BAE Systems – the right information to the right people in real-time

Citation

(2003), "BAE Systems – the right information to the right people in real-time", Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology, Vol. 75 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/aeat.2003.12775eaf.006

BAE Systems – the right information to the right people in real-time

BAE Systems – the right information to the right people in real-time

Keywords: BAE Systems, Knowledge Management, Internet

BAE Systems (formerly British Aerospace) is a systems company, innovating for a safer world. It employs 130,000 people, including Joint Ventures across five continents with more than 110 sites. It has annual sales of around £13 billion. The company offers a global capability in air, sea, land and space with a world-class prime contracting ability supported by a range of key skills. BAE Systems designs, manufactures and supports military aircraft, surface ships, submarines, space systems, radar, avionics, communications, electronics, guided weapon systems and a range of other defence products.

The need

As a large, multi-national company, BAE Systems found that the amount of information available and continuously being added to the corporate intranet was becoming a burden.

What BAE Systems had discovered was that over 80 per cent of networked employees were wasting an average of 30 min a day retrieving information, while 60 per cent were spending an hour or more duplicating the work of others. This is the kind of inefficiency that cannot be ignored, and so began a three- month trial, which would encompass a highly detailed qualitative study costing over £130,000, designed to identify and measure the link between individual, user productivity and information technology. In doing so, the trial discovered the knowledge management solution that would best reduce wasted effort and give more value to the information resources held on their intranet.

In addition, BAE Systems Virtual University wanted a solution to a vexing problem: which technology would enable them to build a self- sustaining culture of learning and continuous improvement right across the company through education, training and research. In meeting this innovative and demanding standard, the technology they choose – Autonomy – also enabled them to identify expertise, visualise and effectively manage these objectives across a community of 35,000 engineers consisting of highly skilled individuals and teams of people working world-wide. Importantly, they wanted to avoid traditional technology approaches that are manually dependant, such as users describing their areas of interest using either a list of predefined keywords or through the filling out of forms – which forgets that experience and interests change with unpredictable frequency.

The solution

The software infrastructure chosen was Autonomy's intelligent data operating layer (IDOL) accessed initially through the Portal-in-a-Box and most recently, the additional deployment of Autonomy's collaboration and expertise networks (CEN) module. Implemented at first in two departments: Corporate Communications and the Virtual University are the enterprises's learning, research and best practice division. Kevin Phillips, Head of Information Systems, said "The trial clearly indicated that Autonomy was head and shoulders above the competition, in terms of the product set up and administration, ease of use and stability."

Autonomy at BAE Systems aggregates content from many sources in many different formats, structured or unstructured, including their intranet and 10,000 news feeds per day. This content is then automatically categorised without the need for any manual intervention, and hyperlinks are inserted to related content, on the fly. This allows employees of BAE Systems to navigate very easily through the site to access pertinent content.

The overriding goal was to personalise the delivery of that information to each user, and to eliminate work duplication and time- consuming searches. Employing people to organise the data was an option, but not an efficient or cost-effective one. BAE Systems concluded that they needed to automate as many of these tasks as possible. Autonomy technology generates real-time user profiles, automatically, based on the pages that users visit and the documents they read.

It automatically alerts BAE Systems' employees to documents in the system that relate to what they are doing, or to other employees in the company whose interests and expertise match their own.

The benefits

Using Autonomy technology, BAE Systems has been able to personalise the delivery of business-critical information to employees across the company, as well as adding significant value to the vast volumes of data held in the company's intranet-based staff development and training centre, the Virtual University.

Reducing time spent retrieving information by over 90 per cent

Autonomy technology allows BAE Systems' employees to make an increased number of informed decisions more of the time, something that companies spend fortunes on management training to achieve.

Sharing of best practices

BAE Systems achieved ROI just 7 months after the initial implementation. Richard West, Head of Organisational and e-learning, said "We discovered engineers working, in different parts of the country, on precisely the same problem – a wing construction issue – but in very different areas, a military aircraft and an airbus. One group took the step to establish best practice, which was transferred to another plant in another geographical location with multi-million pound savings. Tools like Autonomy ensure that this sharing of best practice is more likely, particularly in a global organization."

Ease of maintenance and scalability

Once BAE Systems had decided that Autonomy's technology could sufficiently reduce time spent searching and duplicating effort, they had, it "embedded" into a number of Web site portals, all accessible by BAE Systems 50,000 intranet networked employees, and a continuous measurement process instituted. These included the corporate communications portal, which receives 3-4,000 hits/day; 45,000 on-line courses undertaken yearly; 12,000 hits/day and 176 user sessions/day on their learning and development Web sites where users spend >12 min/day.

BAE Systems is also using Autonomy as the core engine powering their award winning e-learning environment

"Our mandate is to take any person in the business – they come to the Virtual University, and can enter their development needs and career aspirations. We are using Autonomy's profiling, which takes into account their learning profile, location and position within the organisation and will offer them a list of development solutions that they can review with their line managers" said Richard.

But, Richard stresses, e-learning is not just about editorial content – the Virtual University offers access to people, "because what better way of learning than from someone else's experience in the business? How often in an organisation of our size, do you not know what a person is doing on the other side of the factory or office, let alone other side of the country or world. We are using Autonomy to bring people together".

As far as a return on investment is concerned, Richard argues that "if we can provide our people with the right learning at the right-time, whether access to a byte sized piece of learning content, a timely piece of news, a piece of best practice or a person's expertise, in the context of their job- daily-that's going to drive competitiveness".

Two parts of the business were looking at creating a fully on-line comprehensive, accredited Composite material course. The Virtual University was able to alert the two areas of each others work and bring them together to share costs and deliver a far better product.

"We're using our learning environment to make sure that people can do their jobs, and to stop people looking at work and learning as two different things. Integrating learning and work is not a desired luxury it's fundamental to business success."

Details available from: Autonomy (USA). Tel: +1 415 243 9955; Fax: +1 415 243 9981, (UK) Tel: +44 (0) 1223 448000; Fax: +44 (0) 1223 448001.