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April 26, 1999

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Sharing Knowledge
Corporate Portals: Make Knowledge Accessible To All

By Thomas M. Koulopoulos

Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

Corporate Portals

The Role Of IT

ortals have garnered more attention than virtually any other Internet technology over the past year--partly because of Wall Street's mania over Excite, Infoseek, Lycos, and Yahoo. Some have gone so far as to call portals the next generation of desktop computing, saying that portals will do for global knowledge-work what the railroad did for the industrial revolution.

But there is more to the portal story. As we saw with the Internet itself, the real value for providers and consumers lies well behind the firewall. It is no secret that the baseline of corporate value has shifted from bricks and mortar to intellectual capital. The promise offered by the corporate portal to capture and share knowledge is very alluring, especially for the knowledge-based enterprise suffocating under the chaotic overabundance of all types of information.

Indeed, in a recent Delphi survey of 300 IT and business managers from Fortune 500 companies, more than half were introducing a corporate portal. Another quarter will follow suit in the next two years.

Why the mad rush? The rise of Internet technology has resulted in a frustrating experience for nearly everyone using the Web. From home users to knowledge workers, it's the rare interaction with a computer that involves a single information resource. The simplest Web search, the most basic knowledge work, involves the coordination of myriad sources of data, processes, and people--not to mention the integration of a multitude of desktop, enterprise, and Web technologies.

Corporate portals reflect a fundamental transformation of our view of enterprise information management, from a series of isolated tasks to the coordinated integration of knowledge.

Dual Role
The role of corporate portals is not simply to help individuals make sense of the volume of information at hand. More important, portals help users cope with the breakdown in our ability to maintain the underlying connections between information sources--the basis of knowledge and knowledge sharing.

For example, aircraft maker Boeing Co. has an intranet hosting more than 1,600 separate sites used by 160,000 employees. This incredible influx of readily accessible, yet completely disconnected, sources and streams of information makes it clear that the current means of navigating, organizing, and linking information with underlying business processes is woefully inadequate in most organizations. It is in this "middle-office" space that corporate portals promise the greatest impact.

Middle Office
If there is an ideal fit for corporate portals, it's at the intersection of the front and back office where negotiation, product differentiation, and competitive advantage thrive. While back-office functions focus on cost management and front-office functions focus on revenue enhancement, the middle office is where profit is maximized and risk is minimized by the efficiency achieved in coordinating the many information streams, people, and knowledge that create sound business. The middle office is where businesses ultimately succeed or fail.

The audience for corporate portals is best defined by the role and function of knowledge workers in this middle-office space. Though front- and back-office functions have reached a stage of relative equilibrium and parity across most industries--thanks to extensive enterprise resource planning applications and structured transactions--middle-office workers live in a dynamic and unpredictable world. The payback for any application of technology here is measured in orders of magnitude.

In the middle office, corporate portals create a single point of access. They integrate within one interface the highly unstructured nature of knowledge-work with the wide variety of ERP, document, and customer-relationship management systems in use. It is an interface that will ultimately render obsolete the contemporary, window-based metaphors we use today.

Today's application-based PCs separate and segregate functions that are intuitively part of the same process. This is like using a different type of telephone for every state you call. Computer users have suffered this absurdity in quiet indignation long enough. As corporate portals evolve, users will turn on their PCs to be greeted by a portal, rather than a cacophony of applications, similar to today's Internet users who fire up their browser window with My Yahoo as their home page.

Portal Payback
The payback for a knowledge-based organization using corporate portals can be summed up in one word: continuity. The challenge of knowledge work is not so much dealing with the pace of the work, but more important, dealing with the pace of knowledge workers.

As workers move from task to task, job to job, and company to company, their basic work context travels with them.

Corporate portals capture the integral patterns of work in the form of a permanent personalized desktop. The process goes well beyond simply customizing the graphical presentation of information, as you would with a commercial portal such as Netcenter. What's needed is a capture of the relevancy inherent in the way an individual works with applications and information. An example is a self-service desktop that addresses the very individualized needs of knowledge workers, as opposed to a general-purpose desktop environment.