PRESS INFORMATION - FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE – 26^th JULY 2004

New partnership unlocks the hidden benefits in enterprise applications through the capture of corporate knowledge

Solass, who provide enterprise applications consultancy to many of the world’s largest organisations, today announced a partnership with Epistemics, a leading developer of knowledge acquisition, modelling and management tools, whereby Solass will use and deploy the Epistemics PC Pack product suite to help organisations achieve more effective and productive use of their corporate applications through understanding and extracting the inherent value within ever increasing volumes of data.

As organisations continue to drive towards global operations and their enterprise applications produce and manage ever larger quantities of data the answers to many business challenges have become increasingly lost in the enormous volumes of data and the knowledge retained within employees, who are now spread far and wide across the organisation.

Critical questions such as: How do the operational activities deliver against the key business objectives? How can I understand in more detail how my business operates? How can I re-use the good things and avoid or fix the bad things? How do people use the systems and processes created by the business? How can I be sure that critical business ‘know how’ is not lost as people move around or I change the systems? - have all become difficult, if not impossible, for many organisations to answer. However, the solutions always lie within the business. The challenge is how to uncover them, capture them and then publish and reuse them.

The true intellectual assets of a business are in its people, who are all experts in some area or another. The biggest issue with people is they often don’t know what they know! In addition to their tacit knowledge, these people work to procedures and processes (whether formal or informal) and produce a multitude of documents (such as word processing, spreadsheets, and presentation and meeting notes). Embedded within this mass of intellectual assets is the know-how of the business and the answers to those questions.

Traditionally, organisations have thought in terms of data and applications. In order to respond to their business challenges, organisations must now think in terms of knowledge. Since this comes in many different forms, any system that is used to capture knowledge needs to have a comprehensive range of tools to extract the different types found within a company, its applications and its employees, along with the flexibility to store such an array. Application vendors will often capture and supply some best practices to an organisation, but these only operate within the scope of the particular application. In reality, this has meant that many applications have become islands. A business is bigger than any one application and therefore the business itself must take ownership of best practices and apply them across multiple domains. 

Solass are the first enterprise consulting company to use the PC Pack suite of knowledge acquisition, modelling and management tools from Epistemics and apply them specifically to those organisations that want to make more effective use of all of their knowledge assets, thereby unlocking new benefits.  

David Bond, Solass Operations Director comments: “We have been helping organisations deploy and integrate enterprise applications for a number of years. It has become clear that without the ability to capture the tacit and explicit knowledge contained in their people and data, the actual benefit those organisations can extract from their systems is limited. The world-leading technologies from Epistemics will enable us to better assist our clients in extracting the enormous latent benefit from the significant investments they have already made.”