Feature
posted 1 Dec 1999 in Volume 3 Issue 4
Portalmania
Knowledge management is vulnerable
to a fair amount of hype, which means that anything companies can sell as the
new KM product also comes under the same spotlight. Portal technology has
suffered a 'flood of the market' as far as publicity goes, but what is it really
all about? Madan Sheina explains the history of portalmania and gives us a
grounding in different types of technology approaches.
The term 'corporate portal' - in
various guises - has become a market phenomenon in its own right. Portals are
even more over-hyped than knowledge management, and it is still difficult to
distinguish real business benefits provided by the technology; a major barrier
thus far has been the lack of a clear, and obvious, business platform.
The best way to gain
business benefits from portals is to sharpen its focus - specifically towards
knowledge management. The 'knowledge portal' is emerging as a key element in
many intranet-based knowledge management architectures. Its main role is to make
available many of the functions and facilities provided by other technology
layers of the architecture - collaboration services, discovery services,
knowledge repository and knowledge map. The portal component therefore provides
easy access to the shared services and knowledge resources that constitute a
network-based 'corporate memory'.
Portalmania
You
can't throw a dead cat on the Internet without hitting a portal these days.
Corporate portals have garnered more attention than any other Internet technology over
the past year - partly due to Wall Street's 'dot.com' mania over Excite, Infoseek,
Lycos and Yahoo!
Nobody agrees on what a portal is, looks like, or might accomplish. Yet
a November 1998 report from Merrill Lynch, particularly its exciting forecast
that the 'enterprise information portal (EIP) market could reach $14.8 billion
by 2002' , has started a conflagration of interest which has led, less than
a year later, to well over a hundred companies - from start-ups to IBM -
rushing to define themselves as suppliers of either complete EIPs or tools for
building and managing them. Not since the rise of 'open systems' have we seen a scramble
by such a diverse group of vendors to cloak themselves in such a fuzzy new term
as this.
The
corporate version of portalmania also represents a marketing bandwagon that, for
the moment at least, IT vendors feel they cannot afford to ignore. Yet it is too
early to say whether there is any truth to what some vendors are suggesting -
that in some way corporate portals can help us rethink the way we use
information within our organisations and provide a real challenge to Microsoft's
established GUI desktop paradigm.
Portals - this year's
answer to 'infoglut'?
For many IT managers the promises made by portal vendors will stir a
strong sense of déjà vu. The dream of easy access to all relevant corporate
information is almost as old as corporate computing itself. Executive
information systems (EIS), expert systems, OLAP, data mining, and now intranets
have all been offered as radical solutions to the problems of handling the
increasing amounts of data that overwhelm decision makers.
One of the reasons for the massive
interest in portal software is that it allows the software industry to revert to
simple messages to sell technology as the solution to the problems of poor
information and knowledge management. The promise offered by the corporate
portals to capture and share information is especially alluring for knowledge
management, particularly those enterprises that are unable to maintain the
underlying connections between their information resources in a collaborative
structure - the basis of knowledge and knowledge sharing. The corporate portal
can help by providing a common interface to a wide range of resources and
services offered via the corporate network. For knowledge workers, it becomes
the way 'to see and live' in the network.
Portals also overlap many of the
existing categories of knowledge management technologies. Vendors of these
technologies have quickly recognised a new opportunity and many have moved off
the knowledge management bandwagon and on to the portal one with scarcely a
glance backwards. But while it is almost impossible to ignore the latest
fashionable label, an opportunistic tactic should not be mistaken for a
strategic goal. There is a real danger that the hype around portal software will
occlude the key message of the knowledge management movement - that people, not
technology solve knowledge management problems.
Another stage in development
of the corporate intranet
The sole common factor linking all the
vendors who have leaped onto the corporate portal bandwagon is that they are an
attempt to answer the question of how organisations manage and develop their
intranet applications to meet business needs and provide real return on
investment.
Corporate portal development is an indicator of the tremendous promise
of the corporate intranet for accessing information inside the organisation. It
also represents the latest, and perhaps necessary step in the intranet's
evolution from a site that offers static job-support and human
resources-related, into a knowledge discovery tool. This provides a starting
point for corporate knowledge workers to access real-time and historical
information, and a collaborative work-space (for communicating and sharing
information with co-workers).
Types of corporate
portals
The term 'corporate portal' has a large number of definitions and
interpretations, and is used by a wide variety of vendors for confusing array of
products. In its most general sense the term covers a variety of technology
areas and an even wider variety of business requirements. At the root, however,
all the definitions come down to the following - an information portal that
provides personalised access to a large and diverse set of corporate information
sources.
