The Role of Portal Manager
- Amit Starikovsky
- Apr 1, 2007
- 7 min read
Almost every solution we establish within the knowledge management domain requires resource allocation. Typically, these are mainly time and money resources dedicated to the setup phase. We tend to prioritize managing the solution after the setup phase. This is especially true for the portal establishment, where it's clear to everyone that even if it's a virtual product, the portal is a living entity requiring management and maintenance.
For this purpose, it's particularly important to dedicate time and thought to appoint a Portal Manager—someone who will be worthy and qualified for the role but, above all, desires it and feels connected to it. It's important to understand that the Portal Manager is its central driving force. Their level of involvement, enthusiasm, commitment, and ability to motivate others in the organization will determine the portal's level of currency, quality, and contribution.
This review will present the Portal Manager's role definition, perception, required skills, and role components in content, technology, process, and culture.
From the outset, it's important to note that the recommendations presented here are not a closed list. Even if they set a high standard, they are based on our many years of experience in the best organizations in Israel.
Portal Manager Role Definition
Definition Summary
Acts as the portal's "parent" and has significant weight in determining its chances of success. A professional managerial figure is responsible for day-to-day functioning, meeting goals, moving the portal forward, and turning it into a living and vibrant entity. They activate content experts/management/users for quality and scope of activity as expected from them, and additionally, are responsible for performing central activities such as publishing content and updates and monitoring usage levels.
Role Perception
The role requires a unique figure who can also fulfill the spirit of the role ("passionate about it"). The Portal Manager should have the following characteristics:
Awareness: The recognition and understanding that the portal is like a living and breathing creature; if not nurtured, it will degenerate and die.
Alertness: Sharpened senses and vigilance.
Initiative: Taking active steps to identify knowledge gaps, issues, and matters requiring attention.
Assertiveness: Ability to manage interactions with various role holders and ranks and motivate them to action.
Partners
The Portal Manager is the main person responsible for portal activity but not the only one: Several additional role holders partner in managing the portal's life and day-to-day work. The Portal Manager is responsible for coordination and liaison between role holders and their expectations from each other, their managers, and users. The following are the main role holders partnering in the portal's work:
Professional Manager: The portal's upper manager directs it according to organizational strategy. The highest authority for determining the portal's essence and purpose.
Content Expert/Owner: Responsible for content in their designated area, inputting it, quality control, and connecting it to knowledge needs in the field. They represent users, answer questions and feedback, and are responsible for information currency. Usually, there are several content experts.
Managers of Content Experts and Users: The users' managers. Indirectly responsible for user availability to operate in the portal.
Technological Manager: Development units. Responsible for the technological platform on which the portal is based and its usability.
Skills and Training Required for the Portal Manager Role
Like any other managerial role in the organization, Portal management requires various skills to create expertise that will enable optimal implementation and utilization of the tool and its organizational objectives.
For this purpose, there are several knowledge areas that the Portal Manager should know and experience:
Introduction and central principles in knowledge management.
Familiarity with knowledge management tools: portal/community/site, content organization, concise and effective writing, and knowledge templates.
Managing a knowledge management project: mapping and prioritizing needs, adapting solutions, and measuring ROI.
However, professional experience alone is not enough, as this is a managerial role requiring familiarity with the organization, alongside managerial experience that will help the Portal Manager deal with organizational and managerial challenges they will encounter. Therefore, the Portal Manager must have managerial experience, including
Experience in senior management, leading a field, or managing complex projects.
Ability to manage people and resources (content experts).
Systemic, analytical, and integrative vision.
Interpersonal relations - ability to listen and provide advice.
Self-management, management of others, and resource management capabilities.
Multi-tasking ability
Assertiveness and ability to work under pressure.
Service-oriented approach - attentive to customer needs.
It's important to ensure that the Portal Manager's skills include Connection to the organization's goals and strategy.
Knowledge of organizational culture and work procedures.
Ability to cope with change.
Computer work orientation.
Ability to distinguish between primary and secondary matters.
Components of the Portal Manager's Role
As mentioned here more than once, knowledge management must address four aspects of organizational life: content, technology, process, and culture. In this section, we'll detail the Portal Manager's place and part in each aspect.
Content
The Portal Manager is responsible for ensuring that the portal's important content is always correct, up-to-date, accurate, and reflects the reality in the organization.
Among other things, this activity includes:
Maintaining contact with content experts and monitoring the addition/updating/removal of content in real-time by them.
Identifying additional content that can/should be added to the portal.
Supervising content integrity in terms of visuals, content relevance, and proofreading.
It is essential to maintain the content tree and ensure its structure and logic don't lose direction and control. At the same time, they must ensure that any new content in the portal is updated in the most appropriate location while considering the existing structure and knowledge management principles.
