denotes premium content | Jul 24 2008 Feature
posted 1 Dec 1999 in Volume 3 Issue 4
Is the portal Knowledge Management? Or
Is Knowledge Management the Portal?
According to the Delphi Group, by
the beginning of 2001, 80% of the companies they surveyed in 1999 will have
taken on portals as part of their infrastructure. In this excerpt from their
Corporate Portal Insight Series report, Delphi outline what is really on offer
in the link between portals and knowledge management.
Arising seemingly out of nowhere in
1998, the corporate portal has come into prominence thanks to well-understood
dynamics in Internet technologies and the growing adoption of corporate
intranets.
In its
1999 survey of IT organisations, The Delphi Group found that 55% of those
responding indicated their organisations are currently undertaking corporate
portal projects. Sixteen per cent already have portals in production; another
18% are experimenting or piloting the technology; and 22% are working on portals
at a concept or planning level. By the beginning of the year 2001, 80% of the
survey participants will have portals in production.
The applications deployed in those
portals will be led by knowledge and learning support, business process support,
and support for customer relationship management and self-service opportunities.
The next tier of important portal applications include collaboration and project
support, followed by access to data from corporate and legacy systems and the
internal company information centre.
Ironically, most organisations still
find themselves poorly positioned to take advantage of the recent proliferation
of corporate information from intranets, enterprise applications, and electronic
business. The key challenge to portal implementations is the relatively poor
organisation of corporate information today. Successful portals differentiate
and re-integrate business critical information in a function-centred information
environment that helps users work smarter.
Bridging islands of
automation
The core dynamic driving the rise of the corporate portal is that our
expectations for computer use are changing dramatically from acquiescence in a
program-by-program, task-isolated environment to enthusiasm for an integrated
environment that provides information access, delivery, and work support across
multiple dimensions of the organisation.
Intranets have brought us new
capabilities to identify, capture, store, retrieve, and distribute vast amounts
of information from multiple internal and external sources, at an individual,
team, or function level. They have pushed the envelope of legacy computing
infrastructures and challenged the assumptions of current models of information
processing. Applications-based desktops look increasingly like discrete islands
of automation. They separate and segregate functions that are intuitively part
of the same process. (This is somewhat akin to using a different type of
telephone for every country that you want to call.)
Corporate portals provide an architecture and
a set of technologies with which to build a single point of access across
these many applications, repositories, processes and functions in the information
environment. The result is a shift from information systems as a group of
isolated programs that address discrete disciplines, towards a ubiquitous information
"environment" . This new environment is working itself into
the working milieu in every business and social institution. Many have called
it the "digital dashboard" .
While all this has been evolving,
organisations have a growing appreciation for the difficulties involved in
integrating, reconciling and organising corporate information resources across
an enterprise. Inherent in corporate information, however, unlike Internet
information, is a degree of relevance and business context that is non-existent
in the broad-based Internet data sources.
The opportunity for corporate portal
developers is to identify and tap into the underlying organisation in disparate
corporate information, which if correctly exploited, can yield significant
benefits for middle office workers who daily navigate the myriad of internal and
external sources of connections among people, processes, and information.
This is not a small task
particularly since as knowledge sources multiply, it becomes increasingly more
difficult to reconcile and organise across an enterprise. The compelling promise
of the corporate portal is that it offers a unique integration capacity, which
takes advantage of the inherent purpose and structure in corporate information.
The portal crafted around these naturally occurring centres of action and
interest can almost automatically yield a degree of relevancy that is
non-existent in broad-based Internet data sources. Individuals share the
responsibility for defining the taxonomy of business-critical information, and
through their publishing and other information activities, generate a rich
content environment at the corporate portal level, without the need for any
single individual to have a comprehensive overview of all taxonomies.
Portals and
knowledge practice
The development of the corporate
portal underlies many of the major themes in the business environment today from
the rise of e-business, to the internationalisation of operations, and the
changing dynamics of an increasingly mobile workforce. It is particularly linked
with the development of knowledge management practices in large
organisations.
Is
the portal knowledge management? Or is knowledge management the portal? In The
Delphi Group's opinion, the answer to both questions is clearly negative.
However, there is a significant overlap and relationship between these two new
elements in the organisation.
The Delphi Group has developed a
framework for conceptualising the relationship between corporate portals and
knowledge management and for positioning both in the organisational context. In
this view, the role of the corporate portal is to provide an access point (even
if only a temporary one given the shrinking cycles of technical innovation) to
the larger structure of organisational, cultural, and information management
architecture.
Knowledge management and the knowledge practice, on the other hand, is a
more permanent feature of the business. The development and enhancement of a
knowledge practice works within the context of the organisation's physical and
structural design, and is fully linked with the cultural and interpersonal
milieu created and maintained by management and employees alike.
As business becomes
increasingly based on electronic systems, both knowledge management and the
corporate portal depend heavily on the organisation's information
infrastructure. But it is at the level of the corporate portal that issues of
information design and presentation strategies become a primary concern.
This issue of design and
presentation is something that many of the public Internet portal sites have had
to evaluate as their online offerings become more complex. Designing effective
presentation strategies for portal content is as important an issue as
developing the content in the first place. The new presentation challenge can
have a major impact on mission critical business campaigns.
Amazon.com, for example, had to delay
the introduction of several new services acquired as part of its new business
strategy to leverage its brand recognition and customer community as it
repositioned itself as a major Internet retail destination. The reason for the
delay was that adding the new services required a full portal site redesign to
address increasing "clutter" and confusion in its "legacy" portal. Corporate
portals face essentially the same set of challenges. Presentation design will
play a leading role in second generation portal developments in the months to
come.
History
will show that 1999 and 2000 will be characterised by rapid and diligent
deployment to put in place portal architectures and operations that are both
robust from a data management perspective and effective and attractive from a
knowledge worker perspective. By 2001, it will almost certainly have become
plain that the transition to e-business practices would not have been possible
without the tools and technologies, ubiquity and scope introduced to the
corporate information environment by the portal projects.
This is an
excerpt from The Delphi Group Insight Research Report, "Portals in the
Organisation". The Delphi
Group has been assisting global enterprises interested in e-business and
knowledge management integrate the many services they have needed to understand,
evaluate, and deploy information technology in their business systems.
http://www.delphigroup.com
©1999, The
Delphi Group
