INTRODUCTION
“A corporation’s success today lies more in its intellectual and systems capabilities than in its physical assets. Managing human intellect—and converting it into useful products and services —is fast becoming the critical executive skill of the age.”
JAMES BRIAN QUINN, PHILIP ANDERSON, AND SYDNEY FINKELSTEIN,
MANAGING PROFESSIONAL INTELLECT: MAKING THE MOST OF THE BEST
The enterprise knowledge portal is the intersection between knowledge management and the enterprise portal. The components that make up knowledge management strategies include locating information, learning by doing, capturing human expertise, and reusing information and human expertise. Implementing a knowledge management initiative is challenging. Your knowledge management efforts will work best when integrated as part of other corporate initiatives. The return on investment (ROI), benefits, and value proposition of your knowledge management initiative blends into your business strategy and cannot be easily segregated. Enterprise portals, however, allow companies to implement their knowledge management initiatives straight into their business strategies. The resulting enterprise knowledge portal solution brings people, work processes, content, and technology into a single solution. For example, even if your company was not founded on the Web, you are continuing to create new strategies and initiatives that will allow you to take advantage of knowledge management techniques and tools in order to be more competitive in the new Web-enabled market. Thus, your enterprise knowledge portal initiative will be focused on e-business and e-commerce opportunities. The enterprise knowledge portal will provide opportunities in almost every aspect of your organization. Think about how your knowledge management objectives delivered through the Web will help in business-to-employee, business-to-business, or business-to-consumer work efforts.
This book offers detailed instructions on how to create an enterprise knowledge portal solution to implement knowledge management initiatives for the twenty-first century. In it, you will find answers to several questions:
What are knowledge management opportunities and which particular opportunities should you pursue?
What is the best way to integrate knowledge management strategies and initiatives with existing work processes?
How do you measure return on investment?
How do you define an enterprise knowledge portal for your specific business needs?
How do you need to be organized to manage an enterprise knowledge portal solution?
What skills and capabilities will you need to successfully design, develop, implement, and maintain an enterprise knowledge portal solution?
How will knowledge management impact your existing work processes?
How will the enterprise knowledge portal be able to adopt and change as your work processes improve?
The enterprise knowledge portal will assist you in identifying the most valuable information assets of your organization. You will find your most valuable information assets scattered among people, processes, and content. The ultimate goal is to create an enterprise-wide environment that seamlessly connects these people, processes, and content assets together. This book will provide details on how to:
Determine the structure of your enterprise intellectual capital in relationship to your strategic goals and objectives.
Put in place the organization that will manage knowledge assets in a way that satisfies customers, increases profits, and decreases costs.
Learn how to multiply the value of knowledge from inside and outside your organization.
Create a successful knowledge management infrastructure that minimizes technical, cultural, and logistical barriers.
Know what information is essential to make sure people have the knowledge they need to succeed.
Distribute knowledge, employing personalization techniques that meet the needs of business processes within and across organizational boundaries.
Your enterprise knowledge portal, the next-generation enterprise portal design, offers improved benefits and features that your organization can take advantage of in a Web-based software solution. Knowledge management and enterprise portal solutions are driven by e-business and corporate initiatives that are never done, never static, and always changing. The goal is to recognize what knowledge management successes look like, realize when your enterprise knowledge portal offering has achieved some success, and launch the next phase of the enterprise knowledge portal. Your enterprise knowledge portal program will be implemented as a cohesive collection of development and infrastructure projects. Each project is a succinct effort that can be delivered in six to nine months and is tied directly into the overall enterprise knowledge portal program for your organization.
The enterprise knowledge portal provides several opportunities for your organization to achieve your corporate objectives. It is designed to leverage Web-based technologies to connect people, work processes, and the data they need using the Internet, intranet, and extranet. Your enterprise knowledge portal must support the following structure to meet the definition of a complete solution. It must:
Dynamically build content into the enterprise knowledge portal when the user opens the portal page. The information the user has requested will continue to reside and be maintained in the data source it originates from. The portal object will attach to the data source, retrieve the content requested, and present the information as the user has configured it to be presented. This process guarantees that every user has access to the same single source of information, provided he has the security rights to interact with the information.
