Portal - Managing the Right Knowledge
- Dr. Moria Levy
- Jul 31, 2002
- 3 min read
When dealing with portals, three aspects require consideration: content, organization, and technology. A balanced combination of all three is the key to success.
In this document, we have chosen to focus on the content component: What are the right contents to enrich the portal?
Let us first clarify and remind that the portal's purpose is not to add or manage new content. The portal is fundamentally a tool through which one can aggregate, organize, and bring to the user data, information, and knowledge that assist the employee in performing their role.
The portal does not replace other applications; it simply packages them correctly for the employee's use.
We collectively refer to data, information, and knowledge as "content."
Seemingly, any combination of organizational content can be surfaced and made more accessible through the portal.
In practice, most organizations in Israel, as well as many organizations worldwide, include organizational intranet content in the portal:
Welfare (from employee promotions to cafeteria menus)
Image sites (of subsidiary bodies within the organization)
Procedures/reporting forms
Management messages.
A portal based on such content has high chances of failure. In the US, this issue has been discussed for nearly a year, and in Israel, we hope it will also be understood.
Why are these not good contents?
The emphasis is on content that the organization knows how to offer, rather than on content that the employee requests to see; therefore, there is no real reason to be there.
The emphasis is on welfare, a subject that has been neglected and not without reason. It was never justified as a standalone application in cost-benefit terms, and somehow, in portals, this issue is sometimes overlooked.
Let us clarify that there is no objection to having such content as well, but it is not the center of gravity, rather an addition.
So what then?
The right content should be built with an emphasis on job role, not jointly for the entire organization. Only this way will it be possible to provide an organizational business advantage in knowledge management through the portal. We refer to such a portal as "Job Related." Abroad, it is also called a "Workspace Portal."
How do you choose the content?
In the first stage, you must start with organizational goals and identify critical role holders who can help achieve these goals (if you want to increase market share, for example, you should probably focus on marketing and sales people).
Subsequently, you must analyze the gaps in data, information, and knowledge that are insufficiently available to employees, hindering them from achieving their goals.
In the third stage, you must decide which content to group according to different work processes. For each group, you must define the required availability level (to be detailed in the review on proper organization) and the content source (i.e., how to actually obtain it).
And to illustrate this, here's an example:
The Need: Account Managers handle customer care, coordinating installations, providing troubleshooting support, proposing new solutions to expand the product portfolio, and more.
The Solution: A central page where you can select from a dropdown list the customer with whom you are in contact (phone, this, or other treatment). With the selection, a world view of the customer being handled opens: phones where they can be reached (data); open trouble ticket report from an operational system (data); customer document file including correspondence with them (information); new promotions page (information); current payment status information of the customer (data); link to discussion group on customer topics (knowledge); relevant insights from similar projects and customers (knowledge) and more.
Of course, not everything must be open simultaneously. The more frequent contents will be spread out and open, while others will have quick access enabled. Details on this...
In summary, when building an organizational portal, the goal before us is to provide people with the right content that will assist them in performing their work. Our goal is to achieve improvement in organizational objectives. Everything else is merely supplementary.
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