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Managing the Intellectual Property Lifecycle

Bryan L. Bell

Strategic Technologist

Frank Russell Company Synth-Bank, Inc. 909 A Street
Tacoma Washington 98402-5120 USA
Email: bbell@synthbank.com Web: www.synthbank.com
Phone: +01 253 594 1810
Fax: +01 253 594 1814

Biographical notice:

Bryan is president and founder of Synth-Bank, a consulting practice focusing on architecture, custom solutions, and system integration. 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.

Brown, Jr., Ph.D., Allen L.

Microsoft Corporation

USA

Currently Bryan is working as the Strategic Technologist for the Frank Russell Company, where he is responsible for long-term technology planning, vendor relationships, strategic partnerships, and advanced technology research.

Allen L. Brown, Jr., Ph.D.

Senior Program Manager

Microsoft Corporation USA
Email: abrown@alink.net

Biographical notice:

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. 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. He is the author of numerous published technical papers and the holder of several U.S. patents. 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.

ABSTRACT:

While an enterprise mayappear to be in the manufacturing business, the financial services business, the telecommunications business, orwhatever business, it'sreal business is the production and management of intellectual property. Consequently, the management of such property entails a business problem that universally challenges such enterprises. In this report we describe the universal problem, the particular variant that we have at the Frank Russell Company (FRC), our solution to that problem, and our experiences with developing and deploying the solution. Needless to say, we believe that the story that we tell here has lessons for many if not most enterprises.

Introduction

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.

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.

What, then, is the intellectual property lifecycle? That lifecycle consists of four phases:

Authoring
Assembly
Distribution
Archiving

It is important that we establish a sufficiently broad perspective on IP. While it is not our mission here to give a precise definition to intellectual property, we need to establish such a perspective before turning to the subject of managing IP as an asset. Intellectual property is an idea that is perceived asvaluable and has a tangiblerepresentation . One traditional tangible representation of intellectual property is the document. Indeed, the canonical representation of intellectual property of this sort is thepatent . Because of the traditional identification of intellectual property with document-like artifacts, there is a tendency to equate IP with content. That IP might be something other than content is seen by a more careful examination of the IP lifecycle. Thus far we have enumerated phases in the intellectual property lifecycle with no particular attention paid to the flows among those phases. That business process orworkflow , when explicitly represented, is itself an instance of intellectual property which is subject to management. This suggests that IP can be bothcontent -centric andprocess -centric. How can these two forms of IP be related?

We believe that there is ahierarchy of content-centric business IP which, in ascending order, is businessdata (numbers, text, images,etc. ), business information , businessknowledge , and businessconsciousness . When metadata is associated with business data in such a way as to explicitly indicate the structure of the latter, we get business information. When metainformation is associated with business information to explicitly indicate how the latter is used , we get business knowledge. Lastly, when metaknowledge is associated with business knowledge to explicitly indicate how business questions aredecided , we get business consciousness. Structuring ,using anddeciding 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 asmetaknowledge .

Having now laid out our classification scheme for business IP and the lifecycle through which all such property passes, we are ready to confront the details of managing that lifecycle.

The Business Process

Universals

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 theprocesses that enable and uniquely advantage the enterprise.
The intellectual propertydocuments the enterprise's actualproduct having unique advantages in the market place.
The intellectual propertyis the enterprise'sproduct .

Evolving Business and Market

Like any living organism, a business is constantly evolving. Defined by its state, structure, and processes, a business' evolution is reflected in the change of some or all of these abstractions. One of the principal forces driving the evolution of a business is the evolution of the market or markets that it serves:

Part of the business' state is a reflection of its assessment of its markets.
Many of itsprocesses are contrived so as to serve those markets.
Thestructure of the business is optimized to execute its processes.

Technology, and, more specifically, information technology, of course, can also be a driver of business evolution. Information technology enables us to replace human labor with computer labor. Information technology enables us to replace socially mediated processes with computationally mediated ones. Information technology, in fact, makes it possible to structure businesses and business processes in ways that would simply be impossible without that technology. Risking belaboring the obvious, information technology provides the most powerful tools available for managing the intellectual property lifecycle.

Corresponding Evolving Intellectual Property

Documents provide the traditional tangible representation—the long-term memory—of the business' state, structure and processes. Put otherwise, virtually everything that the businessknows 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. This electronic document revolution makes it possible to renderexplicit and dynamic many things about businesses that were formerlyimplicit and static . The knowledge that these documents embody is the business' primary intellectual property. This same document explosion also creates amanagement problem. The documents are only as good as the accuracy, currency and availability of the knowledge that they embody.

