1. Executive Summary
A week does not seem to pass without a software, middleware or publishing company issuing a statement of intent to enter into the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) market space. But what is an Enterprise Information Portal? Where has this market come from? Is it an extension of Knowledge Management or does it replace the corporate-wide Intranet? What functionalities are inherent parts of an Enterprise Information Portal? What are the business benefits?

These and many other questions are addressed within this briefing paper. There is currently confusion in the market place regarding the functionalities that determine true EIP technology, both from the supplier and end-users. True EIPs are not just a tool kit designed to build personalised web sites behind the firewall.

This is the main reason why SageMaker has commissioned the briefing paper, to look at the market and examine the evolution and inter relationships between Information Management – Knowledge Management – Intranet to Enterprise Information Portals. Surely if EIP technology has roots in these areas it is imperative that an Enterprise Information Portal can still deliver against these very real business issues.

The market has witnessed a certain degree of miss-representation in the market, with vendor claims that rarely match the delivered solution. We at SageMaker are of the firm belief that this only serves to undermine the industry as a whole, there should be no “smoke and mirrors” within the market, we believe that the content of this briefing paper will help you to take an honest look at the market and the vendors who work within it. EIP technology has rapidly evolved from “link management” to passive montage displays to interactive e-business and transaction environments. With the quick evolution of the market place it is important that you review the latest research and the technology behind the User Interface.

This paper can be used as the starting point of any corporate EIP research. It aims to help you understand and manage your expectations when engaging with any EIP vendor. In section 7 there are 28 questions, which we recommend that you should include in a Request For Information (RFI) from a vendor. This will match EIP delivery with key business benefits (highlighted in section 6). Section 8 offers a list of web sites from independent sources that you may find useful for EIP research

Lastly SageMaker have included an Executive Summary of our products and services. This offers a benchmark of what EIP technology can deliver to your company. A full colour version can be downloaded from www.sagemaker.com/benefit.htm.

Sincerely,

Charles Barnick, Managing Director, EMEA

2. Introduction
2.1 Information management
There is a tendency to regard the issues of managing information as a recent problem, brought on by the wealth of published information that is now available. This is somewhat ironic in view of the fact that only a very small percentage of businesses actually make effective use of information about the external business environment. The reality is that for decades, if not centuries, businesses who have paid attention to the management of information regarding the internal state of the business, and about external market factors, have been highly successful. The success is often the result of the skills of perhaps just a few people who have developed the techniques to identify, integrate and assimilate relevant information from documents, meetings and from colleagues.

The opportunities and issues arising from an increasing volume of information, and the potential benefits of computers in handling this volume, were first highlighted in the early 1970s, though the genesis of the information desktop arguably dates back to Vannevar Bush and his MEMEX machine in his famous article in Atlantic Monthly in 1946 (1) In 1969 Georges Anderla was commissioned by the OECD Directorate for Scientific Affairs to carry out a forecasting study on information needs and resources over the next 15 years. Anderla forecast that the rate of growth of scientific and technical information would grow exponentially at an annul rate of 12% until 1985, and probably well beyond that date. At the time this and other forecasts that he made were treated with great scepticism by most experts, but a decade later were found to be even somewhat conservative. (2)

The information requirements of managers have been the subject of much research and discussion over the last thirty years. In 1972 a paper on the Information Needs of Top Management was given by Nick Pollock of the British Steel Corporation (now Corvus) at the Annual Conference of the Institute of Information Scientists, and most of the conclusions reached in the paper stand the test of time well. (3)

He proposed that the main information requirements for managers were to be able to

• Keep control of the business in the very short term
• Keep control of the business in the long term
• Seize fleeting opportunities for profit improvement or cost reduction
• Solve problems of resource allocation
• Design and construct projects for change

Of course in 1972 the microprocessor was just a year old, and the IBM PC would not be launched for a decade, so Pollock was pessimistic about the likely impact of computers on effective information management

2.2 The future is e-business
The Internet economy places a range of new pressures in businesses. Business markets are now global, and as a result competitors are global. Only a few years ago a letter requesting product information might have taken ten days to arrive, and a reply by letter within perhaps two or three weeks was regarded as good customer service. Now an e-mail request is expected to gain a response within minutes, and a company web site needs to be constantly updated to provide a 24/7-shop window.

