Cerebyte
Cerebyte, Inc. was founded in early 1997 by a team of professionals with over 40 years of combined specialized experience in the intellectual capital management field and use of expertise. Flagship product Infinos was adopted by industry leaders, including Hewlett-Packard, 3Com and Tektronix These customers helped Cerebyte understand the power and exciting possibilities in harvesting, reusing and commercializing specialized knowledge.

According to IDC, a prominent research analyst, Cerebyte is the market leader in the Intellectual Capital Management (ICM) $3B market.

Excerpts from an Interview with the CEO and President of Cerebyte, William Seidman

1. What is Cerebyte's core area of business and how far do you think has it managed to create a difference among its clientele in terms of increased ROI and enhanced productivity?

Cerebyte solves a specific problem for chain and chain-like companies. In these organizations, strategic initiatives are used to guide the organization, but they are very difficult to actually implement in large, geographically dispersed environments. Cerebyte's Infinos system "supercharges" the strategic initiative process in chain and chain-like companies by raising the performance of the less effective operating units to near expert levels.
Typically, Cerebyte's Infinos system has the following impact:

• Reduces the time from definition of a strategy to action the field organization to 6 days

• Reduces planning and coaching time 80%

• Reduces ramp up time of new personnel 50%

• Reduces task performance time 30-50% 
  
  This has produced significant economic gains such as

• Increasing sales in a fast food restaurant $2000 per week per restaurant

• Saving a semi-conductor manufacturer $2M per week per fab in manufacturing costs 

2. What is the Cerebyte's Infinos System? Who are its target customers and what are its features and benefits for enterprise IS organizations?
Infinos is Cerebyte's proprietary technology for knowledge harvesting and coaching. Cerebyte's target customers are the field operations departments of chain and chain-like companies. There are no specific benefits for enterprise IS organizations. The system is not intended for IS use.

3. What is the 'secret sauce' and does it work the same way across industries or do they vary according to the area of business and functions?
The secret sauce is the tacit knowledge top performers have that distinguishes them from others. It consists of rules of thumb, mental models, risk detection and management and many other areas of unconscious competence. 
While the general structure of a top performer's secret sauce is the same for any industry or function, the specific application of the structure is unique to each profession.

4. It is said that Cerebyte provides software that emulates the human mentoring experience. Could you elaborate on this to provide understanding as to how the Cerebyte solution works?

Almost everyone has either coached someone or been coached by someone. Great coaches use a consistent pattern of interaction with the people they are coaching. Cerebyte studied human coaching for over five years, developing a very explicit model for the interaction. Cerebyte's Infinos System emulates the human coaching process by providing prompts similar to those supplied by a great coach. These prompts produce similar behavioral responses in the people being coached to the responses from a human coach.


5. Cerebyte has been recognized as the industry leader in harvesting and using intellectual capital by leading research analysts IDC and KM World. To what do you attribute this success to especially in this era of economic thriftiness in organisations and businesses?

We have been recognized for doing three things no one else has been able to do:
1. We are able to consistently and quickly (in less than 3 days total) gather all of an expert's true and complete tacit knowledge
2. We are able to use the tacit knowledge to create a visible improvement in performance in as little as 8 minutes and sustain the performance improvement after only 90 minutes across a chain of hundreds or thousands of outlets, essentially simultaneously
3. We are able to reduce the time it takes to go from definition of a corporate strategy to implementation in a field organization to only 6 days 
No other approaches or technology can produce anything even remotely close to these results.

William Seidman, PhD.
William (Bill) Seidman has more than 15 years experience as a manager of profit and loss centers in high technology companies including Hewlett-Packard, Silicon Graphics, Mentor Graphics, and Integrated Project Systems, a Silicon Valley start-up. He is an experienced manager of fast growth, high technology environments. 

Bill's doctorate is from Stanford where he spent eight years studying management decision-making. As part of his doctoral dissertation, Bill developed a ground-breaking technique for analyzing management decision-making behaviors. This technique is the core of Cerebyte's technology, enabling Cerebyte to systematically examine complex management processes and reduce them to a few, easily automated "best practices." As a manager of various service organizations, and later, as a management consultant, Bill was able to apply the technique to a wide variety of industries and management situations. In doing so, he refined the process, proved its utility, and created a capability that was both truly unique and extraordinarily valuable. 

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