Allied Mortgage Taps Internet for Managing Content

Software Magazine, August, 2000 by Elizabeth U. Harding

Houston-based Allied Mortgage Capital Corp. wanted to develop a Web-based capability that would allow the company to maintain state-specific disclosure requirements and regulations for mortgage lending. Since the company has more than 500 branch offices nationwide, it is very difficult to maintain awareness of regulations that differ from state to state.

"At first we looked for a content management system," says Ron Litt, Allied Mortgage's CIO. "The cost for [content management systems] was significant, and the ones we looked at had a bias toward the technical side. They presupposed a basic knowledge of HTML and Web publishing, and were too difficult for our users.

During his search, Litt found KnowledgeMaps, an information exchange system from Correlate Technologies in San Francisco. KnowledgeMaps lets people assemble, manage and share strategic knowledge and project-related information.

"When I first saw KnowledgeMaps, I was intrigued," says Litt. "It had an intuitive feeling for how the information was structured. It fits our particular needs nicely because you can modify a single portion of the KnowledgeMaps. When regulations in one particular state change, you can treat that one object."

Moreover, Litt says, the people maintaining the system basically just had to know Microsoft Word. "It required very little new knowledge to grasp that tool."

While he was evaluating KnowledgeMaps, Litt discovered many other uses for the system. "We are rewriting the computer manual for our branch offices," says Litt. "Instead of writing it in 150 pages, we are putting it into KnowledgeMaps. You have a map of the table of contents which explodes into a tree structure, and at the end of each branch is the content you are looking for. It's a visual road map of our publication that makes it easy to present complicated material in a simplified way."