Over the last few years Autodesk has made a significant investment in online self-service in preparation for the increased demand for customer support resulting from our shift toward subscription-based business models and direct sales, moving away from a purely reseller channel model. The design tools that Autodesk sells are deep, complex, professional tools that often have an extended learning curve, and the real practical expertise for applied use of them often resides in an established global community of companies and individual experts. The Autodesk Knowledge Network represents a knowledge ecosystem strategy that embraces this broader community in all its forms to accelerate web content generation by Autodesk and these partners and customers. We have invested in optimizing traditional web publishing by Autodesk, including KCS. But we’ve also embraced aggregation of disparate content siloes and the direct online contribution and sharing of content in the form of both video and traditional long-form articles. Providing experts an opportunity to create a public profile for themselves and build their reputation seems to be helping us gain momentum with programs to encourage contribution. This talk will outline our existing tools and programs, describe some of our near-term plans for expansion and share our key effectiveness measures.

1. Autodesk Knowledge Network – a
Knowledge Ecosystem Approach to
Integrated Content-driven Self-service
Tom Williams | Autodesk, Inc
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rockdr

2. Autodesk Business Context

3. 3
Our Vision: Help
our customers
imagine, design,
and create a better
world
• US$2.5 billion
• 12 million users
• Very global
• 7000 employees
• 2000 partners

4. Autodesk’s Business Model Transformation
• 100% Subscription (as of August 1, 2016)
• Increasing share of direct sales
• New & rapidly-changing cloud products
• Increased need for direct support & learning

5. 5
Circa 2013 – Years of Deferred Investment in Self-Service
Historically dependent on a global
network of 2000 channel partners

6. © 2014 Autodesk – Autodesk Confidential
§ Products are deep, complex professionaltools
§ Global ecosystem of expertise, highly-federated
knowledge, both inside and outside of the company
§ Need to scale, operate at today’s business pace
Why a ‘Knowledge Network’?

7. Building a “Knowledge Network”
A strategy for embracing and leveraging a federated knowledge ecosystem

10. knowledge.autodesk.com

12. forums.autodesk.com

14. © 2014 Autodesk – Autodesk Confidential
Circa 2013 - Siloed Online Resources
Caused by organizational and technological boundaries
YouTube Channel
Blog
Forum
Product Team Documentation
Support Knowledgebase

15. Aggregation Strategy – Remove the Siloes
Documentati on
Support
Knowledge
Base
YouTube
ForumsBlogs
IN-PRODUCT WEB BROWSER APP
Webinar
Recordings
Any answer,
from any
content source
To any access
modality
Atomize,
aggregate,
organize
knowledge assets
Deliver via Web
Service APIs

16. Knowledge-as-a-Service Platform
Engagement
Rating, Commenting, SharingPresentation-Neutral Format
Content
Search, Taxonomy
Discovery
Big Data Integration
Analytics
Cloud-based Web Service APIs and Widgets (data over HTTP)
Help
Documentation
(Trisoft)
Support
(SFDC)
Topic Areas
(Drupal)
Discussion
Groups
YouTube
Autodesk
University
Blogs
3rd Party
Partners
Content Sources
Crawl Aggregate Auto-Classify Auto-Tag Index
Aggregation Engine

17. Platform Technology Stack
• JavaScript + CSS – Dynamic presentation & styling
• Drupal – Web site presentation layer, templating, web CMS
• Java & OSGi – RESTful web service wrappers
• SolrCloud – Indexing & Retrieval (Search)
• Aerospike – Highly-scalable NoSQL database
• Smartlogic – Text Analytics, Ontology & Taxonomy
• Corporate services for authentication, identity & entitlements
• Amazon Web Services – Infrastructure
• Salesforce Knowledge & Case Management
17

18. Publishing - Support Knowledgebase
• Knowledge-Centered Support
(KCS) in Salesforce Knowledge
• Extract content via API’s,
replicate to cloud store
18

