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Overview: The Social Life of KM Tools 13
tent, services, processes, and people. Key characteristics for assessment of portal vendors
include scalability, security, customizability, navigability, and ubiquitous accessibility.
“IBM employees rate our portal, called W3, as the most credible, useful and preferred
source of information today,” according to Ng; the portal displaced employees’
managers and co-workers as the primary source of information over the period
1998–2001. Two-thirds of IBM employees believe that the portal is now critical to
performing their jobs and saves them valuable time. The portal also includes sections
or “portlets” for working knowledge.
“We are now entering the era of the role-based workplace,” says Ng, where the portal
must provide multiple functionalities: employee-to-work (applications), employeeto-employee
(collaboration), employee-to-company (yellow pages, HR, e-learning),
employee-to-external (collaborative commerce), and employee-to-life (finances, leisure).
“An enterprise whose business processes are integrated end-to-end across the company
and with key partners, suppliers and customers can respond with speed to any
customer demand, market opportunity or external threat,” advises Ng. To be effective,
however, KM architecture must go hand-in-hand with organization-wide cultural
initiatives for knowledge-exchange, content policies (e.g., document templates, validation
processes), and communication policies (e.g., promptness of responses, adherence
to threading tools).
Platforms for personalized access and interaction have evolved from chaotic
intranets to more cohesive enterprise portals, says Tom Koulopoulos, President of
Delphi Corporation. Delphi classifies enterprise portal vendors into the following categories:
content management (Documentum, Open Text), collaboration (Microsoft,
Lotus), search (Inktomi, Autonomy, Verity), KM (Intraspect), and ERP (PeopleSoft).
Enterprise knowledge portals have emerged as a foundational tool to
bind together the various content and collaboration activities of a KM ecosystem. A
well-designed enterprise portal site map can correspond meaningfully to the knowledge
maps, communities, and expertise in an organization.
“The enterprise portal is a KM solution that brings a method to the madness. At
the same time, KM professionals should beware of the ‘portal in a box’ myth. Portal
maintenance can be expensive due to the frequent changes in people, processes and
information,” cautions Heidi Collins, author of Corporate Portals and Enterprise
Knowledge Portals (2003). The enterprise portal is a way of context management, and
the knowledge desktop should create an actionable environment for end-users.
Enterprise knowledge portals (a natural evolution of corporate portals, which
themselves evolved out of corporate intranets and the consumer portal model) are
useful platforms for tying together KM functions. These include features for content
organization (for business intelligence and learning materials), presentation, search,
integration, personalization, and collaborative activity.
Enterprise portals can help turn information into knowledge by facilitating the
organization, navigation, visualization, and heuristic interaction of employees with
one another and with information. “Business portals nurture a sense of community
among users and provide access to knowledge and the experts who maintain that
knowledge. They impact the supply side, demand side and organizational knowledge,”
Koulopoulos says.
From the industry side, a variety of alliances are being formed by vendors along the
KM tool spectrum. For instance, IBM (Websphere portal) and Interwoven (TeamSite
and MetaTagger content tools) have formed alliances for KM solutions for a number
of clients in the public sector (e.g., state government of Utah), industry (Siemens, John
Deere), finance (CSFB, Pacific Capital Bancorp), healthcare (Kaiser Permanente,
Wellpoint), and distribution (Boston Market).