The emergence of enterprise information portals

While the term "knowledge management" may not be familiar to everyone, most companies have some kind of knowledge sharing system in place. One tool that is growing in popularity is the enterprise information portal (EIP). Similar to web portals such as Yahoo (http://www.yahoo.com) or Excite (http://www.excite.com), an EIP is a window to information that is relevant to a particular company. This information can be customized for individuals or groups within a company.

Though the EIP market is still considered to be in its infancy, more companies are beginning to take a look at the technology. More than half of respondents to a Delphi Group (http://www.delphigroup.com) survey said they planned on making a significant investment in portal technology within the next year.

Benefits of EIPs

There are so many easily accessed sources of information these days that it is often difficult to keep things organized. That's where an EIP comes in—a portal offers a single access point to a variety of information sources that have been tailored to employees' needs. Through portals, employees have access to structured (hard) data such as databases and marketing/sales reports, unstructured (soft) data such as documents and web pages, and organizational knowledge, which can come from colleagues through e-mail and discussion groups and chats.

While the first portals were basically just data aggregation tools, more features are now being included. Current EIPs, usually set up on a company intranet, are more scalable than their predecessors and contain such features as a search tool, news links, a document library, and collaboration tools such as instant messengers and virtual communities, often on a personalized page.

Through the page or interface, employees get centralized access to many of the tools they need to perform their daily tasks. And when tasks are completed quicker and more efficiently, the company sees the benefits in such areas as cost and time-to-market for products.

The evolution of the enterprise portal

The International Data Corporation (IDC) (http://www.idc.com) mapped the progress of enterprise portals in three waves.

• The first wave, which started in 1998 and ended in 2000, focused on simple user-interface integration.

   

• The second wave, which started in 2000 and will continue to 2002, centers around separate but equal access to structured and unstructured data.

   

• The third wave, which IDC projects to start in 2002 and doesn't yet have an end date, involves unified structured and unstructured data access.

Industry experts say the next generation of portals will offer integrated environments that allow for enterprise-wide access. It's also expected that these portals will allow users to complete transactions as well as support more collaborative work through text and voice messaging, audio and video conferencing, and dynamic document sharing.

As more functionality is added to EIPs, more companies are realizing the potential of portals. Though numbers are still fairly low, IDC forecasts that about half of all US companies will have a portal in operation by the end of this year. Many agree that the EIP is the "killer app" of knowledge management. The interface and tools available in EIPs facilitate collaboration—and that's what knowledge management is all about.