I-Tech

Knowledge Portals

by Madanmohan Rao

A challenging but rewarding evolution

The corporate portal – a marriage of concepts underlying the early consumer portals and a proliferation of decentralized Intranet sites on corporate networks – has certainly come a long way, spawning an entire industry of vendors, implementation methodologies, systems integrators, consulting firms, and even books and events.

The basic corporate portal has now evolved to an enterprise portal, going beyond internal organizational roles to include customers, vendors and external partners. In terms of functionality and strategy, some 21st century corporate portals have also become “knowledge portals,” encompassing not just vanilla functionality — content creation, aggregation, customization, search, browse, collaboration, access control, alerts, transaction – but also “knowledge dashboard” utilities. These include mobilisation of knowledge according to workflow, expertise yellow pages, communities of practice, analytics tools, knowledge taxonomy, social network analysis, metadata, and narrative structures like blogging.

“Portal technology is the first killer application for knowledge management. There’s been no good way to pull together an organization’s knowledge until the portal came along,” according to Hadley Reynolds, Director of Research, Delphi Group.

Reflecting the growing convergence between KM and e-learning, some corporate portals also offer “smart” features like corporate learning, offering just-in-time instruction contextualised to the business workflow and based on organizational memory.

“We have been able to cut processing costs for some of our clients via our B2B exchange portal by 30 to 40 per cent. We already offer e-learning modules to our clients via our corporate portal that help them use the services on the platform,” says Jon Richman, Standard Chartered Bank’s business head of Global B2BeX, and a speaker at the Ark Group’s Corporate Portals Asia 2002 conference (www.cp-asia.com) in Hong Kong.

“There is also a wealth of data that customers can use to enhance their knowledge of how to manage their trade processes more efficiently,” says Richman.

And it is not just corporate portals but government portals as well that are beginning to embrace the power of the portal model. For instance, 350,000 active service personnel are reportedly receiving e-learning on the US Navy’s  knowledge portal.

Some of the early benefits of portals, of course, arise in tighter organizational integration and cutting costs of business activities. The US General Services Administration’s GSA Advantage! procurement portal claims to have slashed procurement costs by 80%.

In a post-9/11 post-Bali world, we can also expect to see the extended portal model being embraced by a number of government, intelligence, law-enforcement and healthcare organizations across international borders as well.

For instance, one of the implications of the US Patriot Act of 2001 is a greater push by public agencies to share knowledge on protecting the infrastructure of finance, health care, transportation, telecommunications, and energy.

At the level of connectivity via handheld devices, “mobile portals” can help distribute information like GIS services across a wide range of field workers in multiple organisations: utility, police, sanitation, and telecom. Vendors and tools active on this front include ESRI’s ArcPad, Tablet PC, MapInfo, FieldWorker, MapXtend, PocketGIS, Solus, Plumtree, InfoImage, and Arcstream.

“We are currently piloting wireless PDA. We have an extensive system of security to plug any loopholes that may arise: firewalls, NAV software, audit trails, and authentication,” says Peter Halliday, Assistant Commissioner of the Hong Kong police force and its former CIO.

Named POINT (POlice INTranet), the portal serves the entire police force and connects 100 LAN sites with 11,000 PCs and laptops.  In-house teams developed the portal at a cost of HK million. “The content is vast and it has become an important point of reference for members of the police force,” says Halliday.

(Rao writes on development on IT)

Send your feedback to the editor: bizline@mos.com.np  
2003 © Mercantile Communications Pvt. Ltd. P.O. Box 876, Durbar Marg, Kathmandu, NEPAL. Tel : 977 1 220 773, 243 566 . Fax: 977 1 225 407. Reproduction in any form is prohibited without prior permission. No part of the articles which appear in the internet version on NEW BUSINESS AGE may be reproduced without the permission of Mercantile Communications Pvt. Ltd. For reprinting rights, please write to us.  Send us your feedback : contact us.