How to transform the telecom engineering design process

This article summarizes the contents of a webinar hosted by IEEE’s Mark Barragry, senior product manager, discussing how the IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications platform supports telecom engineers’ information needs and transforms development and design processes.

Research conducted by IEEE has shown that engineers predominantly work across a continuum and require specialized content. While Barragry presents the findings from a series of in-depth interviews and a survey with engineers, the webinar highlights features and functionalities of IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications that help engineers with their requirements and transform working processes.

Leveraging IEEE’s position

To further assist and empower telecom engineers in innovating and advancing their work, IEEE identified an opportunity to go beyond the content that is brought together by its IEEE Xplore platform.

The organization has leveraged its position as a leading technical professional organization and the world’s largest professional association to research telecom engineers’ needs and to better support engineers’ workflow and information requirements.

With nearly 475,000 members, IEEE is well placed to rethink how professionals can be supported in their work. As a result, the organization explored how it can further assist practicing engineers in innovating and enhancing their everyday work and advancing the profession overall.

Working across a continuum leads to varying needs

Practicing engineers’ workflows comprise a series of stages, including defining problems, research, integration, and troubleshooting, ultimately aiming to find a customer-ready solution that can be launched.

A key finding from the IEEE research is that engineers work across a continuum. While some engage in pure research, others focus on development and design, including prototyping and product launches.

The second key finding is that depending on where an engineer sits on the continuum, they have different information needs and processes. This means engineers working in different roles need different types of solutions.

In practice, this highlights the need for search results which bring together a multitude of sources and combine these to assemble a wide set of perspectives while ensuring results are relevant, current, and specifically focused on the engineer’s information needs. In addition, engineers highly value the ability to explore related content to stay up to speed.

Source: IEEE

Engineer challenges

In order to develop the right tool, IEEE investigated the challenges engineers face in the development and design stages of product and service innovation.

These are increasingly complex projects and the market itself is becoming demanding with very specific requirements around developing a new tool or product. Moreover, the information that engineers gather and use can often come from multiple and potentially unreliable or outdated sources.

For instance, Barragry recalls a particular engineer with whom the team spoke “who had over 60 tabs open on her browser when we were talking to her, and it was clear that she goes to these places regularly, therefore she keeps the tabs open. Now that's a difficult way to work, knowing which of the 60 to open, being sure that each of those 60 resources is, in fact, still current, is still relevant and reliable.”

It is clear from the process described that there can be a high degree of uncertainty in decision-making during product development and new product specification.

Of course, these challenges will impact time and monetary investments and, as a conclusion, IEEE established that derisking the engineer’s information acquisition process and usage is vital.

Introducing IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications

The above perceptions led to several key considerations in developing a new product for engineers:

These considerations led directly to the establishment of IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications. The platform delivers a reliable solution that directly addresses engineer challenges and focuses on development and design needs. This is an all-in-one search platform from trusted sources focused on content for telecom engineers, providing access to cutting-edge research, industry standards, parts and component data, and expertly curated content that streamlines design and development processes while solving real-world challenges.

Source: IEEE

Tools and features

The technology behind this platform ensures that an end user will receive a result that is accurate, relevant, and closely related to the searched topics. Barragry explains that “there's a concept mapping tool that lies behind the product, where concepts are carefully perceived. The end user's history of searching on the product is mapped, and we're able to determine essentially what it is that drives the end user’s needs, the topics that interest them, the functions they currently fill, and to provide the results quickly.” That response is presented using information type channels that enable easier browsing, e.g., News, Standards or Research.

Another key feature of the service is identifying the key concepts that relate to a topic area being searched. Alongside a set of results, a tool looks at concepts within a given document and briefly summarizes the key points relating to the searched topic. This way, end users can quickly decide on the document's relevance to their project.

A further key feature highlighted involves topic investigation. A unique subject taxonomy allows the user to break out results across different domains / sub-domains and filter them. This is a proprietary feature that IEEE maintains for updates.

The final feature highlighted relates to tracking industry trends. Here, dashboards created and maintained by subject matter experts share snapshots of the current state of key technical areas, find the latest coverage of hot topics, and help the engineer to stay attuned to the latest in the telecommunications industry.

Conclusion

IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications helps engineers overcome information overload, access one platform for all design and development needs, easily find relevant results, and identify additional project-related content. Finally, it enables learning from practical business applications of technical information.

With robust tools such as IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications, engineers and researchers can quickly and easily get the information they need to bridge any gaps in their knowledge and drive related technologies forward. With access to courses, whitepapers, vital prior research, and industry standards, IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications provides a trusted source that engineers across industries can leverage to develop and confirm the skills they need to do their jobs.

To learn more about the benefits and features of IEEE DiscoveryPoint for Communications, tune into the webinar here.