Although 2000 has not been a good year for dot.com businesses that does not mean to say that the e-business revolution has stopped dead in its tracks. The initial focus was on the B2C market, on the basis that even a very small percentage of this vast Internet-connected market would result in substantial revenues and business valuations. In the event these businesses failed even to gain this level of uptake, and during the first half of 2000 the venture capital industry and other investors began to pull back their expectations for this business sector, and the extent of their investment and levels of patience.

The realisation is now that the B2B market is where the future for e-business lies, and this imposes a range of opportunities and constraints on a business. Just how large this market is in terms of revenues is still very difficult to predict, but that has not slowed the rate at which businesses are creating IT platforms to trade electronically. There is a potential danger in this rush to e-commerce, and that is that the entire business has to be re-aligned behind the firewall to be able to be able to provide effective e-commerce services, and to be able to cope with the expectations of current and new customers.

2.3 Knowledge management
Since the dawn of the computer era the fascination of businesses has been in the capacity of the memory and processing power of the computer in the basement. This has largely caused them to ignore the memory capacity and processing power of the human brain. Over the last few years companies have now begun to realise the value of what is often referred to as intellectual capital, a phrase popularised by Tom Stewart, a columnist for Fortune magazine.

Although there is general agreement about the value of incorporating the knowledge of individual staff the processes that need to be implemented to achieve this are still very much in the development stage. Rob van der Spek and Jan Kingma (4) suggest that the main objective of knowledge management is to arrange, orchestrate and organise an environment in which people are invited and facilitated to apply, develop, share, combine and consolidate knowledge. Knowledge management software tools are a component in this environment, but on their own these tools can at best be of marginal value. The timing of the introduction of these tools is therefore highly critical, and ideally a solution is required that does not involve major changes to other business applications, such as an intranet.

2.4 My desk-top
Walking around any organisation can be a very revealing exercise in office spatial politics. No matter how strongly a company tries to impose a “standard desk” for its employees everyone customises their desk area to meet their own particular style of working. Some have very tidy desk areas, with everything carefully filed away. Others function best with piles of paper seemingly spread randomly around the desk. Enlightened companies have realised that permitting, and indeed encouraging, staff to optimise their desk and office environment improves efficiency and effectiveness, and reduces stress levels.

When it comes to the PC desk top all too often companies then forget the benefits of customisation and seek to impose a standard look-and-feel in the interests (usually) of the speed of installation and ongoing support from the corporate IT department. This can usually be tolerated for standard application packages, but is often extended to the establishment of a corporate intranet. The chances of a single intranet home page being able to meet the needs of all staff are very low. However the alternative of allowing multiple intranets with very limited integration can look impressive but still fail to deliver any substantive business benefits.

Nevertheless a dependable and extensible corporate IT platform is very important so that all the building blocks are in place. There is no time, and certainly no budget, to change the underlying platform in order to accommodate new applications arising from new business objectives.

3. Competing with Information
3.1 The Strategic Information Alignment model
One of the leading thinkers on the subject of information management has been Professor Don Marchand at the IMD Business School in Lausanne. Based on the research that he and his colleagues have carried out he has developed a strategic alignment model for the use of information in the enterprise. (5)

The model sets out four ways in which using information can create business value

In seeking to manage risks companies need to access information on the credit worthiness of customers, the impact of exchange rate fluctuations, the reliance on key staff and the levels of protection from intellectual property infringement

Information can also be used to reduce costs through the analytical review of operational outcomes, identifying new process developments and sourcing inputs from companies with more competitive prices

Along the vertical axis, companies are recognising the importance of understanding the requirements of their customers, and using this information to make every customer feel that they are of the greatest importance to the company

Finally there is the need to obtain information on new technologies, new markets and new business opportunities.