Dynamically retrieve content that is relevant, timely, and accurate. This structure makes the enterprise knowledge portal an actionable environment for users. Providing a user interface that brings content from legacy systems, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) solutions, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solutions, Supply Chain Management (SCM) solutions, selected screens from applications, Web sites, documents, reports, and spreadsheets into a unified view for users will bring significant value and return on investment to your organization.
Knowledge management has often been defined in terms of the nature of knowledge. For the purposes of this book, the definition of knowledge management will be the ability to locate and bring together people and relevant information to individuals that need it so that they can take effective action when doing their jobs. You will be able to use the book in several ways. These include:
Enterprise Knowledge Portal Reference. This book may be used as a broad foundation of information of knowledge management and enterprise portals and how to use them in your organization.
Enterprise Knowledge Portal Design and Architecture Reference. This book contains the information needed to design and diagram an enterprise knowledge portal solution. The skills and staffing requirements you should consider can be referenced for future use.
Enterprise Knowledge Portal Methodology. This book contains specific steps you can follow to identify, track, and assign ownership for the information needed to implement your enterprise knowledge portal. You can use this material as it exists or modify the steps to more closely fit your organization’s best practices and procedures.
Guide to Other Information Sources. This book collects several resources available on knowledge management, enterprise portals, and other technologies required to support an enterprise knowledge portal. Additional reading material that includes books and articles is provided in the appendixes to gain future knowledge on topics that you might want to investigate.
Part I: Enterprise Knowledge Portal Definition
To design an effective enterprise knowledge portal, you are going to have to gain some perspective of your whole organization. You can complete this work as an individual or as a small team. The enterprise knowledge portal team will need additional human expertise from a small community of knowledge experts with a broad and deep understanding of your organization. The enterprise knowledge portal team and the knowledge expert community will work together to complete several templates designed to give you an overview of where you are today. The template collection is used to map your knowledge management objectives into the enterprise portal features and functions and will provide the details needed to outline a logical path forward for the enterprise knowledge portal.
The ability to map your knowledge management objectives and the enterprise portal functionality together will require a basic understanding as well as the definitions of knowledge management and the enterprise portal. Chapter 1 provides a definition and overview of knowledge management that is broken down to address all aspects of the organization. These include:
Knowledge workers
End-to-end work processes
Management
Resource and work process management
Vision and strategy
Planning and forecasting
Corporate mission and objectives
Human resources
Chapter 2 is focused on enterprise portals and why they are much more than a browser interface to a website or Web page. The enterprise portal is reviewed as a cohesive architecture that supports a broad collection of features and functions creating a single-user interface to information, services, and applications throughout the organization. It is important to look at these features individually for the purposes of selecting the appropriate vendor and software solutions that address your specific knowledge management objectives. Chapter 3 is an overview of how to quickly identify the communities and the work processes that your knowledge management effort will target to maximize the benefits of the enterprise portal. An equally important benefit will be the prioritization of the features and functionality that will be critical to deliver as part of the enterprise knowledge portal. Your goal is to weave knowledge management best practices into the enterprise portal implementation to create an enterprise knowledge portal vision. The result is the ability for your company to locate, learn, capture, and reuse in a way that is proactively embedded into knowledge workers doing their jobs.
Part II: The Enterprise Knowledge Portal Program
You can get started creating the enterprise knowledge portal program as a small cross-functional team. The extended team members will be a community of knowledge experts with a broad and deep understanding of your work processes. The template collection presented here is used to provide the details needed to describe how the enterprise knowledge portal ties into your existing business strategy, what the scope will be, and when you expect to complete several identified activities. The enterprise knowledge portal program will provide the details needed to deploy a cohesive and consistent enterprise knowledge portal through a cross-functional organizational structure that will manage the work processes and governance to remain successful.