The key
analogy, of course, is with consumer-oriented Internet portals such as Excite
and Yahoo! The key difference is that corporate portals exist largely within a
single organisation and the information being accessed through the portal is
corporate data - for example, sales and financial data and documentation
(accessed intra-corporately) or product pricing and availability data (accessed
inter-corporately).
Vendors of corporate portals claim that they can bring the same sense of
order and ease of use to the corporate network as Yahoo! and others have brought
to the Worldwide Web. The portal uses similar search and content aggregation
concepts to integrate corporate business applications, external data, intranets,
extranets, and provides access to these sources via a single, but flexible web
page - akin to a 'Swiss army knife' -like user interface.
Market growth and
confusion
The market for corporate portals is growing extremely rapidly, yet is
extremely confused. There are numerous different types of vendor trying to
(re)position themselves in the portal space, including, but not limited to
knowledge management tool vendors, business intelligence tool vendors, document
management tool vendors, web publishing and intranet tool vendors. A string of
product announcements during the year from these vendors has been followed by
SAP, Sybase and Oracle. Microsoft and Lotus are expected to make formal 'portal'
announcements in late 1999.
Many of the version
1.x announcements coming from vendors are largely slideware re-labelling: in some cases
it simply means lightly rehashed versions of products that were once
labelled 'business intelligence' or 'document management' tools; in other cases it means little
more than that a product has a web front end. But these announcements have also
been followed not only by promises of real functionality in future versions, but
by financial commitments via a number of acquisitions - notably Hummingbird's
take-over of PCDOCS and Brio Technologies' purchase of SQRIBE. Some start-ups,
such as Plumtree have stolen a lead in the market, having released the third
version of its Corporate Portal Server product.
Back-end integration and application
hosting will be the key differentiators for corporate portal software. A 'second
generation' of portal products is also expected to offer increasingly hybrid
functionality. Some of the document management-centric portal vendors such as
Documentum and web-publishing-centric vendors such as DataChannel, for example,
will strive to add business intelligence analytical functionality and perhaps
improved workflow support. Other types of vendor will move in other directions.
Ultimately the
market will converge on a small number of core hybrid portal product types, but
there is likely to be significant confusion in the meantime. One of the great
things about portals is that it should not matter. Unlike user-interface debates
of the past, corporate portals do not necessarily have to become the domain of
just two or three dominant suppliers. Therefore, expect a lot of catch-up and
leap-frogging as more complete products continue to reach the market towards the
end of 1999 and into 2000.
Knowledge portals - gateways
to the corporate memory
Portals are plausible in the benefits
they claim to offer, but are still untested in terms of the real business
advantages they confer. One area where corporate portals can provide
considerable value is knowledge management. Knowledge workers certainly do need
help in navigating through increasingly daunting quantities of information
routinely placed on intranets.
Knowledge-oriented portals i.e.
knowledge portals - provide a much sharper focus for the technology. They also
provide an opportunity for knowledge management to provide an effective tool for
corporate end users. For forward looking organisations that are pursuing
practices and technologies for knowledge management the concept of a knowledge
portal is simple and compelling - a single web browser-based point of entry to
all of its knowledge assets.
The knowledge portal is also a
key technology that underpins an intranet-based knowledge management
architecture. But in order to achieve this, it needs to be more than a static catalogue
of information resources; it needs to enable, and be part of a company's 'corporate
memory'. From a knowledge management perspective, the main function of IT is to
create a connected environment for knowledge exchange - this connected
environment, based on a complex repository of information resources dispersed
across many individuals, groups and information, is the technical embodiment of
a corporate memory.
As knowledge management software brings together the resources of
the corporate memory, the knowledge portal, in its ideal form, becomes the
common interface to those resources for knowledge workers - the place where they are
at 'home' in the corporate network. To create and maintain a corporate memory, the
components of an integrated knowledge management architecture need to support
four key processes for knowledge exchange:
collaboration services - provide an environment for knowledge sharing
discovery services - help users retrieve and analyse (understand) the
information in the corporate memory
the knowledge repository - provides the information management functions for
captured knowledge
the knowledge map - provides a corporate schema for knowledge
classification.
The
knowledge portal's main role is to make available many of the functions and
facilities provided by other layers. It becomes a portal to a set of shared
services and knowledge resources that constitutes a network-based corporate
memory.
The
requirements for the corporate knowledge portal are ease-of-use, integration
with a wide range of services and applications, and a quickly adaptable
collaborative environment.
