InformationWeek

April 26, 1999

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Sharing Knowledge
Corporate Portals: Make Knowledge Accessible To All

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Sharing Knowledge

Editor's Note

CIO Panel

Building A Culture

Corporate Portals

The Role Of IT

Clearly, windowing does not rise to the challenge, either. It's not that windows are inept, but that they quickly outgrow their usefulness as a knowledge worker's desktop. Windowing is not a unified approach to managing information. Even having 20 windows open on your desktop won't create obvious bonds between the processes that use the information in those same windows. Is your desktop reflective? In other words, is it obvious when you look at your desktop what process you are involved in? Unlikely.

Work patterns are reflected in how a worker uses a particular document with a certain database, or the individuals he or she most often communicates with via E-mail when negotiating a particular type of deal. To capture these interactions, the corporate portal may use a heuristic approach to determine user preferences and habits over time. And since most knowledge workers spend most of their day interacting through a desktop, this is not as difficult as it sounds.

Although the process and the connections that convert information to knowledge reside principally in people's minds, the tools they use to make those connections--and the way in which they organize the information necessary to support their decisions--reside at the desktop. Therefore, these toolscan easily be made part of a corporate memory.

Through a personalized desktop, the discontinuity that results from the movement of workers can be significantly reduced. While not a panacea, the aggregation of information sources provides added value by capturing the connections that make up the value basis for most knowledge workers' environments.

Personal Vs. Organizational
In 10 years, when corporate portals become standard in the enterprise IT landscape, one of the most striking ironies may be that the greatest of all organizational assets will become a heated battleground of intellectual property. Individuals who become accustomed to this new technology are bound to realize its incredible value not only to the enterprise, but to their own careers, free agency, and perhaps even their legacy.

After all, if information is truly the greatest asset, and if we live in a knowledge-based society in which the factors of production are intellectual, then portals become a matter of personal, not just organizational, wealth. However, as organizations themselves move closer to a free-agent model with mergers and acquisitions becoming the standard means of making an enterprise grow, corporate portals will become far more attractive if they are readily transferable.

In the same way that craftsmen once brought their own tools to their trade, individuals could conceivably take an ownership interest in their corporate portals and bring them along as essential tools of their trade. After all, the portal will be the most tangible form of knowledge--their "structural capital," to use a term popular among intellectual capitalists.

Shift In Economy
What happens when we come face-to-face with unlimited information and computing power at the same time that the very notion of knowledge as an intangible is being challenged? As with everything of value, accumulation of wealth and the basic economics of ownership will ultimately be factors. Nearly 150 years ago, Karl Marx postulated that the economy is the fundamental force behind all human development. "Eras change," wrote Marx in his manifesto, Das Kapital. "As the factors of production [technology, resources, and organization] change, these must be owned by the workers." He was close to the truth, but far from the reality. The radical shift in today's economy is not only in the factors of production, from industrial to informational, but in who owns the factors of production.

Imagine this scenario: a dimly lit lawyer's office, solemn faces staring blankly across a dark mahogany conference table.

"To my beloved son, Thomas, I leave my entire estate, except for the knowledge portal I used to build my expansive fortune. This I leave to my daughter, who I trust will use it to build a better world."

"See, sis? I told you dad liked you best."

Far-fetched? Only if you discount the value of knowledge and the ingenuity of knowledge workers in taking ownership over their own destiny--the same mistake Marx made.

Thomas M. Koulopoulos is president of The Delphi Group, a knowledge- and document-management consulting and market-research firm in Boston.

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Read sidebar story, "The Portal Landscape."