Reuse

Intellectual property, especially as it is embodied in documents, can often be reused in multiple (other) documents. Indeed, for some forms of intellectual property, the value of that property is in direct proportion to its degree of reuse. This suggests that one of the most important things that we can do for document-embedded information, in addition to making it readily accessible, is to make itreusable . Another aspect of the value of reused information is that if we reused it, we did notrecreate it.

Consistency of Message

The same information will often have many different audiences. Thus, the information may be embodied in different documents, each document attuned to the needs of a particular audience. It is critical that all the embodiments of the message be consistent. In fact, reuse is a powerful tool for achieving and enforcing this end.

Presentation Over Multiple Media Channels

Not only might information have multiple embodiments, those embodiments might also be delivered over different channels such as print, audio, or video. This offers another reuse opportunity—and challenge. The challenge arises out of the matter of consistency. Certain kinds of information may be more easilypresented through one channel than through another. A classic example of this is found in tables. A table has itsinformation and presentation aspects so intimately intertwined as to make the two aspects difficult to tear apart for presentation of the information through a different channel.

Frank Russell Particulars

We Don't Build Trucks/We Only Do IP

Our mission at the Frank Russell Company is to improve financial security for people. 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.

Our IP has historically taken the form of paper documents which have become ever more electronically enabled at various points in the IP lifecycle (specialized to documents). Furthermore, 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. Recalling the intellectual property hierarchy that we introduced earlier, FRC's opining and structuring can be viewed as the process oflifting 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.

Reuse Over Multiple Channels Is Compelled

FRC has three distinct sorts of customers for its intellectual property and associated information services: individual investors, institutional investors, and information resellers. The first two make use of the intellectual property directly to inform their own decisions. The last resell the intellectual property to others often combined with their own specialized intellectual property or services. The mere fact that there are these very different customer types suggests a need for different delivery channels for the intellectual property.

Multiplicity

The characterization just given of FRC's clientele distinguishes direct and indirect sales from individual and institutional customers. There are other distinctions as can be seen by answering the following questions: In what language is the information to be delivered? About what class(es) of financial asset(s) is the information? What markets must the information cover? What are thelocal regulatory constraints imposed on the information withglobal distribution?

Regulatory Constraints

The last question has a notably significant aspect for FRC. The particular intellectual property that we promulgate concerns--directly or indirectly--financial assets and markets. Such assets and markets are highly regulated by multiple jurisdictions. Thus, information delivered by FRC may be constrained by regulations at the information source, at the information destination, or, perhaps based on the locale of the financial market, constrained by the information itself.

Multiplicity and Our Customers

Many of FRC's institutional customers and resellers have the same impacts of multiplicity that we do. Thus, any business problem that might arise for us out of such multiplicity will arise for them as well. It immediately follows that any solution that we deploy to address these problems can be deployed on behalf of our institutional and reselling customers.

Markets Of One

One of the exciting promises of the rapidly evolving information and communications technologies is that the same extraordinary level ofservice that we have historically dedicated to a relativelyfew institutional clients can be potentially provided tomillions of individuals. While FRC has had for some time aunidirectional flow of information to millions of individuals, making them individual clients entails abi-directional flow of information.

The Business Problem

Universals

We have hinted at many business problems in the foregoing discussion. Here we will make those problems explicit, specifically highlighting how they impinge upon managing intellectual property through its full lifecycle.

Guarantee Information Timeliness

Most intellectual property has a finite lifetime, or at least decreases in value with time. Thus the business value not only arises fromhaving the information encapsulated in that property, but alsomaking use of it when it is most valuable. Thus the challenge to a business is not only todevelop intellectual property as quickly as possible, but also todeploy it as quickly as possible.

Guarantee Information Consistency

An intellectual property "product" is often a complex web of interwoven information components. Links between components arise out of the logical relationships between those components. Individual components may have variability governed by the multiplicity described above. Moreover, individual components may also evolve over time. This says that we must be careful that the components woven into this web of relationships are logicallyconsistent . Having related information components valid in mutually exclusive regulatory jurisdictions is probablyinconsistent across those jurisdictions. Having information components that are valid at different times is probablyinconsistent across those times. Maintaining consistency across multiple environments, therefore, is a major challenge.

Guarantee Information Integrity

Information inconsistency, more likely than not, arises from errors of specification. Inconsistency can also arise both from misfortune and from malice. Hardware failures, user input errors, and unexpected exhaustion of resources can all cause information to become inconsistent. Inconsistency may also arise from malicious action leading to the loss or mutation of information. We must guard against all of thesehazards . Failure to do so results in a loss ofintegrity in the information.