In an ideal world companies would invest in information management solutions that would give them 100% of the information that they need in each of the four areas. The investment is too great, and as a result companies develop pragmatic information solutions. As a result the commitment to information management of a pharmaceutical company may be somewhat different to that for a chain of retail stores.

The situation is made even more complex as a result of the fact that not only do companies in these vertical industry sectors have different information requirements, but the management roles in these sectors will also require specific blends of information.

Indeed not only does the information need to be industry specific, but also relevant and of a nature to add value to the job function. The information needs of strategic planning will be different to the needs of marketing, however consolidation needs to develop to ensure efficient information management across the enterprise. One platform ideally should resolve the Enterprises Information needs.

The way in which the company uses information is highly dynamic, and as the result of a change in the business environment the focus of information attention may need to be changed radically, perhaps only for a short period of time to meet an unforeseen change in the market. It is also important to be able to monitor the use made of information, especially external information services accessed on a subscription basis, and the extent of the use of internal information resources to ensure that the maximum return is gained on the investment in information resources and information systems.

What is the value that can be attributed to the information used by an enterprise in its decision making process?

3.2 Reducing the time to decision
Managers are faced with the paradox that the volume of both internal corporate information and external business information that is potentially available to make a decision continues to grow rapidly, and yet the time available to make the decision is reducing as the world works at Internet speed. The volume of both categories of information, and the need to ensure that the knowledge of staff is also brought into the decision equation makes the crucial task of integration very difficult indeed.

3.3 The importance of customisation
Although most managers would agree that “information” is important, rarely is any thought given to the fact that different members of staff have differing information requirements, based not only on the task that they are undertaking and the decisions that this task involves, but also their own experience and expertise. The granularity of information is poorly understood.

Some of the key parameters of information access and use are the following

A business planning manager may wish to track a competitor in a very top-level way, looking for information on share price movements, major acquisitions and executive board changes. Within the same company the sales director has a requirement to track the same company in considerable detail, looking at product pricing, marketing literature (etc)

Consideration also needs to be given as to the frequency of up-date, and how this is carried out. To take the example above, the competitive analysis may be carried out on an ad hoc basis, perhaps as a precursor to an acquisition. Another option would be to look at the company every quarter (to look at earnings statements) or monthly (to view press releases). For other managers the requirement for every available piece of information to be pushed to the desktop as soon as it enters the system is of considerable importance.

Another factor to be taken into account in retrieving information is the character of the information. Will it be largely or totally homogeneous (such as a set of Excel spread sheets) or will there be a need to trawl through large reports, PowerPoint presentations, e-mails, web sites and documents in foreign languages.

Although much is made of the need to be able to integrate internal and external sources of information, this needs to be at the discretion of the individual. In many situations only information from specific sources is needed, and it must be possible to specify what these sources are

Attention also needs to be given to the extent to which staff has the right to see certain information

The way in which information is accessed also has to take into account, as will the extent to which it will be acted upon. Will the requirement be a largely individual personal requirement, or will there be a need to share the information with a team. At the other end of the spectrum the information also needs to be made available to everyone who needs it in the enterprise, including the extended enterprise of customers and suppliers. This is probably the most complex area of customisation as teams can be established and disbanded with little notice, and the information requirements of teams in particular will change as the project on which the team is working develops, and team members join and leave. The need for this team to access the knowledge of the team as a whole, and the rest of the enterprise, is another important requirement.

4. Intranets – the Story So Far
4.1 Early adopters
A definition of an intranet that is based around the use of Internet and World Wide Web technologies has the downside of ignoring the experience gained over the last decade by companies using other technologies, in particular Lotus Notes. It is well worth reading Liberation Management by Tom Peters (6), published in 1992, as it is full of fascinating case studies of companies that had begun to recognise in the late 1980s the benefits of effective information management and of knowledge management.

The problem with many of the books on knowledge management, and on the use of intranets, is that the case histories tend to be of large, technologically-capable US-based organisations, and it is difficult to read between the lines to understand what is generally applicable and what is specific to the company at the time the case history was documented. The early adopters included large IT companies, pharmaceutical and biomedical companies, management consultancies and other service-based companies such as international courier companies.

