Case Study

Case Study: KM Platform

for Insurance Company

Case Study: KM Platform for

Insurance Company

Open Source Powered Knowledge

Management Platform

Marketing Contacts:

Vineet Dahiya

InfoAxon Technologies Ltd.

Mob - +91-9810425760

Email - vineet.dahiya@infoaxon.com

Case Study

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Overview

Our customer (the Insurance Company) is country‟s top 10 largest insurers (with more than US$2 billion assets under

management), has more than 10,000+ strong workforce and presence in 400+ cities in the country. It is a joint venture between a

Fortune 100 US insurer and a leading business house in India. In line with its vision to be the most admired life insurance

company in India, it has developed a strong corporate governance model based on the core values of excellence, honesty,

knowledge, caring, integrity and teamwork.

It has multi-channel distribution spread across the country. Agency distribution is the primary channel complemented by

partnership distribution, bancassurance and dedicated distribution for emerging markets.

It also emerged as one of the best employer in the recently announced Business Today-Mercer-TNS Survey of „The Best Companies

to Work For in India‟.

Business Needs / Challenges

As this Insurance company‟s business grew rapidly spreading across various geographic locations, its stakeholders realized that

they need to help their workforce become more productive and efficient in order to improve organizational performance and

achieve organizational growth plans.

Additionally, Insurance is an extremely competitive, people-intensive business and it constantly adapts its processes to cater to

changing consumer demands. It is therefore imperative that workforce be enabled with right platform and tools to store, manage

and search information quickly and efficiently.

This Insurance Company was also getting affected by:

The high employee turnover (a standard in Insurance industry). It continued to lose tacit knowledge due to attrition.

This led to re-inventing of information and documented knowledge several times thus wasting precious resources and affecting the morale of employees.

In turn, customer experience also suffered as result of non-availability of right information and knowledge.

Case Study

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Gaps in present KM tools

The Insurance Company was using various software productivity tools such as e-mails, shared drives, group collaboration, intranets

etc. to communicate information regarding processes, best practices, new product launches, product etc. to employees within

Branches. This was far from being efficient and was becoming a „bottleneck‟ for faster and efficient working.

The present set of tools resulted in many inefficiencies:

Content was created through a series of disparate, inefficient, and unorganized processes which made collaboration and

knowledge capture difficult.

Flow of information between Head Office (HO) and Branches was mostly top-down and one-way. HO accounts for around 15%

of its workforce while it has 80% of organizational knowledge in terms of processes, best practices, product information etc.

This information was not getting shared efficiently and lost in emails and shared drives

Teams often struggle to retrieve/search relevant information quickly

Information existed in silos and not available easily to assist decision making

Information created did not have a particular organizational taxonomy to categorize the content and therefore it was not

possible to search or index the information stored in IT systems

Cross functional collaboration was very difficult to achieve with the current set of tools

In summary, the Insurance Company was unable to tap the tacit knowledge of its workers and turn it into competitive advantage.

This was impacting their ability in an industry where speed is of critical importance. Their stakeholders realized that they need to

help workforce:

Reduce wasting precious time and cost in searching for content and

information

Easily search for competent resources to deal with specific issues

Reduce time in re-doing / duplicating the activities or works already done

Collaborate with team-members in almost real time

Capture the tacit knowledge and improve sharing of knowledge

Adhere to business processes and audit compliances

Case Study

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Help through Open Source KM Platform

Choosing the right technology platform and the right partner to integrate, customize, deploy and support the Knowledge Platform

was the major decision for the Insurance Company. The other criterion were Platform‟s scalability potential to handle ever growing

user base and volume of content, its flexibility to make further enhancements, future readiness, use of open standards and last but

not the least cost effectiveness as the company wanted to give access of its Knowledge Platform to all its employees and also

extend it to its advisors and partners.

The Insurance Company needed a right partner that can help them make right choices keeping in mind their long term vision and

have enough technology expertise, experience and business consulting depth in open source model to guide them and see them

through their KM journey. Most importantly the vendor should be willing to collaborate with their IT and business teams to see this

initiative through as this was their first initiative on open source business solution. After many deliberations and meeting with

various vendors they partnered with InfoAxon – India‟s first Open Source Integration Company and an expert in delivering Open

Source powered Knowledge Management & Business Intelligence Solution Platforms, to deliver the Knowledge Platform.

InfoAxon helped the Insurance Company‟s technical team choose open source powered alternative such as Alfresco Share that

provided a right- fit for their current KM needs.

