Ever since a 1998 Merrill Lynch report proclaimed that
enterprise information portals (EIP) "will eventually
reach or exceed the investment opportunities provided
by the ERP market," established software vendors have
repositioned themselves and new suppliers have staked
their claim in the rapidly growing portal market. Many
are still viable, while others have fallen victim to
shaky business models and a declining venture capital
and business market.
Regardless, a high percentage of remaining vendors
are focusing on aggregating internal and external
content and offering access through a browser
interface. However, providing access to corporate
information is really just part of the value of a real
corporate portal. Why? Because unlike other
technologies, people understand and gravitate to
portals; they find value in them and are intrigued by
their personalization features. Used creatively, this
presents a great opportunity for IT, business and
executive management. Provided they deliver a portal
with compelling content alongside of role-relevant
applications and content, the portal can truly become
the place for people to work.
What's more, portals have been called one of the
first compelling knowledge management applications.
They address the issue of broadening the peripheral
vision of organizational teams by exposing them to
content, applications and experts that they might not
be aware of, especially in large organizations. But
given the broad acceptance of portals by end users, a
portal can also become the focal point for people to
share what they know and experience, and collaborate
with experts and peers across the extended enterprise.
With that background, here are the seven "Cs" of
corporate portals, which describe crucial
characteristics that portals should exhibit to add
value to knowledge management initiatives. These key
words are:
- Contributive
- Consistent
- Comprehensive
- Contextual
- Collaborative
- Customizable
- Compelling
Contributive
Thinking of the corporate portal as a contributive
interface might seem odd at first. Odd, because the
concept is a rapid departure from a corporate portal's
Internet mega-portal ancestor (my.yahoo.com
and other variants) along with most current offerings
in the market. But if you agree that the corporate
portal is the first "killer application" for knowledge
management, it makes absolute sense. Sure, it's
important to have a corporate portal to access
information -- but better than simple access to
information is to see the portal as providing a single
point of exchange. Such a personal workspace would not
only enable individuals to see information relevant to
their job function regardless of where the information
originated, but it would include modules where they
could go to contribute and share relevant information
with others in their functional groups, the
organization as a whole or with customers and partners
alike. Moreover, the system should automatically
manage the dynamic interrelationships between content,
security, users and navigational hyperlinks. In this
manner, the portal becomes, in effect, the corporate
knowledge desktop.
Consistent
Most portal solutions handle access to content and
applications quite well. Often times, though, it's not
enough to merely access files stored in different
repositories. A portal should use the underlying
storage capabilities of a database that stores all
object representations (e.g., document, collections,
folders, hyperlinks, users) and the relationships
among them.
To understand this better, consider the following
example. An organization can easily spend hundreds of
thousands, and possibly millions, of dollars deploying
a corporate portal. The portal is used to provide
access to information in disparate systems. But what
happens when people start using the portal? A basic
corporate portal has absolutely no ability to assure
the quality of the underlying information. Bad
information going in guarantees bad information coming
out. This fact has been the downfall of many a
corporate portal project.
In addition, consider that a portal is a launching
point, whereby users click on links to information on
http servers or Web-enabled applications. Oftentimes,
clicking on a link produces the famous "Error 404 '
file not found" message. We are all familiar with this
from surfing the Web, and typically it is not a
problem. However, when it happens in an environment
(corporate portal) that is meant to make it easier to
discover and leverage information, this result becomes
problematic.
Both of these examples make it clear that you
cannot consider deploying a corporate portal without
considering content and document management, and
overall information and navigational integrity.
Comprehensive
For a corporate portal to be an application that
provides true business value, it has to take a
comprehensive look at information. When people talk
about information, they sometimes categorize it into "structured"
and "unstructured." Structured information is stored
in columns and rows, typically in relational database
tables, and unstructured information is everything
else -- Microsoft Word documents, Acrobat files,
multimedia files, etc. In addition, it is important to
consider that information in the portal will be coming
from external sources, such as the Web, and free and
for-fee content providers (news, stock, etc.). For a
portal to be effective, it must tie together these
different information types into one neat package. It
should access, aggregate and work with various forms
of internal and external information. To summarize,
this would include:
- Documents including text, spreadsheet,
presentation, scanned, PDF, audio, video, etc.
- Structured data in relational databases, ERP
systems and even legacy systems.
- Groupware content from such messaging and
groupware systems as Lotus Domino and Microsoft
Exchange.
- Web content from any URL that users deem
relevant to their job functions.
- Relevant industry news, research and top stories
from news providers.
- Extensible markup language (XML) encapsulated
information.
Providing access to these different information
types and syndicating applications in the portal is
vital. There is another component to the corporate
portal, however, that makes it a comprehensive
interface, especially in a knowledge management
framework: e-learning. Although a somewhat nascent
application, especially in corporate environments,
thinking about providing continuous learning through a
portal makes sense. Providing access to e-learning
content completes the portal and makes it the place to
go to access what is known within the organization,
who knows it and what a given person in a given
corporate role should be learning. In addition to
that, providing continuous learning to end users is
vital in making them feel they are a valuable and
vital part of an organization, and that the
organization is helping them improve their skill sets.