It is comparatively easy to look at a web site that has some innovative feature and examine the HTML code used in order to adopt the idea. It is much more difficult to look at a range of intranets, and to learn from them what has worked, what might work given time, and what has totally failed to work.

4.2 Levels of deployment
It is equally difficult to gauge the levels of deployment of intranets in organisations. Many organisations have multiple intranets, especially if they are highly decentralised global businesses. Other organisations may well have an intranet, but the use by staff is limited and decreasing all the time! International Data Corporation carry out a survey of some 10,000 companies each year and the results from the 1999 survey indicate that around 50% of employees will have access to an intranet by the end of 2000.

The annual Benchmarking Study sponsored by the UK Department of Trade and Industry supports this forecast. (7) In the 2000 edition of the study the penetration of intranets and extranets was surveyed in a range of businesses

Source UK Department of Trade and Industry Benchmark Study 2000

The figures indicate the percentage of employees in each country that have access to an intranet or extranet. The rate of increase over the last year suggests that by 2001 the level of access by employees could be in excess of 70%.

4.3 The anticipated benefits
Most intranets have been established without clear objectives being set regarding the likely value of the Intranet or how these were going to be assessed. The main reason for this is probably that the initial investment in IT was regarded as being minimal. As a result

The conventional wisdom that has grown up about intranets are that they:

• Enable staff to integrate internal and external information with the skills and expertise of the entire organisation
• Reduce the risks inherent in any business decision
• Ensure that the organisation is not at risk from the loss of experienced staff
• Increase staff efficiency and reduced decision times
• Reinforce organisation culture
• Assist in the development of a ‘smart’ agile organisation

Achieving these aims has turned out to be much more difficult than expected, especially in the public and not-for profit sector where it is much more difficult to make a business case without the ‘for profit’ dimension to the discussion.

4.4 The lessons
Most of the descriptions of intranets, which have been published, or presented at a conference, tend to position the intranet as a success story. Certainly many intranets have had a positive impact in the business, but even with these intranets the lessons of deployment are only just below the surface.

Among the lessons, which have been learned by organisations, which have implemented an intranet, are the following.

• The staff resources required to implement an intranet are always under-estimated. Often staff have to undertake their intranet roles alongside their original roles, and this soon leads to one, or both of the roles, not being undertaken effectively. Job descriptions and evaluations have to take intranet contribution and use into account
• Once an intranet fails to deliver benefits it is very difficult to re-launch the intranet as staff lose their trust in the desktop. The challenges of re-design and re-launch are so great that the home page just tends to get extended in an unstructured way to cope with new divisions, categories of information and geographic expansion.
• The importance of trust in an intranet is often overlooked. Staff assume that care has been taken to make sure that all relevant material on the intranet is accurate, reliable and timely. As soon as a decision made on inaccurate information delivered by an intranet back-fires on a member of staff they are unlikely to trust the intranet in future, and bad news always travels fast around an organisation.
• An intranet never stops being developed. Organisations often put considerable resources into the launch of an intranet, and then scale down the development effort. As the objectives of the organisation change then so do the information and intranet requirements, and if action is not taken to reflect these requirements again the level of use will fall off quite quickly.
• Adding electronic versions of printed documents to an intranet without re-designing the business process and the document results in a reduction in efficiency. Documents on intranets tend to be much longer and more complex structurally than those on a web site, and all to frequently inadequate attention is paid to not only adapting the document, but also the underlying business process to maximise the technical benefits of an intranet
• Without a clear focus for the objectives of the intranet the content fails to support these objectives. Content, which just happens to be available, is added to the intranet without any thought of its relevance, or how it will be used on an electronic desktop. Not infrequently key documents are not available at launch, often because no thought was given as to what these documents or databases might be.
• The content architecture is based on the organisational structure, and severely inhibits locating relevant information from across the organisation. A primary objective of an intranet is to be able to share information across existing organisational channels and information flows and yet usually little attention is paid to understanding these information flows, and how they could be facilitated in the design of the intranet.
• Introducing an intranet will not in itself create a communicating organisation, or ensure that knowledge is captured and distributed. The organisation has to have developed a strategic approach to information and knowledge management, setting out the objectives and the resources to be allocated. Intranets are all about people, not clever IT.
• Adding an extranet onto an intranet can be a very difficult operation when the likelihood of this being implemented was not accommodated in the intranet architecture.

