*Quick Links: QuickView*
Overview Listing of KM Tools	Tool Description	Addition of Knowledge
Organization of Knowledge	Visualization of Knowledge	Knowledge Retrieval
Usage of Knowledge	Knowledge and Collaboration	Knowledge and Organizational Memory

KM Tools: QuickView

QuickView is a report storage and retrieval system. Its primary purpose is to allow companies to store large amounts of written information (on the order of millions of pages) on laserdiscs in a way that permits people to make use of them over a network. The manual describes it as a "microfilm replacement system"

QuickView has a number of report formats that it knows about, and has the capacity to let users define new report formats. By knowing about the format of the report, QuickView is able to attach meaning to the content so the user can do a search based on it. A user can, for example, search to find only reports on accounts with balances greater than $5000 and with a dormant status.

QuickView requires the user to have an SQL database installed.

Addition of Knowledge

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Any users who have been granted write permission by the administrator can add knowledge to the system. There are three ways a user can do this. They can just paste in the contents of a document, in which case QuickView can only perform simple string matching queries. They can define by hand a set of fields that make up the document and fill in each field. That way, that and other users can do searches based on field name and contents. The user can also use a pre-defined form template.

QuickView comes with a number of templates, provides a mechanism for users to define templates, and the company which sells QuickView will, for a fee, generate a template from a paper copy of the form. Using a template makes searches more useful because the meanings of the fields are standardized. Templates also make it easier for inexperienced users to use the system. In either of the later two methods, some or all fields can be defined as index keys to speed up searches.

Organization of Knowledge

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QuickView organizes the documents it knows about according to date and format. Since the intended use of QuickView is the storage and retrieval of routine reports within a large company, the designers feel that the most common use case is a manager deciding "I want to see all Weekly Earnings/Net Income Statements from January 1997" or something like that. Given that assumption, they organize the knowledge in order to make that search as efficient as possible. By using fields and a database backend, they also allow queries based on specific aspects of the content of document.

A string-matching search engine is also provided.

Visualization of Knowledge

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QuickView has only a fairly primative knowledge visualization capability. Users can browse all document, or all reports meeting the search criteria, in a table sorted by date, document format, size, or any indexable field. At a higher level, users can also look at a table of document types which lists how many documents of that type are in the system for a specifed range of dates. This visualization method is very similar to the details view provided by most GUI file system browsers.

Knowledge Retrieval

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QuickView allows simple string-matching searches, but from a knowledge management standpoint, the most significant method of knowledge retrieval is searching based on the content of specific fields.

As an example, let's think of a bank using QuickView. They have thousands of customers, each of whom have reports generated on them on a daily basis. Reports on account status and balance, credit status, use of the bank's systems, etc. The bank is considering offering a new kind of account which allows customers to both trade stocks and write checks from the same account. They want to know if enough customers would be interested in such an account. They decide that most people who hold and have had checking account balances of over $5,000 within the last three months would probably be interested. They first select Account Status and Balance from the list of document types within the system. Then they do a search for documents within the list where the "Checking Account Balance" field is equal to or greater than $5,000, the "Stock Portfolio Balance" is greater than 0, and the report date if between three months ago and the present. The manage then is greeted with a table of Account Status and Balance reports about customers who would be likely to be interested in the new account type.

Unfortuantly, QuickView's usefulness is rather limited in this example. The manager was only able to get useful information because all the information he was searching on was within a single report. Had the bank kept seperate documents for each account instead of one document per customer per time period, the system would have been completely useless. QuickView does not associate various documents together which share a common value for certain shared fields, such as "Customer Name", nor does it provide a mechanism for searching based on fields within multiple different types of documents.

If we stick to uses closer to the intentions of the developers, we have better luck. QuickView would be an excellent program to use if you wanted to retrieve information on customers who have account balances below the required minimum, or to retrieve all information on a particular customer or account. We only have problems if we try to use QuickView for more complex knowledge extraction.

QuickView has no mechanism for making use of context of usage for knowledge retrieval.

Usage of Knowledge

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N/A

Knowledge and Collaboration

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N/A

Knowledge and Organizational Memory

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The primary purpose of QuickView is a form of organizational memory. The idea is that anything worth saying is written down as a report. Reports are entered into the database. It doesn't matter if there are tens of millions of pages of memos after several decades, because a high-end optical storage server can store billions of pages of text. QuickView hopefully makes searching for the ones you are interested in quick and easy.

As an example, consider a new employee who wonders why he has to go through all the trouble of writing three or four memos a day and then entering them into the database. Rather than hunting down the person who made the decision (which he might end up doing anyway, although not for informational purposes) and finding out that they retired ten years ago and nobody remembers why the decision was made, they can search for memos on the subject of "Memos" or "Knowledge Storage", sorted by date with the oldest first. The employee finds the memos of the original discussions for why the policy was instituted. He can read all the arguments for and against it. Knowing that there is a legitimate reason for a seemingly stupid policy, his morale improves. In the long run, this saves the company a great deal on money it would otherwise spend filling requisitions for resume paper.

Other Issues

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QuickView is meant as a replacement for a physical repository of paper or microfilm documents. As such, it provides much faster searching and access. The field-based search and sorting functions are useful, but there is much room for improvement

QuickView's user interface is annoying. It is ugly, and it relies too heavily on dinky little dialog boxes. These can become quite annoying.

Despite the ameturish GUI, QuickView is quite expensive. Their pricing plan, copied from their website, is as follows:

Basic license (includes the first 5 user licenses)	$2,950
Additional user license	$295
5-pack user license	$1,475
10-pack user license	$2,750
25-pack user license	$6,625
50-pack user license	$11,750
100-pack user license	$17,500
Annual maintenance plan (per user)	$45
Form overlay (each)	$145

Last modified: Thu May 3 09:49:15 PDT 2001