Also due to its open architecture, reliance on open standards, capability and agility, the open source Knowledge Management

Platform powered by Alfresco Share provided enough flexibility and room for innovation to handle changing requirements and

future needs of the Insurance Company.

The entire solution was conceived using the Open Source Platforming approach advocated and well practiced by InfoAxon. Thus as

a Platform it was easier to think, conceptualize and build new features or experiences using the underlying „content as a service‟

capabilities of the platform.

The Open Source Model also ensured much lower cost base due to „support subscription‟ based costing as opposed to per user

license based model. The open source infrastructure stack consisting of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, MySQL, Apache Tomcat and

number of other open source components further reduced the TCO.

Alfresco Share‟s technology and InfoAxon‟s Open Source „Platforming‟ expertise proved an ideal fit for the Insurance Company as

they not only met the above criteria, but also allowed the Insurance Company to take advantage of the rapid innovation from

InfoAxon‟s R&D and the open source community and avoid proprietary lock-in.

Solution Summary

Dynamic KM Repository

InfoAxon established a centralized knowledge repository within the Insurance Company‟s environment where all the employees

could participate actively, contribute and locate wide range of information about company‟s best practices, SOPs, projects related

information, reports, performance appraisal, DR etc. and that is as simple to use as shared drive but with benefits of sharing,

workflow, auditing and enhanced document security.

Case Study

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Smart Knowledge Spaces

For KM to be effective, department and function specific „knowledge spaces‟ (or „sites‟) were conceived and launched such as

Agency, Operations, Actuarial, IT, Legal, Marketing, Human Resources, Bancassurance knowledge spaces.

Further, knowledge spaces for top business leaders such as CEO, COO, and CTO etc. were created to help them connect and

communicate directly with the organization workforce. A content folder structure as per the type of knowledge space (i.e. business

Taxonomy) to categorize different type of content was also implemented which goes a long way in quickly provisioning a new

knowledge space using the pre-defined knowledge space „Template‟.

These knowledge spaces provided a shared and secure area where employees belonging to a particular department or function

could become members and get connected to the knowledge of entire team. Once member of a particular knowledge space they

could access the team content and collaborate with other team members and share knowledge. In order to promote cross-learning,

a user could become member to multiple „workspaces‟ based on his profile. These knowledge spaces are owned by functional

experts.

Helping in KM Adoption

InfoAxon from its experience as a KM solutions company knew that most of the KM programs fail due to non-adoption by end-users

as they do not find the solution intuitive or helping them contributing in their daily work. Once the technology platform was

finalized, InfoAxon team worked with the Insurance Company stakeholders to create the right „user experience‟.

The entry point to the Knowledge Platform is through user personalized Dashboard which provides a snapshot view of users‟

interaction with the platform in concise and intuitive way and also acts as a gateway to other corporate applications.

The Dashboard could be customized by the users as per personal preferences and business role. The contextual information related

to users‟ interactions is provided in form of various „dashlets‟ which provides a quick view of the consolidated information. Some of

the key „dashlets‟ configured in the platform are:

My Activity Feeds

•Provide real time aggregate feeds of all activities performed in the knowledge spaces to which the user is member of. Such as new document /wiki post/calendar event added.

My Knowledge Spaces

•knowledge spaces user has joined

My Tasks

•Tasks assigned to users either by other members or through automated workflows

My Profile

•Rich user profile with information pulled from LDAP and updated by user

My Documents

•Documents user has added, modified or editing

Case Study

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When the user clicks on any of the knowledge space, the space specific dashboard gets opened. All the above dashlets gets

contextualized as per the knowledge space. For example „My Activity Feeds‟ dashlet in personal dashboard becomes contextualized

to „Knowledge Space Activity Feeds‟ and so on. Apart from dashlets, the knowledge space provides collaborative tools such as

shared calendars, blogs, wikis, discussions forums, user profiles and activity feeds and also social content

management capabilities providing a single content repository to store, manage and collaborate on content with

capabilities such as „library services‟ which provides content storage, check-in, check-out, and versioning, workflows etc.

In order to accommodate customer‟s unique requirements, Alfresco Share was further customized and enhanced to manage:

Different content types such as SOP, best practices, training manuals, performance reviews, DR, New Ideas etc. to help

categorize the content. Admin provided with capability to associate relevant content type with knowledge spaces.

Upload of content with mandatory rich metadata such as content types, functions, sub-functions, impact, KPIs, cross referenced

content, tags, approval date etc.

Identify and alert the user about „duplicate documents‟ at the time of document upload

User and Knowledge Space (Site) Dashboard customization to manage the corporate layout and dashlets. New dashlet

development to accommodate the requirements.

