IBM Rational Knowledge Community becomes the first IBM internal community to adopt IBM Rational Asset Manager.

The IBM Rational^® Knowledge Community, an internal IBM community, was established to provide an environment where practitioners in IBM Global Business Services can collaborate and learn how best to deploy IBM Rational software solu­tions. It is a place for IBM employees to build their Rational software skills. The Rational Knowledge Community serves an audience of 15,000 end users of Rational tools and manages a repository of over 200 software assets. These assets were previously available in multiple Web-based repositories. In an effort to cut costs and consolidate these important information resources into a single location, the Rational Knowledge Community decided to migrate its assets from the legacy repositories to IBM Rational Asset Manager software.

The challenges faced in this endeavor included the requirement to provide an improved user interface experience, (better searching, documentation, submission, review and approval processes). The Rational Knowledge Community also wanted to implement the taxonomy that had existed in the previous solution. The community needed to control access to these assets, manage user groups and provide community-level metrics.

The community also faced the challenges of migrating its assets from the existing repositories, completing the deployment of Rational Asset Manager in less than three months and then pro­viding training to those that would be using the new repository.

Finding a more effective asset management tool
The Rational Knowledge Community knew that the selection of Rational Asset Manager as the new asset management tool would enable it to realize significant benefits. These benefits would include a significant reduction in the time to publish, harvest and reuse assets, which would in turn drive a 10 percent to 20 percent increase in user productivity when searching and harvesting Rational Knowledge Community assets. Rational Asset Manager also has the advantage of providing each user with a listing of the assets that they have published and own. The Rational solution consolidates assets into a single location, thereby creating cost savings over the multiple databases used by the legacy solution. Rational Asset Manager has excellent feedback capabilities, which add value to end-user assets; these capa­bilities include auto-notifications when assets have been updated, the ability to more quickly locate higher-value assets and the availability of asset-level metrics, such as information about the downloading of a particular asset.

Rational Asset Manager goes live for the Rational Knowledge Community
In April, 2008, the Rational Knowledge Community successfully moved its active assets from the legacy repository to Rational Asset Manager. This effort was undertaken by a cross-functional team comprising individuals from IBM Global Business Services, IBM Rational software and the IBM Software Group. The team was responsible for publishing, documenting, tagging and attaching materials into Rational Asset Manager. The cross-functional team collaborated on the migration and succeeded in completing the entire migration in three weeks, far shorter than the original time constraint of three months.

The benefits of the migration to Rational Asset Manager are numerous. IBM Global Business Services has achieved a significant cost savings totaling more than $50,000 per year. IBM users can now far more effectively manage the use, reuse and governance of their software assets. Users can easily search for and locate assets, get details about them and receive notifications when new assets are added that are relevant to the users. IBM has gained a competitive advantage, since Rational Asset Manager helps strengthen proposals by help­ing to quickly and easily leverage available assets. Approximately 15,000 IBM employees have already joined the Rational Knowledge Community and are now reaping the benefits of the Rational Asset Manager deployment.

Momentum builds for Rational Asset Manager
Inspired by the success of the Rational Asset Manager migration, the IBM Project Management Knowledge Network (comprising IBM project management profes­sionals) decided to deploy Rational Asset Manager for the publishing, harvesting and reuse of its software assets. The Project Management Knowledge Network is the largest professional community in IBM. Because its legacy asset management tool was retired, it was necessary for the community to migrate its asset repository within a strict time constraint. While the Project Management Knowledge Network’s 12,000-member user base was smaller than the Rational Knowledge Community, it had over 2,000 managed software assets. The Project Management Knowledge Network managed to complete its migration from the legacy repository to Rational Asset Manager successfully and in a very short 10-week timeframe.
Consequently, the Project Management Knowledge Network is now enjoying the same cost savings and ease of use delivered by the Rational Asset Manager solution that gives organizations the ability to manage and govern the design, development and consumption of software assets.

The Rational Asset Manager wave continues
Following the rollout of Rational Asset Manager to the Rational Knowledge Community and to the Project Management Knowledge Network community, there has been tremendous interest in the Rational solution across IBM. The Asset Management Team from IBM has encouraged the adoption of Rational Asset Manager as legacy systems are retired, saving IBM an approximate average of $50,000 per community by utilizing fewer resources and limiting the number of asset repositories. Communi­ties large and small, with hundreds or thousands of assets have migrated to Rational Asset Manager after seeing the benefits provided by the solution. Between April and June of 2008, there was a 40 percent increase in the number of communities using Rational Asset Manager, now totaling 38 individual communities. Over 10,000 searches of the more than 7,000 assets in Rational Asset Manager were made by users during the month of June alone; resulting in over 1,800 downloads of assets. It is expected that the number of communities in IBM using the Rational solution to manage their intellectual capital will continue to grow substantially, resulting in signifi­cant cost savings for IBM.

For more information
To learn more about IBM Rational solutions, contact your IBM Business Partner or IBM representative, or visit:
ibm.com/software/rational

To join our Global Rational User Group Community and network with 17,000 worldwide members visit: www.rational-ug.org