Consulting firm Zamba Solutions using its Brainz

There is no question who is the brains of the organization at Zamba Solutions.

The consulting firm that helps companies set up customer relationship management software stores everything it knows in a central repository, affectionately called Brainz, that has become a historical reference to all its work and a staging area for servicing new customers.

Zamba is a company finding success with so-called knowledge management, the collecting and indexing of digital information from e-mail to text files. While knowledge management remains a phrase in search of a concrete definition, companies such as Zamba are mining gold from its basic concepts.

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"The key is reuse of information," says Jeff McCall, executive vice president of internal operations for Zamba. "Generating information is all we do. There is no product for a consulting company except the knowledge we have to help our clients. The system captures our best practices and our knowledge and helps us become a learning organization."

The Brainz system has been in place for about eight months and is already paying dividends for Zamba, which has clients including Best Buy, General Mills, Hertz and Progressive Insurance.

McCall says he is not measuring the system's worth in dollars, but in time saved.

He says a project team for a Chicago client was recently able to discover through Brainz that another team was doing a similar project in Silicon Valley. The two could quickly share data, which the Chicago team used to win the deal and jump-start the implementation process.

"Prior to Intraspect, this type of interaction between teams would have developed only through personal knowledge of what other teams were doing around the rest of the country and the world," says McCall. "It wasn't exactly a consistent, scalable model."

Brainz, which is built on Intraspect 4 from Intraspect Software, is a Web-based system that catalogs electronic documents and e-mail into a searchable electronic repository. The repository is built like a file cabinet, with top-level cabinets holding client folders and subfolders. Users can file documents into the folders, building a history of work in progress or completed. They also can send e-mail directly into the folder to capture discussion threads with clients. The results are fully indexed and searchable.

Eventually, clients will be given access to portions of their project folders through use of Intraspect's access control features.

All of Zamba's 300 employees have Brainz as the home page on their browser and can access it from the Internet, a VPN or a dial-up connection. The home page can be customized to include relevant project folders and notifications of changes made to any folder or Web site a user wants to monitor.

The ease of use also extends to IT.

"IT is in charge of making sure it is backed up and so forth, but the end users can run 90% of the system," including setting up new users, McCall says. "We did not want to build a knowledge management group where we had to think about how things were structured, or have full-time people analyzing how the knowledge is managed."

The system is run on Windows NT 4 using one primary and one back-up Dell dual- processor 933-MHz server with 2G bytes of RAM and 18G-byte internal hard drives. Zamba also uses a Dell storage-area network that currently holds 250G bytes of data.

After Zamba built the technical side, McCall says it quickly overcame the culture issues inherent in a knowledge management system, namely getting people to use it.

"As long as it doesn't take me any longer to do it this way, the end users don't have a problem with it," says McCall.

It was that ease of use that led Zamba to choose Intraspect over other products from eRoom, Lotus or Microsoft.

McCall says Zamba offers one- to three-hour training classes and a self-paced training guide to get users up and working quickly. "Actually, people are anxious to do it because frankly it makes their life easier."

And it makes Zamba's life easier as it attempts to grow into a larger organization.

"The three biggest benefits are that we can get employees up to speed quicker; we can react more quickly and more effectively; and on the delivery side, we are learning from successes and mistakes."

And it doesn't take a brain surgeon to figure out the competitive advantages of that.

Consulting firm Zamba Solutions using its Brainz

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