MANAGING THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LIFECYCLE

1. MANAGING THE INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY LIFECYCLE BRYAN L. BELL AND ALLEN L. BROWN, JR. Knowledge Technologies 2001

2. Allen L. Brown, Jr., Ph.D. • Dr. Allen L. Brown, Jr. has been architecting and implementing enterprise client/server product software for more than two decades, beginning with the landmark Xerox Star. • Most recently, Dr. Brown was CTO and co-founder of Media Guaranty, a venture-backed software startup focused on providing enterprise media asset management for corporate marketing. • He is the author of numerous published technical papers and the holder of several U.S. patents. • Allen is currently Senior Product Manager, Webplications, Microsoft Corporation.

3. Allen L. Brown, Jr., Ph.D. • Dr. Brown has played a number of roles in research and development in information technology including time spent as a Xerox Research Fellow and as Vice President and CTO of Xerox’s XSoft division. • Both his undergraduate and doctoral degrees were earned at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr. Brown has been a James Clark Welling Professor at the George Washington University, and has served on the National Research Council NIST Panel on Information Technology.

4. Bryan L. Bell • Bryan Bell is president and founder of Synth-Bank, LLC. He was a pioneer in the convergence of the telecommunication and entertainment industries developing an on-line distribution system for intellectual property in 1979. His early work in multi-vendor hardware interface for music paved the way for the software standard today known as MIDI. Bryan's articles appear in numerous industry periodicals. Over the last 20 years, his clientele has included some of the biggest names in the entertainment industry. • 1994-2000, Bryan has worked as the Strategic Technologist for the Frank Russell Company where he is responsible for long-term technology planning, vendor relationships, and advanced technology research.

5. Bryan L. Bell • Bryan’s recent projects: Experience Music Project, FlightSafety/Boeing Catalog, Halbert, Hargrove/Russell • Bryan's Affiliations include: DIS, Harvard University Graduate School of Business Administration, BS in Engineering, Honorary Universidad Francisco Marroquin Guatemala C.A., member National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, member CWA / NABET, member of Board of Directors for Bridge School, Gold and Platinum Awards for Engineering and Sound Design, Xerox Advisory Council, Advisory Board Member International Glass Museum, member W3C, member OASIS.

6. Overview • Intellectual property as a business asset • Intellectual property lifecycle management • Frank Russell experiences • Universal experiences • Knowledge Management Architectures • Conclusions

7. Intellectual Property as a Business Asset • We believe that intellectual property (IP) is the single most important business asset. As with every other business asset, it is incumbent upon management to husband these assets in such as way as to maximize their return to the business. Indeed, to do so is the essence of management. • For example, the dramatic difference is a company’s “market value” versus its “book value”. • Consequently, it must be recognized that intellectual property has a lifecycle that must be explicitly managed. While particulars may vary, the lifecycle in question is universal across businesses. Happily, then, any information technology based solution to managing intellectual property will have universal applicability.

8. The UniversalBusiness Problems • Guarantee information timeliness • Guarantee information consistency • Guarantee information integrity

9. Managing IP as an Asset • Intellectual property is an idea that is perceived as valuable and has a tangible representation. • There is a tendency to equate IP with content in a document-centric world. • A business process or workflow, when explicitly represented, is itself an instance of intellectual property. • This suggests that IP can be both content-centric and process-centric.

10. Evolving Business And Market • Part of the business' state is a reflection of its assessment of its markets. • Many of its processes are contrived so as to serve those markets. • The structure of the business is optimized to execute its processes.

11. Categories of Enterprise • Every enterprise produces intellectual property. The production of intellectual property by an enterprise is usually to one or more of three ends: • The intellectual property documents the processes that enable and uniquely advantage the enterprise. • The intellectual property documents the enterprise's actual product having unique advantages in the market place. • The intellectual property is the enterprise's product.

12. Information technology • Enables us to replace human labor with computer labor. • Enables us to replace socially mediated processes with computationally mediated ones. • Makes it possible to structure businesses and business processes in ways that would simply be impossible without that technology. • Provides the most powerful tools available for managing the intellectual property lifecycle.

13. Managing Intellectual Property as Documents • Documents provide the traditional tangible representation-the long-term memory-of the business' state, structure and processes. • Virtually everything that the business knows is reflected in its documents. • This suggests that a business can be managed only as well as its documents. • The advent of electronic documents has enabled us to produce many more documents, of increased complexity, and greater currency than was formerly the case.

14. Managing Intellectual Property as Documents • This electronic document revolution makes it possible to render explicit and dynamic many things about businesses that were formerly implicit and static. • The knowledge that these documents embody is the business' primary intellectual property. • This same document explosion also creates a management problem. • The documents are only as good as the accuracy, currency and availability of the knowledge that they embody.

15. Intellectual Property Requirements • Reuse • Consistency of message • Presentation over multiple media channels

16. Managing Intellectual Property Is Universal • Creation - explicit representation, iterative mutation, review, and regulatory compliant. • Assembly & Distribution - to be useful, the intellectual property must reach the hands of its intended users. • Archive - for recovery at some future date. • Within and between these various phases resources and processes must be managed.