Updating the home page to be current and presentable and externalizing the main topics appropriate for the specific time point according to organizational strategy and agenda.
Proactively identifying additional and new content for processing, visual and content improvement, and placement in the content tree.
Ensuring responses to feedback submitted within the portal framework.
Work Processes
The Portal Manager is responsible for ensuring that the portal adapts to work processes and/or adapts processes to it.
Among other things, the activity includes:
Formal establishment of the organization for portal use/update. Including the scope and mapping of places and processes where the portal will be used.
Identifying activities and anchors in work processes that can be integrated into the portal to establish and increase its involvement in organizational activity.
Backing information and knowledge transfer processes are performed in the organization through the portal.
Regular and continuous monitoring of portal usage levels through reports and using them to identify and solve problems.
Managing viewing and updating permissions for the portal so that each role holder is defined with viewing permissions and information updates appropriate for them.
Constant thinking about development trends and updates for improvements, such as identifying new needs, design changes, changes in the content tree, technological and methodical changes, adding/updating/canceling reports, and more.
Supporting content experts and being responsible for their continued training beyond initial training through Regular meetings, including empowerment training and training to provide work tools, identifying needs and addressing problems, brainstorming for plans, and social cohesion and creating a group feeling. Maintaining a training program to instruct new content experts and role holders who entered the portal during their lives (and were not involved in its construction). It should include training, mentoring, and increasing motivation. Continuous monitoring of their performance quality and inclusion in their performance evaluation of this role. The formal definition is for experts/owners and their managers of the scope of activity and expectations, so there is no conflict between this and their original roles.
Culture
Leading formal and informal norms in the organization towards portal use and work processes.
The activity should include:
Diagnosing the main cultural characteristics that inhibit/encourage portal use. • Performing direct activities to increase motivation: Lectures/workshops on portal advantages and ingraining habits of using it.
Integrating various media to introduce the portal - written messages, lectures, conversations, and discussions. Clarifying management expectations for portal use. Integrating knowledge management considerations (contribution, sharing, creation) in evaluation and promotion considerations of role holders. Providing "soft" rewards to portal users: "good word,” reputation, appreciation, and recognition.
Performing publicized activities to raise awareness of the portal, such as operating a "hotline" or competitions.
Performing indirect activities:
Mentioning the portal at every opportunity (meetings, workshops, training, conversations, etc.).
Publishing success stories related to the portal and its advantages over the previous situation.
Involving employees in portal goals to strengthen identification with it.
Encouraging the use of feedback, giving feedback, and recommendations for improvement.
Building a perception of the connection between portal use and the organization's and individual's success.
Setting a personal example:
Continuous and visible use by others of the portal as an exclusive tool for information transfer.
Open expectations from employees to update information through the portal.
Daily interest in the extent of portal use in corridor/phone conversations.
Personal leadership of one activity or another in the portal.
Encouraging content expert activity:
Creating a feeling that their work contributes and is desired, holding cohesion and enrichment meetings, meeting with the personal managers of content experts to ensure expectation alignment between the routine role and this role, giving positive feedback and rewarding active content experts, and alerting inactive content experts.
Performing marketing actions:
Both when the portal goes live and during its life, the Portal Manager will market it among users and content experts.
Managerial responsibility for marketing and implementing portal use.
Technology
Ensuring the following principles in the technological maintenance of the portal:
The portal should be convenient and allow the implementation of a user-friendly interface. It should also be easy to link/develop/add applications, have Online update capabilities, and integrate with other systems in the organization.
Quick response in solving discovered issues.
The Portal Manager is also responsible for maintaining contact with the IT department to monitor and handle technical issues, identify and define technological needs, help characterize and develop technological infrastructures, and monitor and report on system issues.
Conclusion
We have seen here that the Portal Manager role is significant, including many areas of responsibility connected to the core of organizational activity. As with any organizational change process, the key word here is management, where commitment is a necessary but not sufficient condition, so care must be taken to appoint the most suitable person.
However, we understand that the criteria and extensive detail presented here set a particularly high standard for the Portal Manager role, a kind of organizational "superman," which will be especially difficult for us to find.
Reality and organizational availability will ultimately dictate the organizational choice. Among the organizational ideals described here, the most important characteristics in choosing a Portal Manager are ensuring that the person is a manager with a systemic analytical and integrative vision, good interpersonal relations, and a service-oriented approach. Additionally, it's important that they can perform multitasking.
It's clear that without a guiding hand with a broad organizational vision on the one hand and a range of personal and organizational skills, the portal will struggle to achieve its organizational and business goals. Therefore, the issue of appointing a Portal Manager is particularly important and one of the critical key points for its success.
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