Company: Factiva, a Dow Jones & Reuters Company
Company Description: Factiva, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, provides world-class global content, including Dow Jones and Reuters newswires and The Wall Street Journal, offering the only single content solution with multiple language interfaces and multilingual content covering nearly 8,000 sources. Factiva’s products and services help companies integrate news and business information into their daily workflow.
Nomination Category: Company, Office & Product Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Most Innovative Company

Nomination Title: Factiva: Most Innovative Company

Tell the story about what this nominated company achieved in the past year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:

Factiva®, a Dow Jones and Reuters Company, provides global news and business information to more than 80 percent of Fortune Global 500 companies.  Its award-winning products provide easy access to the exclusive combination of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones and Reuters newswires, as well as nearly 8,000 essential sources from 118 countries in 22 languages. 

Innovation is the heart of Factiva - and it is what drives the company to be successful.  The three elements that prove Factiva's innovation and achievement in 2003 is its tunnel vision-focus on customer service, its state-of-the-art platform and technology, and its strategic partnerships with other innovative companies.

Factiva had a tremendous and business-critical deliverable to execute in 2003. 
The company worked as one unified to team to upgrade more than 1.6 million paying subscribers from two different product platforms, Reuters Business Briefing and Dow Jones Interactive, to one new innovative, industry standard XML platform -- Factiva.com.

With clear objectives and milestone targets set by the CEO, all Factiva functional groups, including sales, content, technology, marketing and services, seamlessly transferred all of its customers to Factiva.com by the target date of July 1, 2003.

Since speed of execution was critical to the success of Factiva and to ensure customer satisfaction, Factiva creatively used technology, such as e-trainer and online tools, and customer service to make the cross-over transparent for all of its customers. The sales and customer service teams worked with each individual customer, to make sure all their needs were met.

Simultaneous with upgrading its customers, Factiva continued to launch over 14 new products and generated new business the entire year.  The new products and services help companies integrate news and business information into their daily workflow, increasing organizational intelligence and leveraging external and internal content within the knowledge management function. 

One example of our innovation is Factiva Fusion - a solution that integrates all of a customer's internal and external information into their users' workflow.  Instead of doing several extensive searches on competitive, customer, and market news and information, the Factiva solution tracks and combines all the information into one source - enabling Factiva customers to make better and quicker business decisions.
 
A third success that proves Factiva's innovativeness is its two new pioneering partnerships with Microsoft and IBM during the past year.

Microsoft -- Factiva Search, a Factiva application, was embedded into the Microsoft Office 2003 system, providing information workers with quick and convenient ways to gain a comprehensive view of the external business environment from within their daily workflow.  It allows information workers to conduct research on Factiva's collection of thousands of sources directly from a report or presentation they're creating.

IBM -- Factiva moved forward to build a truly innovative relationship with IBM to create a reputation management application on top of IBM's WebFountain solution, an Internet text analytics platform.  The new solution will allow executives tasked with increasing brand equity to gain insight, manage risk, and to identify the next business opportunities more quickly and cost effectively than ever.  This will be the most comprehensive qualitative search available today.

Since Factiva strategically decided to build an entire new platform based on industry standards, XML, and Web services - at a time when the future of these technologies was not certain - Factiva was able to offer innovative solutions and partnerships for its customers in 2003.

List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:

Upgrade:
http://www.factiva.com/investigative/releases/upgrade070103_us.asp?node=menuElem1176

Microsoft:
http://www.factiva.com/investigative/releases/microsoft031003.asp?node=menuElem1176

IBM:
http://www.factiva.com/investigative/releases/09182003_ibm.asp?node=menuElem1176

Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the leader of this nominated company:

As President and Chief Executive Officer, Ms. Hart leads an innovative news and
information solutions company that counts more than 80 percent of Fortune 500
companies as clients and whose products and services are available to nearly 1.6
million paying subscribers worldwide.

Since 2000, when Ms. Hart became president and CEO, she has led the Dow
Jones Interactive® and Reuters Business Briefing joint venture to form one Factiva
culture and a suite of market-leading Factiva branded products and services.
Factiva products and services are built on the best collection of global business
news and information, customization and personalization capabilities and are
supported by an experienced team of more than 800 professionals in 47 cities in
28 countries.