In the end, this might result in being even more
valuable to the individual than it is to the
organization.
Contextual
Accessing and contributing to the knowledge base of
the organization is vital. Just as important is
providing some context around the information
presented in the portal. Context should be provided in
a number of ways, including functional and personal
relevance. Both should provide the ability to view
disparate information in a way that is appropriate for
a user, based on personal preference or functional
role.
This typically takes the form of a tabbed user
interface where different tabs in the browser
correspond to projects, departments or the role that a
user is associated with, along with personal tabs.
Collaborative
If accessing information is all there is to a portal
solution, then it totally misses the mark. The reason
is because people work with people. People are
innately collaborative, preferring collaboration with
peers and experts to wading through volumes of
documents. The human mind is the ultimate knowledge
base, offering quick recall and an ability to identify
patterns and trends that supercomputers are not even
close to matching.
Within the portal, users should be able to explore
the tacit and explicit knowledge within the
organization. There are a number of ways this
information can be collected. For starters,
individuals can specify their personal skill set and
expertise, or have peers and even management add to
their personal profile. In addition, an expertise
profile can be derived by analyzing the content a user
contributes to the corporate knowledge base. For
example, if a user has consistently contributed
documents pertaining to launching telecommunication
services in the Pacific Rim, that information can be
captured in an expertise profile. A user's profile can
also be tied into a human capital or training system
that gets updated when a user successfully completes a
given course or achieves some career goal.
All of this rich profile information should be
accessed through the portal. A user looking for an
expert in a given area should be able to access the
expertise system and retrieve a list of individuals
who meet the criteria. From that list, a user should
be able to specify how he or she would like to engage
that individual. Depending on the urgency of the
situation, users should be able to choose from chat
interaction, inviting a group of experts to a
discussion forum, simply sending an e-mail message to
experts or -- dare we say it? -- call them on the
phone. Again, the portal is the starting point to
knowledge exchange within the organization.
Customizable
The fact that Internet portals are in such broad use
mandates a certain level of customization for
corporate portals. They should therefore offer both
user personalization as well as comprehensive
flexibility for application developers.
Along with the ability to personalize and customize
the look and feel of the portal, it is important to
consider that corporate portals must address the needs
of globally dispersed organizations. Users should be
able to set a language preference and have it impact
not just the menus and user interface, but also which
version of a multilingual document should be served to
a given user. In our predominately English-biased
business world, this is a facet of customization that
is often overlooked.
Compelling
Now, given the length of time that corporate portals
have been in the spotlight, we are starting to see
some patterns of success and failure. One of the
causal factors in a portal implementation's demise is
the lack of compelling content and applications. What
exactly does that mean? Although vendors will not
often tell you so, corporate end users are reluctant
to change. There is inertia that keeps them
comfortable with the status quo, especially when it
comes to IT. As a result, for a portal to be accepted
by end users and provide value to the corporation, it
is vital that it be compelling. It should give end
users an experience that they cannot find anywhere
else, and one that will keep them coming back for
more. It needs to help them do their job faster and
easier, but it has to recognize that people want to
have fun. Organizations should not hesitate to
incorporate features such as weather, sports, top
general news, stock information and other fun public
content alongside an applet to ERP systems.
Is There Another "C"?
Although it might not be a critical factor in
determining the success of a corporate portal within
an organization, be aware of telecommunication,
specifically mobile support. As we move into the brave
new world of always-on mobile devices, it will become
increasingly important for people to be able to access
information within the corporate portal from devices
such as PDAs and mobile phones. In fact, soon we will
view our PDAs as providing real and proactive
assistance. "Assistance" does not merely refer to
delivering stock reports and sports scores to a mobile
device. It means having these devices be an individual's
sentry to events happening in the office and allowing
the individual to take some action based on
occurrences.
Approaching a corporate portal initiative is no
trivial task. The first place to start is with the
strategic objectives of the organization. Technology
projects within organizations should always be aligned
with strategic objectives; otherwise, they run the
risk of turning into solutions looking for challenges.
Starting with the objects assures that will not
happen. As it pertains to portals, many organizations
today have strategic objectives to leverage their
existing knowledge assets and use these to address the
needs of a rapidly changing market. The portal can
play a vital role in achieving such an objective, but
only if you view it as more than merely access to
information. That is where the seven Cs can help.
Combined, the seven Cs describe a comprehensive
corporate portal solution that offers a single point
of exchange, providing access to relevant information
sources, including both structured and unstructured
content as well as an organization's topical experts,
while simultaneously assuring that users can easily
and securely contribute to the corporate knowledge
base.
With literally dozens of corporate portal solutions
available on the market, the seven Cs describes one
manner to distinguish truly useful ones from the rest.
Tim Kounadis is vice president of North America
Marketing at Hyperwave,
a company that provides enterprise-class knowledge
management, corporate portal and e-learning software
to enable customers to better collect, manage,
organize, store and deliver electronic information
both within the enterprise and to suppliers,
distributors and customers.
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