Phases of the Intellectual Property Lifecycle

As already remarked upon, intellectual property passes through a number of phases. These phases are characterized bywhat is happening to the intellectual property andwho is doing it. Intellectual property needs to be created in the first place, and in a very real sense it does not exist until it is explicitly represented. The creation process is likely iterative, and thus goes through multiple cycles of mutation and review. In many situations with regulatory constraints, there may be a specializedcompliance review to assure that those constraints are actually honored. Since an intellectual property product may actually consist of multiple components, those components must be configured and assembled. Indeed once such an assembly occurs, editing, review and compliance may need to be revisited. To be useful, the intellectual property must reach the hands of its intended users. Finally, when the intellectual property's useful life is deemed to be over, it may have to be archived for recovery at some future date. Within and between these various phases resources and processes must be managed.

Managing Intellectual Property is Universal

We have already claimed, of course, that every enterprise creates intellectual property. This is true of financial services institutions, it is true of military organizations, it is true of law enforcement agencies, it is true of makers of high technology artifacts, it is true of advertising agencies, it is true of the entertainment industry,etc . Moreover 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 ismanaged .

Frank Russell Particulars

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. These changes are part of the FRC business problem.

Inputs

As is true of every "manufacturer", the FRC intellectual property manufacturing process has certain "raw" inputs. There is "published" information such as the quarterly reports of publicly traded companies. There is "unpublished" information harvested through FRC's extensive intelligence gathering network. There is client-specific information such as the client interest profiles, the log of information historically reported to the client, the client's asset performance information, correlations of the clients' asset performance with previous information reported to the client,etc .

Manager Research

While the bulk of thedata involved in the intellectual property developed by FRC is about individual financial assets, the bulk of theinformation is about the managers of those assets. When a pension fund is contemplating committing some of its resources to a particular asset fund, the pension fund manager, in effect, wants to have amodel of the asset fund manager. Such a model is developed based on objective historical data, objective theories of portfolio management, and subjective intangibles. With such a model in hand FRC and FRC's clients can make informed decisions about various asset fund managers. FRC pioneered the formalization of manager research in the late 1960's and continues to be one of the world leaders in this activity.

Managing Asset Managers

Asset managers are both the topics (subjects) and recipients (objects) of FRC intellectual property. FRC, naturally, wants to improve the client's performance with respect to managing his asset portfolio(s). In order to do so, there must be some basis for diagnosing the client's current performance It does not suffice to treat the client as a black box having only inputs and outputs. Successful diagnosis requires knowing what is happening inside the box. Such diagnosis is enabled by having models of asset managers both as objects and subjects. FRC explicitly exploits the hierarchy of business IP that we noted in our introduction. Specifically, we lift business data concerning assets and asset management to business information, to business knowledge. In so doing, we realize the "Multi-Style, Multi-Manager, Multi-Asset Class" formulation of an asset portfolio. This formulation is the cornerstone of many modern mutual funds.

Client Intimacy

From the discussion above it should be apparent that FRC requires an immense knowledge base about individual customers. While this knowledge base may not explicitly appear as intellectual property that is distributed, it is implicitly entangled in the same information web as the explicitly distributed material. Consequently, this information passes through every phase of the intellectual property life cycle with the possible exception of distribution.

Intellectual Property Development

The Intellectual Property and Research (IP&R) Group at FRC develops and refines sophisticated IP specific to financial services. This IP includes the extremely powerful Asset Allocation software modeling tools that are capable of modeling complex investment portfolio performances. These performance models consist of multiple investment classes over multiple time periods. These tools can be seen as taking in business data and producing business information. FRC is known globally as a leader in the creation of such tools and the methods ofpresenting the resulting information in a readily acceptable format. Along with models, tools and comprehensive research this group also provides intensive analytical capabilities which are published in the form ofcommentary about market environments, asset segments and fund performance and portfolio performance. IP&R can be seen as a complex workflow—an intellectual property in its own right--in which some of the tasks are human-mediated while others are computer-mediated. This workflow is constantly evolving and probably presents the greatest challenge to lifecycle management.

Organizational Constraints

Multiple Sources

Within FRC, the "sources" of the information components that go into the development of intellectual property are as diverse as the organizations that make up FRC. The immediate consequence of this is that the ownership of individual information components resides with the originating organization. Since an intellectual property is composed of many components, no organization can be responsible for the entire life cycle. This necessitates asocially distributed solution to managing the life cycle.

