Knowledge Capture and Access award

At Information Strategy magazine’s second annual Knowledge Awards ceremony, The London Stock Exchange won the Knowledge Capture and Access award. Working with NIP, the authority has created what it calls the Exchange Listing Support Application (ELSA) which provides a complete support system for all aspects of the authority’s work and is part of a wider project to re-engineer processes across the exchange.

Here’s the article:

The Knowledge Capture & Access Award 1998 – sponsored by Cognos

Winner – London Stock Exchange

Few financial institutions in the world have the length or depth of tradition of the London Stock Exchange. It has traded through eras of great wealth and great financial turmoil for hundreds of years – from the South Sea Bubble to Black Monday.

In today’s financial sector, competition is merciless and demands on financial institutions are significantly increasing. It is essential that the exchange equips itself with the tools and knowledge it needs to serve that eruptive and rapidly changing market with the highest levels of quality, efficiency and speed.

At the core of the exchange’s business is the process of listing stocks for market trading. Every day the UK listing authority deals with vast numbers of time-critical, high-volume applications, approves documents for listing against a vast array of checks and regulations, and promotes their full disclosure to the market.

Working with City-based developers New Information Paradigms, the authority has created what it calls the Exchange Listing Support Application (Elsa) which uses artificial intelligence techniques to capture stock listing regulations and share that knowledge across the exchange to support trading. It provides a complete support system for all aspects of the authority’s work and is part of a wider project to re-engineer processes across the exchange.

It wasn’t easy. “The business processes within the department are unique – no two applications are exactly alike, and that requires skill in judgement and knowing the right details,” says team leader Sue Moreman. It demanded the bringing together of standard listings references, regulatory news services to monitor changes and establish new precedents, the insights and experience of staff and the lessons of prior decisions.

The system frees up professional time, the authority’s most valuable asset, which means more time can be spent on the exceptional rather than the routine, reacting to events more quickly and spotting trends. It also gives these professional users the power to dynamically adapt process knowledge for later re-use by other members of the Elsa community.

In development for almost three years, the system is now being used by 90% of the people for 80% of the time, says Moreman. Comprehensive and complex information, either working cases or background processes, can now be displayed in many different ways to suit managers and staff in different areas.

But most importantly, she notes, the customer can now have one efficient interface with the authority and that makes for better service and better quality of decisions. “The impact,” she believes, ” has been revolutionary.”