17. Intellectual Property Lifecycle Management • Every enterprise creates intellectual property. • Military, financial, manufacturing, entertainment, etc. • The life cycle of intellectual property is essentially independent of the nature of the enterprise. • Successful enterprises, of necessity, must take advantage of their intellectual property. • The degree of advantage gained from the enterprise's intellectual property is often a matter of how well that material is managed.

18. Intellectual Property Lifecycle • Authoring • Assembly • Distribution • Archiving

19. Technology Constraints • Scope of repository • Scope of standards • Variety of platforms • Portability • Resource constraints

20. Frank Russell • Our mission at the Frank Russell Company is to “improve financial security for people”. • We don't build trucks -- we only do IP. • We do so by creating intellectual property about financial marketplaces and financial assets. • At the Frank Russell Company, our primary product - in a very real sense, our only product - is IP. In essence our transactional activities are vehicles for capitalizing on the value-add implicit in our IP. • The reason people purchase our funds is because they believe that they are "smarter" funds by virtue of the more sophisticated asset management solutions enjoyed by those funds.

21. Frank Russell • The Frank Russell Company's value adding processes of gathering, authoring, structuring, opining, and distributing information about financial marketplaces and financial assets can be viewed as an intensively managed additional particularization of the generic IP lifecycle. • FRC's opining and structuring can be viewed as the process of lifting business data to business information, business information to business knowledge, and business knowledge to business consciousness. • Each lifting stage results in improved net business value and each stage corresponds to an actual FRC business.

22. Hierarchy of Content-centric Business IP • Data + Metadata = Business Information • Information + Metainformation = Business Knowledge • Knowledge + Metaknowledge = Business Consciousness • Structuring, using and deciding are business processes. In well-managed businesses these processes are explicitly represented. Looked at in the context of this hierarchy, we see that the workflow documenting the intellectual property lifecycle counts as metaknowledge.

23. Business Information

24. Business Knowledge

25. Business Consciousness

26. Frank Russell • Reuse over multiple channels is compelled • Multiplicity • Regulatory constraints • Multiplicity and our customers • Markets of one • One of the exciting promises of the rapidly evolving information and communications technologies is that the same extraordinary level of service that we have historically dedicated to a relatively few institutional clients can be potentially provided to millions of individuals.

27. Frank Russell • Inputs • Manager research • Managing asset managers • Client intimacy • Intellectual property development • Historically, the main embodiment of intellectual property at FRC has been printed documents. Although electronically originated, these documents have usually been distributed in paper form. While this particular medium and channel will remain important for the foreseeable future, other media, e.g. video, and other channels, e.g. the Web, will acquire ever more prominent roles.

28. “Change” as a part of the FRC business problem. • Organizational constraints • Multiple sources • Multiple sinks • The customer of the complete solution is the FRC management.

29. Developing the Solution • Our engineering technique is acquisitive and incremental. • Build systems having open interfaces between each module of the production process. • Limit the document representation formats to two: PDF for distribution and archival and SGML/XML for authoring and assembly. • We moved from the old process of print then distribute to the new process of distribute then print. We moved from a regime in which we applied quality control to the finished product to one where we applied quality control to the components.

30. The Horizontal Architecture • HORIZONTAL ARCHITECTURE

31. The Vertical Architecture

32. Standards and interoperability • ODBC/JDBC/SQL. • Once the DMA and WfMC standards mature to the point where they can handle our repository interoperability needs and can provide sufficiently flexible workflow to tie together the various horizontal partitions, we intend to also make use of them. • Unified UI/web browser • While we currently make use of the native interfaces of various authoring and access tools, we are moving towards a unified Web browser-based interface.

33. Frank Russell • In-house experience • Field experience and FRC customer experience • FRC has many customers within the US Fortune 1000 and Global 200 leading companies. • The Russell Publishing System, though a very narrowly designed application for FRC, is based upon universal principles that are a real part of any major enterprise, and that a system similar to it can benefit most businesses.

34. Conclusion • The nature of intellectual property • The singular importance of intellectual property to every enterprise • The universality of the problem of managing intellectual property throughout its lifecycle • The impediments to solving this problem common to all enterprises, and • The architectural principles leading to robust information technology implementations of the solution • In the course of devising a practical solution to the Frank Russell Company's intellectual property management problem, we have made generic discoveries about:

35. Conclusion • These universal characteristics have, in turn, greatly informed our solution to the problem of managing the evolving intellectual property at the heart of the Frank Russell Company's business. • This solution is robust in the face of ever changing off the shelf information technology, while taking into account the infrastructure and organizational challenges that are unique to the Frank Russell Company. • We achieve this by making use of a horizontal architecture that allows us to replace technology on a component-by-component basis, and of a vertical architecture that is tuned to the particulars of the Frank Russell Company's intellectual property, organizational structure, and environment.

36. Questions • Thank you for your attention.