ePeople: New Ware Stems Enterprise Knowledge Loss
01/20/2004
ePeople, Inc., a provider of enterprise software that “enables teams in support, sales, service and development to turn informal interactions into valuable corporate knowledge,” released ePeople Teamwork 5.1.
Without leaving Microsoft Outlook, ePeople Teamwork 5.1 “lets knowledge workers access relevant information, find help from experts, capture knowledge and work in a collaborative fashion with customers and partners that results in faster issue resolution with higher quality and less effort,” ePeople says.
“Designed for companies with high value products, services and customer relationships, ePeople Teamwork 5.1 addresses the core challenge that faces today's enterprise - the fact that sales, support and account management processes are complex and require highly cross-functional teams of people working together,” the vendor continued.
"ePeople Teamwork 5.1 integration with Microsoft Outlook will allow our users to work in a familiar and preferred application with powerful collaboration functionality available at their fingertips," said Ed Shepherdson, Vice President of Support, Cognos. "Integration with Microsoft Outlook will ensure high participation in the collaboration process, not only across our internal and external business, but also proactively with our customers."
According to Gartner's "KM in 2004: Just Part of Doing Business" research report, an enterprise's e-mail system is its most-important communication tool. As much as 75 percent of knowledge sharing is done via e-mail. However, based on Gartner's strategic planning assumption, through 2008, non-management of e-mail will be the major point of enterprise knowledge "leakage" and the major missed opportunity for improved KM (0.6 probability).
"ePeople Teamwork 5.1 supports the way users prefer to work - using email," said Anthony Lye, CEO, ePeople. "By making participation in resolutions effortless, ePeople Teamwork enables companies to exploit the wealth of expert knowledge that exists across organizational, geographic and system boundaries which is essential to resolving business issues more quickly and accurately."
EPeople continued, “E-mail is the defacto standard for collaborating and resolving issues within an enterprise. However, valuable knowledge is lost in folders and archived email threads. Management lacks insight into these interactions with little ability to capture and leverage the knowledge to improve performance. ePeople Teamwork 5.1 overcomes the shortcomings of email by making it trackable, visible and reusable.
“Directly from Microsoft Outlook, ePeople Teamwork 5.1 captures issues. Users can then search for any known solution and if one does not exist, ePeople Teamwork 5.1 assists in identifying key experts from cross enterprise resources based on their knowledge and past experience, minimizing escalations and interruptions. The assembled response team can include experts, employees, customers or partners who collaborate in a shared workspace to resolve the issue. While many users will interact using Microsoft Outlook, ePeople Teamwork 5.1 also supports other devices and interfaces including PCs and handheld devices, the Web, any email appliance and instant messaging.
“ePeople Teamwork 5.1 builds a learning organization by automatically capturing the elements of the solution - the content, people and process - and making the knowledge immediately available for reuse, reducing discovery costs. Rich analytics and reporting capabilities offer valuable insight to this knowledge including the true cost of supporting customers, problem types, and expert workload and capacity.
“With proven adapters to leading CRM and knowledge management systems, ePeople Teamwork processes may be fully integrated with existing enterprise systems to stem the loss of corporate knowledge through e-mail,” the vendor concluded.