InformationWeek

But the IT team's work had just begun. Although the system helped make sense of volumes of data, it still led to information overload. What Procter & Gamble really needed was a way to personalize the information for each employee, based on his or her job, says Dan Gerbus, project manager for the personalized portal project in the Cincinnati company's IT division. "Users wanted one tool on their browser that would consolidate and deliver all the information they needed to do their work without having to navigate through 14 Web sites," he says.

Four years ago, providing such functionality wasn't simple. The portal market was virtually nonexistent; after seeking a packaged solution and finding only immature and ineffective products, Gerbus and his team set out to build a portal to their intranet that would provide Procter & Gamble employees with a more personalized information experience.

What Gerbus soon discovered--and what today's portal vendors are banking on--is that building a portal isn't easy. In January, Procter & Gamble awarded a contract to Plumtree Software Inc. for 100,000 seats of Plumtree Corporate Portal. Procter & Gamble, which became an investor in Plumtree in May, uses the portal to deliver marketing, product, and strategic information, as well as industry-news documents, in thousands of Lotus Notes databases to its employees. The portal's document directory pulls data from more than 1 million Web pages.

Still in development are links to the company's SAP R/3 enterprise resource planning system and a wide range of Oracle data-warehousing products, including Oracle Discoverer, Oracle Express, and Oracle Sales Analyzer. Customer data captured from E.piphany Inc.'s E4 application will also be incorporated.

The idea, Gerbus says, is to give employees one place to get the information and applications they need. "Today, they have to scan multiple intranet sites to find ways to get that. The portal is one-stop shopping," he says.

Gerbus says that by the time the portal becomes fully operational next year, Procter & Gamble employees will be able to glance at their "dashboard," which will deliver a preset view into various information sources, and find all the up-to-date information they need to make decisions about new products, advertising campaigns, or other initiatives.

"If a business manager always needs to track some key pieces of information, we'll be able to build a dashboard for that," Gerbus says. "But we'll also provide the tools for them to get to the application or data source for a more in-depth analysis."

Many companies are turning to a growing lineup of portal vendors--including Brio Technology, Cognos, DataChannel, Lotus Development, Plumtree, Portera Systems, Sybase, and Viador--to handle their knowledge-management initiatives. Executives are demanding that data be readily accessible by common business users, rather than being stored indiscriminately, so it can have a daily impact. Portals are designed to answer this demand, taking over where the knowledge-management framework leaves off, according to Herve Chaveau, VP of marketing in the office systems group at Xerox Corp.

While knowledge management focuses on sharing information and managing documents efficiently, portals add technology to the mix, letting companies manage an ever-growing glut of documents and applications more effectively. For example, Procter & Gamble is managing corporate knowledge within its portal infrastructure.

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