In the end intranets tend to have as their focus the organisation, rather than the individual. Intranets lack flexibility needed within the ever changing demands of business, they are not customisable or personlisable to the end-user.

4.5 The need for scalability
Intranets tend to be like supernovae. When first noticed they gleam brightly in the darkness of information space, but all too soon they condense as a black hole into which information is poured, never to emerge again. It often comes down to a problem of what is often termed “scalability”. It is very difficult to anticipate the information requirements of a company, especially if it is growing through acquisitions and mergers.

To give just two examples. In October 2000 General Electric took just three days to acquire Honeywell, from the time that Jack Welch, the CEO decided to mount the bid in response to the announcement from United Technologies, to the acceptance of the bid by the Honeywell board. Just a few years ago British Airways decided to move into the low-cost air travel market, and launched their Go subsidiary. Now this subsidiary is to be sold off. There are many more examples.

Any technical solution to information and knowledge management needs to be able to be extended, or reduced, with minimum and predictable changes in technical requirements and costs.

5. Corporate and Enterprise Portals
5.1 Definitions
The initial concept of a ‘portal’ dates back to the very beginnings of the World Wide Web and the launch of Yahoo! as a structured access point to Web resources. For centuries librarians have been promoting the benefits of the classification of information, recognising that the human brain is highly contextual, and works best when inter-relationships are suggested.

Despite the advances in Internet search technology that have been developed over the last few years Yahoo! is still the most popular site on the web. This is due both to the structure that Yahoo! places on the information content, and also the functionality that the site offers through the My Yahoo! option, enabling each user to specify the content that they wish to see on their particular home page.

Following the lead of My Yahoo! other sites adopted a similar approach, ranging from other consumer-oriented portals such as Excite to business portals such as CEOExpress.

To a significant extent the current perspective on corporate portals is the result of the experience gained with these consumer portal sites and the convergence of a number of different technologies that were evolving rapidly in the latter half of the 1990’s. These included:

• Business intelligence
• Data mining
• Data warehousing
• Document management
• Enterprise resource planning
• Knowledge management

These applications were a response to the information technology industry and the emerging demands for effective access to corporate electronic information resources. Until probably the mid-1990s companies still had a substantial investment in paper-based systems, which meant that whole scale migration to electronic information management would not result in any significant enhancements to productivity. As businesses moved towards one PC per worker the extent and value of the electronic archive grew substantially, and as a result it was increasingly easy to justify the investment in technology-based solutions to the emerging information requirements.

By the late 1990s companies started to find that they had a multiplicity of systems that in general were not compatible, and that vendors, keen to develop their installed base of systems were starting to add additional functions to their basic offerings.

Another important development in web technology has been the emergence of XML (extensible Mark-up Language) as a way of tagging the significance of data, rather than its appearance, as is the case with HTML.

As a result the Enterprise Information Portal emerged gradually from a primordial soup of applications, assisted substantially by a seminal broker report written by Christopher Shilakes and Julie Rylman (8) of the Enterprise Software Team at Merrill Lynch. This report, published in November 1998 was instrumental in the development of EIPs as it enabled many small entrepreneurial software companies to gain the venture capital support that they needed to fund the next stage of development of their product range.

A generally accepted view is that an Enterprise Information Portal is a browser-based environment that:

• securely integrates and personalises internal and external content and applications into a scalable user interface for communities of e-business users across the enterprise
• provides a scalable infrastructure to seamlessly integrate disparate data sources and applications, presenting a unified view across a fully configurable user interface
• enables an individual member of staff to manage the flow of information in order to make informed business decisions, to implement these decisions and to be able to communicate with others making similar decisions

This is usually achieved through the use of an open bus based platform, utilising Internet standard based technology such as XML and Java Messaging.

