Our CTO, Fred Pandolfi once said “Traditionally many companies thought of themselves as simply as document delivery companies. People ordered documents and they delivered them.  Based on the extensive discussions our executive team had with existing customers one of the concepts that emerged was that we needed a set of supply chain management tools for articles and documents.  So that’s the direction we started to take.  We are not just an STM document delivery service company.  We are really about managing the supply chain of this information from front to back.”

Fred’s description of Mobile Library as a supply chain management tool seems somewhat more accurate than “document delivery”, as the system is designed to facilitate the access, management and control of a large inventory of STM content.  Specifically, Mobile Library is a cloud-based system that provides end users access to all enterprise information assets including e-journals, e-books and internal repositories, their complete collection of personal files, and a database of 50 million citations.  In one of our thought leadership briefings Fred described the system this way, “We have a large catalog of scientific, technical and medical content that customers can license in a copyright compliant manner.  With Mobile Library customers are buying much of the same licensed content from our huge STM library in the cloud.”

The Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP) defines one element of supply chain management as follows: “Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third-party service providers, and customers.”  Another analogy to a supply chain management tool would be the secure social media tools within Mobile Library, which enables collaboration among customers. In the same briefing, Fred describes the collaboration features as follows: “The ability to conduct creative discussions about collective research, follow colleagues through notes and activity feeds, to query subject matter experts for input, create internal documentation, action plans and reports seemed to make a great deal of sense. So having collaborative and social extension to Mobile Library seemed natural to us.”

For the time being, we will resign ourselves to accept the industry terminology of “document delivery.” However, there are more information supply chain analogies we could make.  If you have not read the thought leadership briefing from which we quoted Fred Pandolfi, just click here to download your complimentary copy.

The advent of social media gave consumers new ways to communicate and share information. Mobile Library incorporated the same concepts in its highly secure social media features. Researchers can share, annotate and effectively collaborate with the same ease of use provided by the popular consumer social mediatools. However, the security features keep vital corporate knowledge within the walls of the corporation.

That’s just one example of taking an existing technology, improving it and adding features that make it more valuable to customers. As a document delivery services company, our journey is about continuing to improve and add innovative features to Mobile Library.

“From a design perspective, one of the benefits we had was that we had no preconceived notion of how things had been done historically. I think there’s great benefit in having a group of very smart software engineers with experience in many different industries take a look at the domain and the problem, and ultimately design a solution.

In any vertical industry the players get very used to how things have been done in the past. Look a generation or two backat the historical document delivery industry – where people ordered documents and those documents were simply delivered, without much thought as to how to integrate this content into an end-user’s workflow or other enterprise information assets. Based on our extensive discussions with Infotrieve clients, one of the concepts that emerged was the need for end-users to have access to a virtual collection of all the information assets needed to do their jobs, regardless of whether that content was licensed by the enterprise, available in a proprietary corporate database, or obtained from a traditional document delivery service. So that’s the direction we took when we began to develop Mobile Library in 2006. Today, we’re not just a STM document delivery service company We are really about providing a single point of access to whatever content an end-user needs, regardless of where the content is located or sourced from.

As a result, searching for content needed to evolve, too.  Previously end-users had to use a variety of separate tools to find the content they wanted depending upon where the content was sourced from or located. With Mobile Library we extended that search concept in that we integrated our customer’s licensed and corporate content with the substantial content that Infotrieve has access to.  Now researchers have a more unified view of all the content that is available with one tool.

The end-user needs the article or content to do their work. They don’t necessarily care where the content comes from, and they aren’t experts in copyright compliance. So the essence of an effective content management system is balancing the speed of delivery of the materials, the quality of the materials and the price. The enormous complexity of managing all of that data and all of the copyright issues for every corporate subscription is hidden from the end-user.”

We’re almost afraid to ask, but next time we might ask Fred to explain how that “enormous complexity” works! For more information on Mobile Library, click here.

In our first thought leadership briefing, one of the issues we researched is just how important innovation is to global organizations.

One of the more fascinating studies we found in the course of our research was from a global public relations firm called Allison and Partners. They surveyed a panel of global leaders from a variety of industries to gauge their thoughts on the importance of creativity, innovation and collaboration. To paraphrase their findings, collaboration facilitates creativity, and creativity ultimately drives product innovation. These global leaders were acutely aware of how important innovation was to market leadership. You can read the whole report by clicking here:

In our industry briefing we closely reviewed the first element in this product innovation chain, namely collaboration. One could certainly make the case that without effective and efficient collaboration tools in place, creativity and innovation would suffer. So what does an effective set of collaboration tools look like in today’s competitive, global market? Looking back a few years, collaboration was largely about document sharing and version control. The next generation of tools were both web-based and internally hosted portals which were purpose built for collaboration. Even with this new focus, a fair number of these systems were still document sharing with a whole lot of bells and whistles.

The current generation of collaboration tools are secure, business specific social media tools. They have the same intuitive, easy-to-use interfaces that the popular personal social media tools have. However, they keep corporate IP secure and facilitate collaboration in ways that are dramatically different from the document centric tools of the past.

This brings us back to the title of this post. Mobile Library™ from Infotrieve – with roots in STM scientific document delivery — is the first cloud-based service for global enterprises to combine device independent access to all corporate and personal information resources with consumer-style social media and collaboration tools in a highly secure environment. We’re excited about the capabilities of this technology and we invite you to explore the capabilities of Mobile Library.

Most of us use FaceBook, Twitter, LinkedIn and other social media sites in our personal lives. The one thing all these platforms have in common is that they allow us to follow friends and colleagues, share, comment, offer opinions, advice and communicate in a simple, easy fashion. Imagine the value of being able to do all that within your company while remaining compliant in a completely secure environment!

Global companies have been trying for years to create systems that facilitate collaboration amongst their employees. All companies understand that effective collaboration leads to higher productivity and ultimately, more innovation. That is why the concept of consumer-style social media as a tool for collaboration makes sense in the context of our Mobile Library product, enabling R&D and other professionals to share, comment, offer their opinions and advice to make their work and workgroups more efficient and productive. That’s why we added secure, social media tools as an integral component of the Mobile Library’s scientific document delivery service. No one has ever done this before! If you haven’t seen these features, click here for more information.