Key Findings
- The artificial intelligence capability of Landray’s product is considered as the most noticeable weakness. Other vendors all have strong artificial intelligence service, which is the most acknowledgeable gap between Landray and other vendors.
- Data protection policy compliance are inconsistent since the market of Landray does not focus on U.S. or Europe.
- The integration with production software is weak and cannot help users when reusing content on daily routine.
Introduction
Currently I am working in Landray Corporation, a Chinese company that mostly aims at enterprise collaborative system, knowledge management system, finance system and mobile communication system. Its main products are consisted of BPM, search engine and form engine. During the time in Landray Corporation, I was responsible for implementation of Knowledge Management System (KMS for short in the following chapters), and I have encountered many competitors when assisting sales colleagues to introduce Landray’s products. The main reason of initiating this research is that the revenue share of KMS is decreasing in Landray’s overall revenue, according to Landray internal audit report. The overall revenue from KMS decreased dramatically in 2019 compare to the past few years, and the number of signed contracts also dropped sharply. One additional reason is that the KMS in Landray had not issued a major update since 2018, and it is time for product development team to decide what new features to add and what improvement should they do to improve the product and gain competitive advantage.
Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to compare Landray KMS with its competitors around the world, identify gaps among these vendors, find out what features could Landray learn from them and what steps should Landray do to improve its products.
Currently no similar research was done, because the product research team is focusing in the competitors in Chinese market, but they lack the talents and resources to initiate similar research in global market, especially they have no members who could read and write English fluently. Hence this research was done by the author individually and had no extra support from leaders and colleagues.
At around January 2020, Landray purchased Gartner consulting service to improve themselves in product development methodology, system architecture, system capabilities, competitor analysis, etc. By reading many reports in Gartner database and through inquires with several analyzes, I started this in-depth research based on Gartner’s current report and definition, trying to evaluate and score Landray’s KMS, to see how Landray could improve its products.
The research questions addressed in this study are:
- What market segment does Landray’s KMS match in Gartner’s database?
- How much score could Landray get if using the same evaluation criteria?
- What’s the gap between Landray’s current capabilities and the vendors listed on Gartner’s reports?
- What actions should Landray take to improve its KMS?
Methodology
Since the purpose of this research is to compare Landray with products from other vendors, to find out the gaps between Landray and other vendors and learn from best practice of others, the most matching technology to use is benchmarking technology. Because the goal of benchmarking is simple: to identify the best, study and learn from them, and then implement improvements that could work in their situation based on the learning outcomes (Boxwell, 1994). Benchmarking contains two important things, setting goals by using objective, universally adopted external standards, and learning from others. This research would be achieved by using web-based benchmarking (Griffith, 2006), using data and reports from a third-party consulting firm, Gartner Inc, to help evaluate Landray’s KMS. The goal of this research is to using Gartner’s critical capabilities analysis report as a standard, and to see what Landray could learn from leading vendors in this field.
In the handbook from Camp, R. (1989), he developed a 12-stage approach on benchmarking, which could be used in this research.
- Select subject
- Define the process
- Identify potential partners
- Identify data sources
- Collect data and select all partners
- Determine the gap
- Establish process differences
- Target future performance
- Communicate
- Adjust goal
- Implement
- Review and recalibrate
Combining to current limited resource and support for this research, some stages from above would be skipped or done by using external resources and conclusions. This research would be broken down into the following steps:
- Select comparison subject and identify problem areas. In this research, the main comparison subject is the KMS developed by Landray. Currently the KMS needs to improve and update, because according to Landray internal news and audit report, the sales revenue of KMS is pretty low compared to other products, therefore, the product development team is working on improving this product, but facing difficulties that they do not know what kinds of improvement should they develop, or what features they should add on.
- Determine the gaps between leading players and Landray. Since Gartner has developed complete breakdown analysis on many enterprise software markets, and developed many magic quadrants on those market segments, it is easy to identify the leading players in the same market segments. All vendors that mentioned in Gartner’s magic quadrant are scored in detail, therefore, the author want to use the same questionnaire and criteria to evaluate and to score Landray KMS, to see what score could Landray get under the same criteria, and to find out how much gaps between Landray’s product and other vendors’.