Each EIP vendor tends to have their own definition of an EIP, largely because each vendor has developed their EIP product based on their past experience. This could have been in knowledge management, document and workflow management, business intelligence or information retrieval.

The term “corporate portal” is also widely used, often in the context of a “next-generation intranet”, where the emphasis is on the integration of internal content and applications through a browser-based desk-top, with often limited access to external information and building on existing corporate applications rather than contributing complementary applications such as knowledge management.

The key issue is not in fact to get too concerned at this stage about the definitions of an EIP, but to compare the functionality that an individual EIP product offers against current and future business requirements.

The results of the latest survey by the Delphi Group (9) on portal deployment in the USA indicates that just over 45% of organizations expect to have completed deployment of their portal by the fourth quarter of 2000. A breakdown for this year and next is shown in the graph below.

Deployment status shows a pattern similar to that of adoption status: The larger the company, the sooner it is likely to deploy. 13% of Fortune 500-class organizations have already completed deployment, compared to less than 4% for smaller companies. Clearly, larger companies have recognized the potential for portal technology and are spearheading projects in an attempt to gain early-mover advantage.

5.2 EIP functionality
In order to meet current and future business needs an EIP has to be able to offer a basic set of applications and functionalities that enable the business to:

1. Integrate internal and external information and applications on a common browser-based desk-top
2. Enable users to create a customised view of the information resources that have been made available to them
3. Support the search process by providing a range of relevancy tools such as thesauri and intelligent agents which require little, if any training in their use
4. Ensure that the security of information assets are managed on a highly effective basis so security management does not become a burden that overwhelms the organisation
5. Enable the expertise of the organisation to be identified and utilised within an overall knowledge management strategy
6. Provide effective information access to unlock the often hidden assets within an organisation, from tangible assets, information from disparate depositories (documentation and data) and tacit knowledge held by the employees.
7. Enable physical and virtual teams to be set up and supported with specific information resources, be they inside the organisation, or located within a supplier and/or customer
8. Manage the creation, storage and distribution of documents of all types
9. Distribute knowledge proactively to staff by building profiles of each information user and delivering relevant material which will add immediate and obvious value to their decision making process.
10. Deliver an open, flexible IT architecture platform, allowing integration and support for the entire organisation’s IT applications
11. Adapt to changes in the IT architecture of the company through bus-based technology.
12. Deliver all the information and applications that are essential to business success across one, secure, personalised and scalable browser based interface.

These functions and applications support every aspect of the organisation, and when an EIP is installed a substantial number of business benefits should accrue.

The next generation of EIP’s need to support not just Intranet or Extranet, functionalities but also syndicated content and applications across one common platform. True or next generation EIPs will sit in the middle of this matrix, currently the market is seeing a spread of vendors across the full matrix with a few notable exceptions that are able to deliver to all the business concerns listed earlier.

6. The Business Benefits of an EIP
The business benefits of an EIP all relate to issues of information management

6.1 Delivering change
In business today forecasting the future is all but impossible. The only certainty is that there will continue to be dramatic changes in the external business environment and these changes will have some impact on all businesses. These changes will need to be reflected in the information that is made available to staff, and to enable staff to identify knowledge and expertise that they have not had reason to require in the past.

6.2 Empowering through results
The benefits of customisation are clear, but this has to be achieved at a realistic cost, and implemented within a reasonable time frame. One of the most important benefits of an EIP is the flexibility it provides to individuals to manage their individual information and application requirements without either extensive or expensive support from IT staff, and without compromising security.

6.3 Efficient use of assets
By providing an audit trail through those documents, which have been accessed, it becomes possible to eliminate certain types of reports and other documents that are clearly not important components in the information food chain. This should enable document creation to be more focused. Tracking use is especially important in the case of external information services, where in the past it has been difficult for the subscriber to monitor use on an ongoing basis. It is equally important to track the use made of internal resources, and to be able to review the overall information use of individuals, teams and departments.