Automated Workflows (specific to Insurance Vertical) leveraging the combination of information pulled from LDAP to decide the

next recipient of workflow tasks and the metadata-type entered during content upload.

Integration with third party enterprise applications such as IBM Lotus Notes, MS Office, HRMS etc.

Rich Drill Down Reports both system-wide as well as knowledge space-wide to provide visibility on the health of the Knowledge

Community, Workflow Status, User dependencies etc.

Being a process driven organization, the customer wanted to automate its content creation and publishing processes and also

maintain the quality of the documents and data. Review, classification, and certification of documents were a part of document

management processes handled through Workflows. InfoAxon customized the Platform‟s workflow engine to pull user hierarchy

information from LDAP server and use this information to automatically assign the workflow task to next person in the customer‟s

corporate hierarchy.

Setting a Metadata Driven Information Architecture

Though this helped bringing standardization, it helped little to capture the value-creating staff contribution so essential in

bringing out the context and knowledge. To handle this, InfoAxon worked with the Insurance Company‟s team to create Rich

Metadata sets which helped manage, execute and integrate the asset with the business process. These rich metadata (such as

user generated Tags, KPI Impacted, Functions, Cross-referenced document etc.) enhanced the content‟s context turning

it into Smart Content which in turn automatically initiates the right workflows and tasks. Some metadata is created automatically

by the software such as author, mime-type, added by, time stamp, version etc., and some is created by the people working with

the asset. The metadata of smart digital assets enable the Insurance Company to manage its processes efficiently,

facilitating staff contribution to create knowledge and add value.

Case Study

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Capturing Tacit Knowledge

One of the ways to capture people‟s knowledge (tacit knowledge) is to capture discussions around content, documents etc. This

was made possible through the „Comments‟ feature which allowed members of the Knowledge Spaces to put their comments or

thoughts on a particular content or document. These „comments‟ then get attached with the document and are available for the

entire team to view. The same applied to the workflows where different users put their comments when it passes through multiple

stages and from one user to the other. These helped in bringing context to the document and retain precious knowledge when

people leave.

To drive „innovation‟ and user participation, it was important to capture employee „ideas‟ and allow these to be shared with other

users. An „Idea Sharing‟ dashlet was developed which allows employees to post their ideas around solving the problems in the

company or improve upon existing processes. Other employees could see these ideas, rate the ideas and even search for ideas that

they could use.

Integration with Corporate IT Systems

With more than 10000+ employees, locating the required talent and expertise proved problematic within the Insurance Company‟s

environment.

To address this issue, „Profile‟ feature of the Knowledge Platform was enhanced further to provide rich and wide range of

information on members and using the links available, the members could then be contacted.

IA integrated the Insurance Company‟s LDAP server (Sun Directory Server) with the Knowledge Platform to fetch corporate

information on employees such as employee name, employment no., department, designation, phone number, email id and also

the business reporting hierarchies such as „reports to‟, „employees reporting to him/her‟. This information was mashed with user

edited information such as job profile, work expertise, experience, qualifications and areas of interest. Additionally, the contextual

information related to the member such as „employee is member of‟, „content contributed by the employee‟ etc. further added to

the richness of information. Further the entire information could be searched based on various parameters detailed above.

Google like Search makes Finding Information Easier

A Google like search (both Basic & Advanced) is now available and provides searching of all type of content within specific

knowledge spaces as well as entire Platform. Employees could search for relevant information using keywords, categories,

enhanced metadata, user generated Tags etc. The search results provides rich information display such as content type (document,

wiki, blog post, calendar event, discussion forum), knowledge space associated with, Tags etc.

Case Study

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Key Differentiators

As partner to the customer’s Knowledge initiative, InfoAxon created several differentiators for the customer. Some Key

differentiators are:

• Smart Digital AssetsContent enhanced through ‘user contribution’ in form of rich metadata supplied either at the time of adding the content or through ‘state change’ during workflow process to bring out context and knowledge. Creation of ‘cross referenced’ rich metadata allowing content to be associated with multiple reference documents.

• Rich Drill Down ReportsInfoAxon enhanced ‘Alfresco Share’ by adding an open source Business Intelligence Framework to churn out rich reports such as:

1. User Participation & Contribution metrics

2. Knowledge Products submission

3. Workflow Status and User dependencies

4. Administrator level Reports

• Smart WorkflowsInfoAxon created Smart Workflows which gets executed based on the corporate hierarchy and the rich metadata contributed by staff.