19. Publishing – Documentation
• Documentation authoring in
XML-based CMS from SDL
• Based on DITA XML
Standard
• Transform to HTML using
DITA Open Toolkit, running in
the cloud
Simplify, standardize, and
automate
19

21. “Syndication”
• Leverage established ’social’ web publishing
platforms
– Blogs (multiple blogging platforms)
– YouTube
• Connectors to extract, aggregate and make findable
• Syndicate content from both Autodesk and our
partners
21

22. Syndication – Reseller Partners
22

23. Syndication – Learning Partners
23

25. Contribution - Portfolio of Knowledge-Sharing Tools
• Make it easy
• Make it quick
• Make it a meaningful
knowledge asset
“Contributor”:
• Autodesk
• Partners
• Customers (Users)

26. Contribution - Articles

27. Contribution - Screencast

28. Contribution - Workflows

29. Contribution – “Collections”- Curation as Contribution
User-created,
sharable “Playlists”
of knowledge assets

30. Contribution - Creative Commons Licensing
They credit the author for
the original creation.
Don’t resell this unless
you ask the author first!
License new creations
under the identical terms.
• De-monetization of the Autodesk content
• Encourage re-use, remixing, translation
• Encourage community contribution

31. Contribution - Community Profile & Reputation

33. Challenges & Futures

34. Challenges & Next Steps
1. Shift part of resources from platform development to expanding
program (go-to-market) aspects
2. Allow partners & experts to offer services as an extension of the
network (’services marketplace’)
3. Over-arching content strategy – federated organization, distributed
content ownership. Hard to:
– Align customer experience, information architecture
– Implement standards & governance
– Prevent overlaps / duplication
– Who does human curation? How do we make it scalable?
– Drive quality
34

35. Measuring success & performance
The good, the ugly, and the work-in-progress

36. © 2014 Autodesk – Autodesk Confidential
April 2016 Traffic by Channel:
§ In-Product Help — 8.1 Million sessions (+72% YoY)
§ AKN Website — 5.4 Million sessions (+35% YoY)
§ Forums — 2.8 Million sessions (+11% YoY)
§ 15.3 million sessions across all three channels
(~6% overlap among channels)
§ For comparison, global autodesk.com marketing sites 6.6 million sessions
AKN Ecosystem Top Level Volume Metrics

37. “Macroeconomic” View of Contact Reduction
37

38. (Lack of) Case Traceability - “Dark Matter” Problem
38
"Web" Chat Phone E-store AKN My Account Email eReg Other (30 options)
“Web” ??
Knowledge
Network
• Huge share of cases coming in via alternate
channels and “well-worn paths” for customers
• Case origin not easily traced into SFDC
• Even if and as we fix that, before vs. after
trending not provable

39. Web Site Survey
0 500 1,000 1,500
Help getting started using an Autodesk product
or service
Deepen knowledge about a specific product
feature, capability, or workflow
Contact Autodesk Support and Customer
Service
Download a product update
Troubleshoot an issue with a current Autodesk
product or service
Other reason
Yes No
39
• Primary reason for visit - Why did you
come to our site?
• Resolution rate - Were you able to
accomplish your task?
67%
72%
36%
70%
30%
40%
• Primary reason for visit - Why did you
come to our site?
• Resolution rate - Were you able to
accomplish your task?

40. “Successful Help Sessions” – Sessions x Resolution Rate
40

41. Segment & Measure Differently by Business Purpose
41

42. High-Level KPI Scorecard (WIP)
42
Learning

43. Operational & Content Metrics (WIP)
43
• Publication
• Syndication
• Contribution
• SEO
• Amplification
(Shares)
• Helpfulness
• Moderation
• Curation

44. Tom Williams
Autodesk, Inc.
tom.williams@autodesk.com
https://www.linkedin.com/in/rockdr

45. © Technology Services Industry Association