Multiple Sinks

The "sinks" for FRC intellectual property in its various forms are even more varied than the sources. We have already described the variety associated with FRC's clientele. But there are also internal as well as external customers for these products. Creators, reviewers, archivists, sales personnel, marketing personnel, and clients each have different needs. None of their needs spans the entire solution. The customer of the complete solution is the FRC Management.

Technology Constraints

Scope of Repository

As we shall shortly see, each phase of the intellectual property life cycle requires persistent storage—a "repository". Each of these phases has a somewhat different set of characteristics: granularity of object, granularity of access control, frequency of access, frequency of update,etc . Currently available repository technologies do not have sufficient elasticity to accommodate the wide range of needs. To some degree this shortfall is due to the narrowness of focus of available repository products, to some degree it is due to the technical difficulty of achieving such a broad solution.

Scope of Standards

There is neither a single standard nor a small set of standards that could be the basis for covering the entire solution. Standards tend to codify that which already has been done. Since there is no repository with a broad enough scope to address all of the characteristics that we described above, there is similarly no standard to which repository solutions might adhere. While thereare standards covering each component of a complete solution, the problem with existing standards is the graceful bridging of the boundaries between components.

Variety of Platforms

The different constituencies that historically own the various components of the intellectual property to be assembled, and that supply the infrastructure to the owning organizations voice a variety of platform needs, some perceived, some real. Whatever the case, for the time being these constituencies must be honored, whether they favor Mac or Wintel platforms for authoring, or whether they favor NT or AIX platforms as servers.

Portability

Because weknow that the hardware and software platforms will evolve, we wish to make ourselves as immune as possible to that evolution. As much as possible, we strive for Java based applications, TCP/IP networking, ODBC/JDBC/SQL access to databases, XML/ SGML /HTML for representing componentized intellectual property,etc . As other standards evolve that address parts of the problem in a vendor-neutral fashion, we will inevitably adopt them.

Resource Constraints

The solution must be realizable within the current organizational constraints, both structural and personnel. Neither new organization nor reorganization is part of the solution. While we are free to upgrade the skills of current staff or replace the current staff with staff of different skills, we must continue to deliver traditional services while positioning ourselves to provide new ones.

The Solution Architecture

The solution that we have developed can be viewed as having both a horizontal (universal to all IP management problems) architecture and a vertical (particular to FRC) architecture. The horizontal architecture is reasonably robust in the face of evolving information technology and business needs. The vertical architecture is more sensitive to such developments. Below we will first give an overall description from each of these perspectives, and then we will turn to a more detailed description from the perspective of the vertical architecture.

Horizontal Architecture

Vertical Architecture

A universal architecture for systems to manage intellectual property consists of three tiers: back-end (persistent) storage, middleware services and front-end applications. Access tools include functions like querying, library services include functions like check-in/check-out and version control, and document services include functions like document assembly. Workflow services manage the specifications and execution of computer-mediated business processes. The intellectual property "repository" is a combination of the content store and the DBMS.

We provide the complete solution through a "circus" of three interlocking "rings" and one "sideshow". The rings, roughly speaking, address document assembly, document distribution and document archiving. Off to the side we have a largely independent information component authoring system. We currently have reasonably complete implementations of each of the rings, the most mature being the document assembly ring. The principal unimplemented facet of the solution is the workflow that binds each of the components into a seamless (from both the individual user's and the organization's points of view) system. Because of that, explicit programming is done to move the intellectual property between the repositories associated with the various horizontal partitions.

Sideshow

The sideshow is devoted to the management of intellectual property components at a very fine grain of detail. The grains are the individual information units. It is also here that the schema for a complete intellectual property is specified. Both the overall structure and the individual components are under version and access control. The conceptual glue that holds all of this together is SGML/XML The authoring is carried out through a combination of SGML/XML editing and content-specific editing of individual components. The authoring and access are integrated into a single Web browser-based user interface. In this architectural partition the content store and DBMS are a unified persistent (object) storage system.

Ring 1

This vertical partition of the architecture has primary responsibility for intellectual property "manufacture". The components are first called up via database query to be marshaled on the assembly line.

Ring 2

Then the disparate intellectual property components are (re-)assembled according to criteria specified by the schemas originating in the sideshow. In addition to the meta-data associated with the components and the abstract assembly structure, client-specific meta-data may also be attached. It is also here that formatting of the document takes place. In addition to imposing the traditional formatting specifications as indicated by styles, the actual encoding of the document must be adapted to the particular delivery channel. Specifically, documents destined for the Web must be cast in HTML, XML or PDF.