- Best practice analysis of leading players. Data source for this part is consisted of two parts, the breakdown analysis report in Gartner database and other online content such as vendors’ homepage and demo presentation videos.
- Develop future improvement process. According to the emergency priority and gaps between Landray and other vendors, this research would provide a general development plan for Landray to improve its KMS.
Landray’s overall capabilities
Since this study is aiming at making comparison between Landray KMS (Landray Crop, 2020) and other vendors, it is necessary to understand what capabilities could Landray achieved. This chapter introduces the overall capabilities of Landray products, not only limited in KMS, because some features in the KMS are achieved through other applications from other products, thus all knowledge management related capabilities are listed below.
Here are some of Landray’s capabilities, and some of other capabilities that would be mentioned in later chapters:
- Portal management. All Landray’s products are browser-based systems, and it needs to develop an accessing page for users to view information and to handle routine works. The portal management provides accessing entrance for all Landray’s systems, which allow users or administration team to design their own accessing portal. It provides a centralized access place for clients to engage with all enterprise-related functions, such as Email, CRM, news, document center, etc. Information displaying on the portal can be customized based on users’ position and favorite, and in theory it could provide every user with a unique information page by using algorithm to calculate what are users’ favorite content based on users’ previous browsing history. This unique display capability is still under development.
- Process management, also called BPM, is the core of whole Landray platform. Almost every project Landray successfully obtained contains BPM. BPM is a connection service through whole platform, transferring data and information to associated parties by certain criteria, and running processes based-on business rules and logic. It has the capability of integrating with other external systems and takes it as part of business process associated parties. All approval process related to KMS are achieved by processing management application.
- Knowledge management, including knowledge quiz, knowledge map, knowledge warehouse, e-learning, and experts management. These applications assist users to donate and obtain internal knowledge and gain business-related experience through training and learning. It is one of the most important measure to keep knowledge within organization in case of related field specialists and experts resign.
- Mobile instant messaging. Landray provides an instant message application for Android users and iOS users. It seamlessly integrates with Landray platform, receiving notification and providing mobile access capability. However, it is only provided to users with specific requirements since most of time Landray suggests clients to use Alibaba DingTalk as mobile access application. It is because Alibaba has invested Landray from its collaboration app DingTalk (36kr.com, 2018), thus Landray priors to provide DingTalk rather than its own mobile IM apps.
Defining content service platform
According to the market definition from Gartner and comparing to Landray’s goal and visions, the content service platform market segment is the most matching market segment for Landray’s KMS, and competitors from the content service segments have similar capabilities. Therefore, this research would aim at this market segment and find out if Landray could learn from these competitors.
According to Craig R (2020), he considered content service platform as a combination of content collaboration and enterprise content management.
The content service platform is considered as an upgrade application of enterprise file synchronization and sharing system, with the ability to provide collaboration service for individuals and teams, despites of internal users and external users. Its core capabilities include cross devices content accessing, file synchronization and sharing, file search with search engine, permission controls and integration with third-party tools. Content service platform also takes content as a service for routine works, to support business processes and wider digital workplace initiatives, embedded as an integrated system or a separate application via APIs. Core capabilities on content service platform usually includes:
- Integration capability. Since the goal of content service platform is to provide a repository to store files and grant access for different users, users must have one or some applications to access content service platform, therefore integration with existing application or systems becomes an essential capability for nearly all organizations.
- The content service applications, which in other words are the applications that specified for some scenarios. Most seen applications are document management, with version control, permission control, metadata views, etc.; records management, which serves for long-term archiving record files, needs to meet some certified standards for different regions; image-processing applications, like OCR technology, captures copies of scanned documents and submit them for an electronic process; content workflow assigns users to review, audit content to approval business processes like contract approval, leave approval, etc..
- Web content management services is the process of controlling content from a core repository, and then follow up to see whether that specific digital channel delivers successful outcomes or need further updated content. It contains services like content creation with content template, workflows, version management, access control, prepackaged content deliver and personalization for visitors.
Gaps between Landray and market definition
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