Why EXPRESSway?

In 2010, researchers need a better platform – one that moves them from an overly simple do-it yourself search-engine-like experience to a collaborative and immersive social-network-like experience.  Arity’s EXPRESSway does just that.  It provides access to the RIGHT tools, the RIGHT data, and the RIGHT collaboration strategies for knowledge workers to grow IP.

 

Benefits

 

Dramatically Reduced Time-to-Action

EXPRESSway is an extensible, Web-based platform that

  • combines scholarship, expert collaboration, automated reasoning, evidence gathering, and publishing. 
  • provides fast and easy access to an unprecedented variety of relevant internal and external information, databases, company expertise, project documents and competitor information. 
  • enables more disciplined and comprehensive assessment of data. 
  • uses reasoning by analogy and predictive inference to leverage underlying relationships and improve thoroughness, accuracy and ultimately – quality of judgment. 

 

More Productive Intellectual Property

EXPRESSway:

  • captures the analytic strategies of star performers as “best practice” questions to guide further research.
  • allows the methods and insights of star performers to be available across the enterprise. 
  • researchers’ insights and notes become findable knowledge objects in the system. 

The value of this IP is magnified when a research project extends over months or years, or when different people become responsible. 

 

More Productive Investment in Resources

Swamped in a typical corporate portal, the value of an individual resource is often lost in a sea of data gateways that get reconfigured regularly and leave the user unable to sort through when to use which resource to answer what questions.  EXPRESSway matches the most appropriate resources to your investigative questions.

 

 

 

 

Features

 

Online Notebooks

EXPRESSway  provides integrated notebooks for recording ideas, answers to questions, evidence. Researchers (and EXPRESSway when it makes suggestions) create note cards to hold notes, files, URLs, citations and other media.  Note cards can be easily organized by subjects to facilitate analysis and interpretation. 

 

Suggested Associations and Analogies

Reasoning, inference, and predictive models are used to discover patterns and associations and, then, to provide suggestions to the user.  All suggestions are supported by evidence and rationales that can be viewed by the user and can be accepted or rejected.  New perceptions and strategies emerge.

 

Assembled Knowledge and Resources

Ontologies – representations of objects, concepts, entities, and the relationships between them – are traversed to find relevant and related concepts to focus or extend research.  Multiple ontologies are processed to display facts, concepts, synonyms, and relationships.  With hundreds of important resources (both internal and external) to consider, EXPRESSway takes the researcher, not just to the point of entry, but deep into the Web site, database, or literature – right to the key information.

 

Semantic Mash-ups™

EXPRESSway  creates views that are analogous to pivot tables that are common extensions of numeric data for comparison of selected data within notebooks.  Semantic Mash-up points-of-view can be saved, dynamically updated, and applied to different selected data. Remarkably, Semantic Mash-ups provide insight into both what is known and what is unknown and still to be discovered.

 

Tracking Provenance of Ideas

EXPRESSway automatically collects provenance (the origin of information placed in a notebook) as note cards are created. 

 

Community – The Collaboration Model

The goal of EXPRESSway ’s Collaboration Model facilitates effective individual-team interplay.  Factors considered in adjusting the model to the organization are: information and expertise distribution and flow; individual and team roles, functions, dependencies and synchronization; security requirements; and sponsorship and decision-making authority.  

 

Document Generation

EXPRESSway  can generate draft MS Word and Excel documents from the researcher’s accumulated scholarship.  This e-publish technology is an enormous aid to communicating and sharing insights and backing information.

 

"SPIN" Analysis

 

Situation

  • Highly competitive, volitile, and unforgiving business environment
  • Pressure is especially acute in highly regulated industries, such as pharmaceutical development
  • Huge variances in individual and organizational performance exist, but there seems to be no way to replicate and adopt their winning strategies

 

Problem

  • Hard to manage innovation, discovery, prediction, insight, and understanding
  • Drowning in data, tools, and resources
    • Lost ideas, notes, locations of interesting content,  and trains of thought
    • Hard to locate the right resources and people
    • Hard to collaborate effectively
    • Hard to sift through collected content and formulate ideas and analysis
  • Organizational IP is getting lost
    • Talent walks out the door
    • No systematic way to capture and encourage winning approaches
    • Expensive analyses and reports become stale and outdated quickly

 

Implication

  • Waste: Trouble growing the Top Line, Trouble containing expenses
  • Too many "avoidable" disasters

 

Need

  • Organize
  • Focus
  • Capture
  • Collaborate