Once your initial research is complete and several key knowledge experts in your organization have approved moving forward to define an enterprise knowledge portal, the next phase of the enterprise knowledge portal is to create a program. A program outlines a “what, who, how, and when” frame for the enterprise knowledge portal. The enterprise knowledge portal program is what bridges your enterprise knowledge portal map (created in Part I) to your organizational structure to manage the resources to build and the methodology to deploy and maintain the enterprise knowledge portal.
You are going to need an enterprise knowledge portal program that provides a well-understood path forward for the project teams to be able to deliver a cohesive and comprehensive solution. Chapter 4 identifies a series of activities and tasks, as well as templates you can use or modify, to create your knowledge management portal program. Chapter 5 provides suggestions for an organizational structure, team membership, and associated skills that you should consider to create and continue to expand to design, build, and successfully support your enterprise knowledge portal initiative.
Part III: The Enterprise Knowledge Portal Projects
The template collection presented here is used to provide the details needed to capture the information critical to design a logical enterprise knowledge portal based on integrating your work processes and personalized content. The enterprise knowledge portal methodology will be integrated into the execution of your enterprise knowledge portal projects. The enterprise knowledge portal methodology will provide the details to design a work process-centric solution. Your project management and system development life cycle systems are not represented in this material but are necessary to deploy a cohesive and consistent enterprise knowledge portal for users.
The enterprise knowledge portal program will be implemented in your organization as a series of enterprise knowledge portal development projects and infrastructure projects. You will want to include or modify the enterprise knowledge portal design methodology presented here to deploy a consistent and cohesive solution. Chapter 6 identifies a series of activities and tasks as well as templates for the design methodology used to successfully implement your knowledge management objectives, business strategy, and work processes directly into each of your enterprise knowledge portal releases. Once you have completed the design of the enterprise knowledge portal for the scope outlined in the enterprise knowledge portal project charter, the next effort is to establish the associated financial metrics. Chapter 7 provides a spreadsheet for establishing a return on investment for the enterprise knowledge portal project.
Part IV: The Enterprise Knowledge Portal Infrastructure and Environment
The purpose of the enterprise knowledge portal technical architecture analysis is to organize your infrastructure planning and documentation activities for the enterprise knowledge portal. The information collected will allow you to clarify the technologies common to your infrastructure environment and identify the information technology personnel that will be necessary to plan, design, develop, and maintain an enterprise knowledge portal in your organization. Overviews of the list of possible technologies you will utilize in your enterprise knowledge portal are described. Technology is constantly evolving. The information presented here is a good introduction to the most common technologies included in enterprise knowledge portal solutions.
You are going to need a centralized infrastructure and architecture to deliver consistent enterprise knowledge portal hardware, software, administration, and security that will support a decentralized collection of work processes and content. Chapter 8 describes common enterprise knowledge portal technologies to be supported in your infrastructure environment and identifies the information technology personnel that will be necessary to plan, design, develop, and maintain an enterprise knowledge portal in your organization.
Once the enterprise knowledge portal has been deployed, the support and competency center will take over the day-to-day maintenance of services. The maintainability issues of the enterprise knowledge portal are covered in detail as a collection of services. This type of organization allows you to break up the enterprise knowledge portal solution into subsets of activities, best practices, and guidelines for more effective management, support, and maintenance. The enterprise knowledge portal services are owned by the support and competency center.
The support and competency center team is responsible for the success of a long-term enterprise knowledge portal in your organization. There are several services that the support and competency center will establish to effectively manage and maintain the enterprise knowledge portal. Chapter 9 describes common enterprise knowledge portal services that will need to be defined and supported. This includes the organizational structure that will be necessary to manage problem resolution work processes, maintain the enterprise knowledge portal library of reusable development objects and documentation, and other activities associated with your enterprise knowledge portal’s continued success.