CHAPTER 13
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS AND
KNOWLEDGE PORTALS
TEST YOUR UNDERSTANDING
1.
Why is there a need for portals? How are portals similar to the concept of data
warehouses and data marts?
Almost all organizations are facing challenges that impose the need for integrated and
exposed knowledge. These pressures are as follows:
• Shorter time to market. New products and services have to be conceived, developed,
and delivered in months, or even weeks.
• Knowledge worker turnover. When a pivotal person leaves, the pain is widely
and quickly felt. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to acquire and retain
employees, and a company’s strongest asset is its people,” says Chris Moore,
chief technology officer at Training Server, Inc. “Organizations that do not
tap into their mind share and take advantage of the knowledge within will
quickly fall behind.”
• More demanding customers and investors. For virtually every organization, the squeeze
is on with customers wanting to pay less while investors want more value from their
portfolios. This means that all the resources to which an organization can lay claim,
including its intellectual resources, must be managed for the best result.
Data warehouses and data marts give access to data collected from different databases.
Portals provide the interface to reach, and manipulate data in data warehouses in addition
to other collaboration services.
2.
What are the advantages and disadvantages of having your portal on the Internet
instead of an intranet?
An enterprise portal is designed to provide the same interface for employees, managers,
customers, and suppliers. It allows anybody involved in the enterprise to have access to
the portal from anywhere from the world. It is not restricted to local use. Therefore it is
better to deploy portals over the Internet rather than the Intranet.
3.
List the differences between knowledge and information portals. Discuss the benefits of
each.
Enterprise Information Portals Enterprise Knowledge Portals
• Use both “push” and “pull”
• Are goal-directed toward
technologies to transmit
knowledge production,
CHAPTER 13
KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS AND KNOWLEDGE PORTALS
information to users through a
standardized Web-based interface
• Integrate disparate applications
including content management,
business intelligence, data
warehouse/data mart, data
management, and other data
external to these applications into a
single system that can “share,
manage, and maintain information
from one central user interface”
• Have the ability to access both
external and internal sources of data
and information; and the ability to
support a bi-directional exchange of
information with these sources
knowledge acquisition,
knowledge transmission, and
knowledge management
• Are focused on enterprise business
processes such as sales,
marketing, and risk management
• Provide, produce, and manage
information about the validity of
the information they supplies
• Include all EIPs functionalities
The main benefits of each:
Knowledge portals
 Provide information on various topics, and can be customized to meet a user’s
individual needs.
 Portals make it easy to access knowledge because of their universal interface—a
Web browser.
 Online portal systems let IT organizations access a variety of back-end systems
(such as process management soft-ware and methodology databases).
 Knowledge portals provide two kinds of interfaces:
• The knowledge producer interface. It facilitates the knowledge worker’s job of
gathering and analyzing information, collaborating with peers or colleagues, and
finally generating new knowledge.
• The knowledge consumer interface. It facilitates the dissemination of
knowledge across the enterprise. A key feature of knowledge portals is a
sophisticated personalization facility that takes into account the consumer
profile.
Information Portals
 Benefits for companies include lowered costs, increased sales, and better
deployment of resources.
 Portals integrate applications by combining, standardizing, analyzing, and
distributing relevant information and knowledge to end users, whether they
are customers, employees, or partners.
4.
Discuss the strategic and technological fit required for an organization to implement a
portal.
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KNOWLEDGE MANAGEMENT TOOLS AND KNOWLEDGE PORTALS
Companies must develop strategies and processes designed to best utilize intellectual
resources at both the strategic and operational levels. Companies already began using
groupware (such as e-mail, discussion forums, and document libraries) for coordinating
activities. Now, deploying next-generation information, application platforms (such as
enterprise portals), and real-time tools (such as instant messaging, Web conferencing, and
streaming audio/video) are required.
5.
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of purchasing a portal from a vendor. Make
sure you explore vendor Web sites such as Viador (www.viador.com) and Autonomy
(www.autonomy.com).
Viador and Autonomy are two portal solutions providers enabling companies to manage
efficiently data and intellectual capital. Comparing those two approaches will allow
students to understand the difficulty of choosing among existing commercial solutions. It
will show them that commercial solutions may not fit the operational and strategic needs
of a specific company and therefore forcing it to develop its own application. However,
following this approach is very risky because solution providers specialized in
developing portals have accumulated know how from previous clients. In addition to that,
the company may not have the expertise to develop state of the art applications.
6.
Discuss the differences between static and dynamic portals. When would you use each?
A static portal is a unified interface providing access to enterprise applications. A
dynamic portal has collaboration and interactivity features.
7.
Discuss how you can use content management to sort knowledge from external and
internal sources. Illustrate with examples.
Content management in the EKP context requires directory and indexing capabilities to
automatically manage the ever-growing store of structured and unstructured data residing
in data warehouses, Web sites, ERP systems, legacy applications, and so forth. Using
metadata to define types of information, good content management can serve as the
backbone for a system of corporate decision-making where business intelligence tools
mine data and report findings back to key players in the enterprise. Content management
may also involve going outside the enterprise, employing crawlers that find pertinent data
via the Internet, incorporating it into existing systems, indexing it, and delivering it to
appropriate analysts, knowledge workers, or decision makers.
8.
Discuss the issues that can arise when implementing a portal. Focus on technology,
management, corporate strategy, and end users.
For globally distributed organizations (that is, most international development
organizations) that rely on the Internet as a medium for the sharing of knowledge, the
issue of bandwidth is fundamental. At this point in the evolution of the Internet,
bandwidth is a chief constraining factor for many applications.
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The determination of an organization’s overall KM strategy will provide guidance for the
implementation of appropriate technology. Hansen, Nohria, and Tierney present a
valuable model to help guide thinking about managing organizational knowledge by
distinguishing between “codification” versus “personalization” strategies. This
dichotomy is useful in making the critical decisions required to ensure the right
technological mix. Codification focuses primarily on computer use, whereby knowledge
is carefully coded and stored in databases for easy access (see Chapters 7 and 9). By
contrast, the personalization KM strategy makes use of computers to help people
communicate knowledge, not to store it. The emphasis is on knowledge sharing via direct
person-to-person contacts.
9.
Give examples and uses of portals for B2B, B2C, B2G, C2C, and C2G.
 Amazon.com is an example of B2C portals.
 Plasticexchanche.com, ChemConnect.com, Paperloop.com are examples of B2B
portals for the plastics chemical and paper industries.
 www.e-government.govt.nz/ is a C2G portal allowing people to find and use New
Zealand government information and services.
 www.firstgov.gov is the official U.S. gateway to all government information.
FirstGov is a comprehensive portal connecting citizens, businesses, and agencies to
the government.
10.
List a number of possible ways a portal can be made accessible, given current
technological trends. Focus on five of these technologies and discuss their strengths
and weaknesses.
 Internet
 Intranet

Extranet

Mobility portals - These are portals that are embedded in Web phones, cellular
phones, wireless PDAs, pagers, etc. They are useful for consumers and employees to
obtain product and services information, prices, etc.
 Appliance portals- These are portals that are embedded in TVs (WebTV),
automobiles (OnStar), etc.
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