6.4 Unlocking knowledge and expertise
Although an EIP, especially when KM functionality is provided, can prove to be a valuable tool in providing access to the knowledge and expertise of the entire workforce there is another important benefit. There is very good evidence that enabling people to be in control of their business environment reduces stress levels significantly, as each person feels that their individual role within the business is recognised and facilitated. Furthermore by providing true Knowledge Management tools within the EIP architecture the end-user is seeing an instant benefit to sharing his or her knowledge.

6.5 Integration of applications
An EIP should not be seen as just providing a desktop window to information. An important benefit when compared to most intranets is that the applications can be run and integrated through the EIP user interface.

6.6 Maximising IT assets
The benefits to an organisation through the deployment of an open flexible IT architecture platform are great. By integrating all IT assets on a common platform, which is then displayed through one user interface, an organisation is able to leverage the full potential of all their business and IT applications, this is a key development in next generation EIPs.

6.7 Ease of scalability
Although the scalability should be an inherent function of Enterprise Information Portals it should be considered a real business benefit. The ability to roll out the portal to the entire enterprise, quickly and easily will allow the entire organisation to benefit from the EIP with the minimum of training and without disruption to the end-user. This is a key business benefit; end-users will have access to the entire corporate world from launch date.

By leveraging all the enterprises’ assets, whether they be “information”, tacit knowledge or IT applications on one searchable, secure and customisable user interface, the business benefits are very real. Indeed the real business benefits of a true, or next generation EIP is the ability to bond an organisation closer together, to facilitate the communication of disparate groups with common business goals.

7. Deploying an EIP
7.1 Specification and selection
It is of the greatest importance that the specification for an EIP is itself developed on a collaborative basis, as the purchase decision will have long-term impacts on the organisation. Another factor is that the budget for an EIP will probably come from a number of budget centres, and it is important that everyone involved understands the opportunities, challenges and resource implications of an EIP. There may well be situations where a vendor has oversold the capabilities of their portal solution, and a replacement has to be deployed, but this should be avoided at all costs, as the impact on the effective operation of the company is likely to be severely impacted

Selecting an EIP vendor should always be undertaken on a team approach, and involve (for example) senior representatives from

• Corporate IT
• Major business divisions
• Personnel department
• Business development/strategic planning
• The Board of Directors

In an increasing number of companies there will be a Chief Information Officer or a Knowledge Manager but even with the scope of their responsibilities a broad-based team to support them is advisable.

There have been numerous papers written on the functionalities of Enterprise Information Portals, the majority of these however have concentrated on first generation EIPs, which has not addressed the need of a flexible Portal platform that allows IT applications to reside on a common platform. The table below highlights the key factors that need to be taken into account when reviewing EIP vendors.

The end result of all this is to ensure your entire work force has quick, easy, intelligent access to all the information, knowledge and IT applications needed to make solid business decisions.

7.2 Managing the deployment
The Delphi study mentioned earlier commented on the various deployment strategies that have been used. The most common strategy for deployment overall is a phased deployment by business unit, followed by an enterprise-wide rollout or a phased rollout by department. In general, it makes the most sense to deploy among a user population that is able to ascertain the business value of the portal and can provide feedback regarding its usefulness and improvement. Complete survey results are shown in the graph below.

There are notable differences by company revenue. Rollout by business unit is much more likely among Fortune 1000-sized organizations; however, almost a third of the companies with revenues in excess of $15 billion (Fortune 100) expect to roll out their portals on a departmental basis. As might be expected, future enterprise-wide rollout to selected users is more often a consideration in smaller companies.

8. References

1. Information on Vannevar Bush can be found on the web site of Brown University at http://www.cs.brown.edu/memex/
2. Anderla G., Styles in information management in C.Oppenheim et al (editors) Perspectives in Knowledge Management 2, 1990, Bowker-Saur, London. ISBN 0-862-91279-2
3. Pollock N.C., Information needs of top management. The Information Scientist, June 1972, 6(2), pp61-74.
4. van der Spek R., and Kingma J., Achieving successful knowledge management initiatives. In Liberating Knowledge – a Business Guide, Caspian Publishing Ltd., London, 1999. ISBN 1 901844 13 7
5. Marchand D., (editor) Competing with information. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Chichester. 2000. ISBN 0-471-89969-0
6. Peeters T., Liberating knowledge, Fawcett Columbine, New York, 1994. ISBN 0-449-90888-7
7. Department of Trade and Industry. International Benchmarking Study 2000. http://www.ukonlineforbusiness.gov.uk/
8. Shilakes C.C. and Tylman J., Enterprise Information Portals. Merrill Lynch. New York. November 1998 (available in the White Papers section of www.sagemaker.com)
9. http:www.delphigroup.com