Mirroring the importance of Internet
technology at other levels within the knowledge management architecture, the
knowledge portal will typically be based on browser technology, allowing the
widest possible access and greatest integration of services. The role of the
knowledge portal is gaining further impetus from the adoption of XML (eXtended
Markup Language), which is enabling vendors to offer new levels of integration
and functionality through a browser interface.
As the user interface is standardised
around browser technology, the differentiation lies in the functions and
services that a knowledge portal makes available in an integrated manner. In
order to provide these functions and services, a vendor will need to be able to
provide the back-end services of a knowledge repository integrated closely with
other elements of the corporate infrastructure, as well as advanced tools for
collaboration and knowledge discovery.
Above all, the emergence of
the knowledge portal marks the move from the traditional (single) user interface
to the 'collective' or 'collaborative' interface. The emergence of this new type of
interface is being accompanied by greater personalisation of the interface in
terms of the delivery of information filtered according to user preferences such
as news items on specific topics, updates to websites and priority messages and
personalisation - based on a personal view of the corporate knowledge map for
easier navigation among resources.
Watch out - knowledge portals
can be political!
Although using a portal is easy,
building an effective knowledge portal is more complex. The primary aim should
not be to deliver information, but to provide a mechanism for knowledge
exchange, enabling interactions between people so as to make knowledge transfer
as friction free as possible. Lessons from the past should be remembered as the
hype around portals continues to rise. The biggest barriers to successful
knowledge sharing and improved collaboration still remain cultural and
organisational - no knowledge portal can succeed unless these issues are
addressed first.
Knowledge portals have the potential to become heated backgrounds
for intellectual property issues within the organisation. Individuals are bound
to realise the value they can develop from knowledge portals not only for
the enterprise, but also for themselves. They will increasingly take an 'ownership'
interest in their portals and the value generated and realised through them will
increasingly become a matter of personal, not just organisational,
wealth.
Who are the corporate portal vendors today ?
The corporate portal
market is attracting a variety of vendors from specialist areas, for different
reasons, including:
| 'Specialist'
portal vendors: These are primarily technology-driven companies, and tend
to focus on the construction and management of corporate taxonomies, as
well as on the on-going categorisation of new information. They bill
themselves as 'MyYahoos for corporate content'; they tout access to
corporate data sources and information on the Web /context management and
stress personalisation capabilities. Examples include: Autonomy Systems,
Plumtree Software, Perspecta and Epicentric.
|
| Groupware and
collaboration software vendors: The corporate portal is simply another
battle in the fierce war between the two key players in this market:
Microsoft and Lotus. Both want to see their products as the default entry
point into the corporate memory. Among key new features in the R5 version
of Notes/Domino is a new personalised, portal-style interface. Microsoft's
recent announcements of its future plans for Exchange includes the
portal-like 'Digital Dashboard'. |
| Document management
and information retrieval vendors: Many of these vendors are taking
advantage of the hype around portals to reinforce their role in managing
unstructured information in an intranet environment. These products
are being augmented with web capabilities that enable them to manage
and query new data types such as HTML pages in addition to what s
traditionally housed in a document repository. Vendors such as Documentum,
Open Text and Verity are all keen for corporate portals to be seen as just
one part of an extensive corporate knowledge management architecture that
they can provide. |
|
Business intelligence and data warehousing vendors: These see portals
as rejuvenating a market that has been hit by uncertainty since the entry
of Microsoft with its OLAP Server product. Typically referred to
as 'Enterprise Information Portals' in this context - the promise is of a
cheaper, more flexible front-end to OLAP and data warehouse services that
is integrated with the corporate intranet. Most products are still
best-suited for ad hoc reporting on structured data, but are evolving to
address unstructured information such as web content and documents.
Examples include: Information Advantage, Viador and Brio
Technologies. |
| Application
vendors such as SAP and PeopleSoft: These are trying to ensure that their
products are positioned at the core of the corporate information
architecture. By providing a 'portal' element to their products, they can
be seen to be driving the delivery of information to users - not simply
acting as a passive, back-end data source. SAP plans to deliver software
that brings the look and feel of a portal to its R/3 applications
environment. SAP is also launching its own portal (MySAP) on the Web,
which it hopes to turn into a kind of online marketplace for
business-to-business commerce. PeopleSoft, Oracle, and other ERP vendors
are moving in the same direction. |
| Content
management vendors: They are adding personalisation capabilities to their
software products, giving users custom views of information coming in from
the web, intranets and extranets. Sample players include 2Bridge Software,
Broadvision and Vignette. |
Madan Sheina is a Lead
Analyst within Ovum Ltd., and author of Ovum's latest report - Knowledge
Management: Building the Collaborative Enterprise (1999). He can be contacted
at: MMS@ovum.com
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