Ring 3

This ring mediates actual distribution. Documents may be pushed out to prescribed recipients, at prescribed times, in prescribed formats. Alternatively, documents may bepulled out by individual clients. Whether pushed or pulled, documents arejust in time assembled. Hence, they are guaranteed to be current and consistent. Whether pushed or pulled, the document transaction is subjected to access controls and auditing.

Ring 4

This ring handles the memorialization of the document. The document is archived to a suitable form of long-term storage along with its audit trail and original access control information. In addition to retaining the document, we also retain the query that constructed it. In later times, this allows us to construct the then current equivalent of the same document for comparison or other purposes. It is in this ring that compliance-checking criteria are applied. If the criteria are mechanically specified, they are also archived with the document.

Standards and Interoperability

As we mentioned earlier there are neither systems nor standards that span the entire solution. Nonetheless, we make aggressive use of the standards that do exist to maximize the portability of our implementation. We have already mentioned our use of SGML/XML. We make extensive use of Internet protocols. We access the database via 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. One motivation for this is, of course, the portability for which we constantly strive. The other is that such interfaces are becoming thelingua franca for all users. Thus, from the users' point of view this will allow us to house the very broad functionality of our system under a single roof.

Using the Solution

Developer Experience

Since we could not buy the solution we needed (which we would have preferred to do), we have had to build it. Our engineering technique isacquisitive and incremental . As new technology components that can replace and improve upon our homegrown solutions become available, we incorporate them. At the same time that we are incorporating new technology, we are broadening the system's functionality. Indeed, the purpose of incorporating the technology is to make just such improvements. Each time we take such an incremental step, we not only retest (to guarantee system reliability), but also re-evaluate to make sure that the latest "improvement" really is such. Thus far, we have managed to take only forward steps.

The strategy for the development was very simple. Start with the finished product in mind and build systems having open interfaces between each module of the production process. Our production process ends with archival of a paper and electronic documents. We decided to limit the document representation formats to two: PDF for distribution andarchival and SGML/XML forauthoring andassembly . Naturally we accommodate other source materials from popular desktop authoring tools, but we convert them into our primary formats for automation.

Our research and development included two paradigm shifts for the business process. We moved from the old process ofprint then distribute to the new process ofdistribute 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. The former move allows us to leverage IT advances such as web delivery and new cheaper desktop and production printing to reduce cycle time and increase customer intimacy. The latter move makes it possible to have "golden master components" which can then assemble a multitude of different products of guaranteed quality, thereby allowing the leverage of automated assembly.

As we successfully completed each stage of our development, we simply "dropped" the new piece of the solution into the production environment. We are in a mode of continual improvement. We are able to allow extremely smooth transitions from earlier versions of the system to later versions of the systems because the workflow and user interfaces become simpler and more streamlined as we progress and reach more portions of the lifecycle. For example we started by creating a web-based PDF document repository for the distribution and archival of the components. Then we added an SGML/XML process to author chapters in the books to create the PDF files. Then we added a UI to facilitate the automated assembly of the books. Then we added an automated charting tool to simplify the graphics process. Then we added an automated individual account formatter to create client chapters.

In-house Experience

When we started the pilot project for the system, the benchmark for book production after all components were ready was several weeks. In fact one independently researched workflow study found one part of the process which was draft printed 61 times before approval. Our current system allows creation and auto checkin, producing books in less than 8 minutes! It requires no draft printing, is Web-based which allows instant distribution to anywhere in the world, and has been in successful production for 5 quarters. The second production group has used the system for 1 quarter and several new groups are being scheduled for study in 98 and production deployment in 99.

Field Experience and FRC Customer Experience

As yet, we have broadly deployed neither within FRC, nor without to the various FRC customers who are interested in making use of our system. The demand is so great we have had to create a process to manage the prioritization of requests for deployment. Hopefully, in our next report, we will be able to comment on our experiences using a much broader base. The current production system is in deployment only at the Tacoma Global Headquarters facility. Several North American branch offices are already realizing the benefits of the improved quality, accuracy and timeliness of the system. A version of our 3 Ring system is currently being used to support our extranet web site for a complete channel of our clients.

FRC has many customers within the US Fortune 1000 and Global 200 leading companies. Several of FRC's customers and vendors have visited our facilities and mentioned that a system similar to this would be useful for their enterprises. This reinforces our belief that 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.

Conclusion

In the course of devising a practical solution to the Frank Russell Company's intellectual property management problem, we have made generic discoveries about

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

We have reported on our discoveries in the foregoing exposition.

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.

Acknowledgments


XML-based Agent Communication: VPN Provisioning as a Case Study		Table of contents		Indexes		Formal data models for SGML and HyTime