• Integration with 3rd party corporate applicationsprovided a single gateway to end-users to Enterprise Applications such as:

1. IBM Lotus Notes

2. LDAP (Sun Directory) to authenticate and Pull employee information to create user Profiles

3. MS Exchange Server for email notifications, alerts and documents upload through email

4. MS Office applications (Word, Excel, Powerpoint) through SharePoint Protocol

5. Other corporate productivity applications such as Time Sheet, HRMS, Corporate Intranet

• Collborative Open Source RoadmapInfoAxon works in close collaboration with the customer’s stakeholders to jointly manage the KM Platform’s IT and business roadmap. This involves setting up of development and support environment to allow quick prototyping and delivery of functionalities in production environment. Frequent workshops are held to analyze end user feedback and building on KM agenda.

Case Study

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Solution Architecture & Technology

Case Study

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Knowledge Management Platform stack comprises of:

Value Delivered –

After initial phase of development & implementation, end users are using the KM platform extensively. With increase in its usage,

end users are now participating actively in its promotion and are now raising new and exciting expectations indicating a faster take

up of the service.

Users now demand for enhanced functionalities in the existing KM platform. The KM Platform there is catching on fast as it is

simple to use, quickly locates information and provides a better platform to collaborate with teams and quickly get the work done.

The KM platform is gradually replacing the usage of shared drive and emails for knowledge sharing and collaboration. The customer

has moved from a situation of theoretical KM practices towards a stage of building a KM practice aided by a Knowledge Platform.

Like any other Insurance company, availability and accuracy of content is vital for the customer. Today, a complete workflow

enables review, classification, and certification of documents keeping team members in loop about the status at each step.

Furthermore documents are not just getting approved but also getting rated against a pre defined scale using the inbuilt rating

functionality, which further motivates an employee to participate and collaborate in knowledge creation and sharing.

Our customer was early to recognize the significance of KM for the success of the company. The company leadership is promoting

KM aggressively within the company and even working out a „KM Reward Points‟ system to encourage knowledge submission and it

re-use.

Open Source Stack Components Details

Collaboration & Knowledge Repository Alfresco Share Enterprise 3.4

Database MySQL 5.1

LDAP Sun Directory Server

Backups Hot Backups on Veritas SAN Storage

Web / Application Server Apache Tomcat

Operating System Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6

Case Study

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The benefits arising out of the Knowledge Platform implementation and the resulting KM culture could be summed up as follows:

Knowledge Platform leveraging Open Source Platforming provides our customer with many innovative features and strategic

advantages that otherwise would not have been possible through purchase of any single proprietary software and within their

budgets and timeframes.

Freed up employee time from locating the right content and verifying its accuracy leading to increase in

employee productivity. Reduction in to-and-fro emails to collaborate is further expected to enhance productivity

and reduce costs further.

„Re-inventing the wheel‟ to solve business issues has come down drastically. Instead the Knowledge Platform

promoted Re-use of knowledge assets resulting into improved efficiency. Opportunity cost of lost employee

productivity has been cut-down significantly.

Broken Information Silos. Facilitated cross-learning opportunities among multiple teams leading to new

knowledge creation.

Improved team collaboration, employee connectedness and general staff motivation leading to less attrition.

Prevented loss of organizational knowledge when people leave and encouraged transfer of knowledge to improve

the skills of employees

Initiated an environment of transparency and information sharing leading to capture of „tacit knowledge‟.

Collaborative Working with InfoAxon to leverage open source development model has resulted in:

Faster Innovation

Lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)

Faster Turnaround

Case Study

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Our Customer Showcase

About InfoAxon Technologies

InfoAxon is a leading provider of enterprise services and business

solutions powered by open source. We design, architect and support

complete “Enterprise Solution Platforms” using Open Standards, Web 2.0

next generation technologies and Open Source Frameworks providing

end-to-end solutions to business problems.

India‟s First Global Open Source Integration Company

We are India's First Global Open Source Integration Company providing business solutions in areas of Content & Knowledge Management,

Web2.0 Collaboration and Business Intelligence powered by our

unique open source „Platforming‟ expertise.

Website: www.infoaxon.com | Blog: http://blog.infoaxon.com | E-mail: contactus@infoaxon.com

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INDIA OFFICE:

InfoAxon Technologies Ltd.

H-189, Sector-63,

Electronic City,

NODIA-201307, U.P

India

Phone:+91 120 4350040,

Fax:+ 91 120 4350065

UK OFFICE:

InfoAxon Technologies UK Ltd.

Building A, Trinity Court,

Wokingham Road,

Bracknell, Berkshire RG42 1PL,

United Kingdom

Phone: +44 1344 668048,

Fax: +44 1344 668148