management, and other tools that Astrium was already using and also of tools that were available on the market, Astrium chose to centralize and utilize IHS Goldfire as its main research tool. IHS Goldfire customers report cutting research times by as much as a third while also accelerating idea generation and inventive problem solving. IHS Goldfire is very popular within Astrium's research organization, with over 100 users who appreciate the software's integrated research tools and problem-solving and collaboration capabilities. IHS Goldfire can ingest, analyze, and utilize large amounts of heterogeneous content ranging from research reports, file shares, email, and other corporate resources to public content like patent filings, standards reports, and other public sources of information. As part of the ingestion process, it semantically analyzes the information, extracting and relating names, facts, and events so that disparate areas of knowledge knowledge otherwise easily overlooked are brought together for potential review and analysis. IHS Goldfire offers a number of specific features and capabilities around innovation and advanced problem solving: It provides patented natural language semantic question and answering to deliver relevant responses to specific questions, uncovering answers in documents rather than simply retrieving documents. 2014 IDC #248707 3
Concept lenses provide focused answers around a particular topic grouped by areas such as advantages and disadvantages as well as causes and effects. It provides organizations with the ability to perform multilingual search across hundreds of document types, structured and unstructured text, internal knowledge housed in shared drives, document management and other enterprise systems, and external knowledge like patents, standards, journal articles, and the deep Web. To focus on and speed problem solving, it embeds known engineering methodologies such as root cause analysis, value engineering, and failure modes and effects analysis (FMEA) as part of its overall platform and workflows to guide projects such as finding new markets, improving a product or process, or designing a new product. It employs a predictive analytics capability that IHS calls its decision engine to organize the previously mentioned features into a suite of tools that helps researchers analyze paths and topic areas quickly in order to take action on a particular topic. Astrium also makes extensive use of IHS' broad knowledge collections to locate and utilize information from many different sources across industries and scientific disciplines. With IHS Goldfire, Astrium is able to connect to this information and utilize it in conjunction with its external data sources. Deployment To deploy IHS Goldfire, Astrium partnered with the IHS Goldfire Professional Services team. With two distributed servers supporting researchers in France and Germany, Astrium has found IHS Goldfire easy for its IT staff to install, deploy, and support. Astrium has been working with the engineering and research staff to utilize IHS Goldfire and has been gradually expanding the use of the product on a project-by-project basis. As is the case with any new enterprise solution, the biggest challenge that Astrium has faced has been getting engineers to use IHS Goldfire as their go-to research tool rather than using another tool or the manual approach. Since the organization has centralized on IHS Goldfire, it has indexed nearly 2 million internal documents and another 600,000 external documents and will soon begin indexing multiple internal sources from its Windchill Document Management System (DMS) in France. Astrium has approached this as an internal communication challenge and has been working to solve this by providing outreach to its engineers to demonstrate the power and capability of IHS Goldfire to find answers in documents and to answer questions even when engineers don't know which questions to ask. Astrium has also been conducting internal training sessions where senior engineers and researchers can see and share the benefits of using IHS Goldfire. Outcomes and Benefits The use of IHS Goldfire fits well within Astrium's current business processes and helps accelerate Astrium's research and decision making in particular. While Astrium hasn't conducted any explicit studies, it recognizes that the use of IHS Goldfire has improved its research where it has been used as part of a project in some cases, very dramatically. As an example, with IHS Goldfire, Astrium has been able to reduce the amount of time spent doing research by approximately 30% in several projects where outside and inside research needed to be conducted freeing Astrium engineers to spend less time researching and giving them a more thorough scope of knowledge before making critical business decisions. 2014 IDC #248707 4
The most important benefit for Astrium has been the ability to unify, organize, and analyze all of the related information around a particular project enabling its researchers to more fully leverage past experience and expertise. IHS Goldfire's semantic question-answering and expert recommendation software engine leads engineers and knowledge workers to information quickly and enables them to rapidly digest it to make better decisions. New knowledge acquired by Astrium's IHS Goldfire users can be easily shared and facilitates collaboration. The ability to easily access and utilize third-party data that IHS offers through IHS Goldfire and IHS Knowledge Collections has been very useful to Astrium, especially very large and complex data sources like the world patent index and other areas of published space research. In addition to research support, Astrium is beginning to utilize IHS Goldfire for market (competitive and technology trends) and product analysis. While this is still in the early stages, it is a use case that Astrium expects to expand over the next year. LESSONS LEARNED Utilize external information to facilitate decision making. Astrium's use of IHS Goldfire together with IHS Knowledge Collections data sources made it easy for Astrium to locate, collect, and utilize information from a wide variety of sources, providing its senior management with up-todate research on particular topics to facilitate decision making. Organizations should consider third-party information to augment and improve their decision-making processes. Unify and centralize research efforts and silos. Since Astrium had a number of different repositories and tools for researching and analyzing information, it wasn't getting the benefit of sharing that information and research across departments, locations, and teams. Utilizing IHS Goldfire to unite all of these various information sources helped Astrium streamline and improve its research process. This is an excellent way for organizations to reduce and eliminate redundancy. Develop internal marketing plans to demonstrate the value of new systems. One of Astrium's biggest challenges has been to educate staff on and increase the use of new tools like IHS Goldfire. Organizations should consider documenting early successes and deploying internal marketing campaigns to raise the awareness of staff and encourage the use of the tool to improve overall productivity. Consider the use of vendors that can supply both software and data. In IHS Goldfire, IHS provides Astrium with a single point of access to both research and analysis software and third-party data to augment Astrium's own enterprise research information. Previously, Astrium would have to use a costly third-party service, conduct the search, and then import that data into its internal system to utilize it. This approach would be duplicated for every information service that Astrium wanted to utilize. Using the offering of a single vendor that consolidates the information access point allows organizations to bypass an external research cycle and speed up their research and decision-making processes. 2014 IDC #248707 5
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