The Enterprise Portal – From Application Integration to Knowledge Management and Enhancing Organizational Collaboration
- Ziv Mendel
- Dec 1, 2003
- 3 min read
One of the most prominent topics in the field of information systems today is the enterprise portal. Like any popular technological topic, the enterprise portal has multiple definitions, with all hardware and software manufacturers offering their interpretations, which naturally include their winning products in the field.
What is an enterprise portal application?
What are the goals we want to achieve with the enterprise portal? What is the basic architecture of the enterprise portal? And what are the problems and solutions for training and implementing an enterprise portal among users? We will try to answer these and many other questions in the following article.
In building an enterprise portal, we aim to address two key problems: the first is to create integration between different applications, both at the process level and at the information level. Organizations are seeking tools that enable users to operate processes and sub-processes of any application, regardless of the application, and tools that facilitate extracting integrated information items from all systems within the organization. For example, organizations today are looking for tools that will allow them to perform a query that will extract information that exists about a customer from all places and systems in the organization, starting from the financial system, through service systems, sales and marketing systems, and up to email systems and organizational Word files.
The second problem that enterprise portal applications aim to address is creating a systematic process supported by technology for implementing organizational knowledge management. Within the framework of knowledge management, we aim to enhance cooperation among the organization's employees and foster a higher level of knowledge sharing.
The enterprise portal architecture consists of three layers: the user interface, portal services, and information access.
The user interface includes the home page of every user in the organization. The home page will provide access to all organizational information systems, office computing systems, the intranet, and the internet. The opening page will include pointers to relevant information items for the user and summaries of information that the organization wants to present to the user. The user interface is based on an internet interface, and it is preferable to build it based on personalization principles, so that each type of user (and perhaps even each user) will have a dynamic profile definition tailored to their needs when accessing systems and information.
The enterprise portal services are based on access and operation services for different applications in the organization, cross-sectional information retrieval services, and organizational collaboration services. At the level of retrieval tools, we are talking about tools based on smart search engines that can search for information in different formats from different information items (from databases to unformatted information sitting in emails or Word and Excel files). At the level of organizational collaboration services, we are referring to tools that facilitate the creation of virtual communities, such as forums, instant messaging tools, e-learning platforms, and more.
At the information level, we provide access to four information sources: databases of various information systems, office document repositories (including emails, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, etc.), the internal organizational website network, and the internet environment's website network. One of the most important challenges is naturally creating an internal organizational website network within the intranet. The success of the enterprise portal is measured, among other things, by its ability to create an interactive network with current and dynamic information, as well as a high rating. In this area, it is planned to appoint content managers for each site, drawn from the various departments within the organization.
One of the problems we encounter in implementing the enterprise portal stems from the fact that, although we are dealing with an application of great importance and probably also with a relatively fast return on investment, we are still dealing with an application that is not part of the organization's mandatory processes. For this reason, a significant portion of portal applications fail at the implementation stage, resulting in low usage levels. When planning the project to establish an enterprise portal, great emphasis should be placed on implementing the portal within the organizational culture, while also changing work methods and investing in substantial training and implementation processes. Only in this way can a higher level of use be achieved and, as a result, utilize the level of integration, information, and action sharing offered by the enterprise portal environment.
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