There are a few web sites that offer additional information on EIP issues:

• http://www.dkms.com/ contains a range of briefing papers on EIP deployment and on knowledge management
• http://www.traffick.com/ is styled as The Portal Portal. The focus of the site is on consumer portals but there is also some useful background information on wider portal issues
• http://www.bi-portals.com/ was established by Business Intelligence Ltd in mid-2000 as a source of information on corporate portals, but has not been updated since launch. It does contain information on some of the main EIP vendors and their products
• http://www.intranetfocus.com/ offers a list of over 60 portal vendors and a range of other resources on portals and intranets.

Martin White, Managing Director of Intranet Focus Ltd, a consulting company specialising in intranet and portal deployment strategies, developed this briefing paper for SageMaker.

9. Appendix
The following outlines the current capabilities of our portal SageWave 4.0, and other elements of SageMaker’s product line.

SageMaker is an established leader in the enterprise information portal market. SageMaker’s products are targeted at day-to-day business information management and decision making needs of large organizations. The products are designed to scale from a single department or small user community to the entire enterprise. Our products currently serve over 250,000 corporate users in 450 major corporations with a combination of their internal information and commercial content from over 9000 publications.

Sagemaker has a unique position in the e-business portal solutions space. Our product architecture includes a portal display manager, comparable to other products in the portal space, and a bus-based integration framework, similar to those used in high end trading rooms. The portal display manager and standard portal user interface, referred to as SageWave, create the user experience. The SageBus integration framework serves as middleware integrating and normalizing diverse data and applications in real-time. SageBus normalizes both information requests and data into standardized XML, allowing the display engine’s components to leverage the entire base of content and provide integrated views at any level of granularity.

SageMaker offers a normalized content delivery service for over 18,000 sources ranging from real-time newswires to key industry periodicals. SageMaker coordinates with your organization and publishers to arrange electronic delivery of key information into the portal. This allows the information to be delivered to the decision makers, analysts and researchers within their business portal, integrated with the internal content and other decision-making tools. Furthermore, through the integration of the SageNews component into the portal, SageMaker offers the ability to search seamlessly across thousands of real time news sources and distribute the right items to the right people regardless of their geographical location. Also, the administrator can customise the whole system to match your corporate intranet, whilst maintaining complete control, over which users access which functions and sources.

SageMaker unlocks the hidden knowledge assets within the enterprise. With its Athena component SageMaker enables organizations to access the vast wealth of information that is typically locked away in many operational repositories whether they be Intranet sites or proprietary applications built for specific purposes. To enable this resource to be exploited fully Athena offers the user knowledge distillation tools, which ensure that the right and most appropriate information is driven to the user’s portal – even offering links to the tacit knowledge holders within the organization.

The needs for corporate and enterprise portal products are rapidly evolving from link management to passive montage displays to interactive e-business and transaction environments. SageMaker’s product focus is on the most evolved e-business and transaction portals, allowing you to integrate both content and applications into a single framework that can be personalized to the end-user’s needs.

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Shared portals or views can be created and published for common functions, departments or roles, allowing appropriate practices and tools to be rapidly deployed to the appropriate user community. We include a suite of community components that allow your end-users to collaborate on key issues, documents, calendars and other tools while sharing a common portal environment for their key information and applications.

SageMaker recognizes that the future of enterprise portals lies in the ability to seamlessly integrate and leverage a combination of internal and external data and applications. The architecture provides an open platform that can be extended to reach into other information repositories or applications using well-defined interfaces and tools based on industry standards.

SageWave 4.0 offers a ready-to-run portal based on a platform architecture that will meet your needs far into the future.