When is an Organizational Portal the First Step to Knowledge Management?
- Neta Lee Sandormesky!
- Dec 1, 2007
- 3 min read
Many organizations choose to establish a portal to solve their knowledge needs.
Generally, knowledge needs in the organizational world can be divided into two main categories:
Horizontal needs - needs common to all employees, regardless of their organizational affiliation and/or professional role. For example: human resources issues, operations, information security, and computing.
Professional needs - needs relevant to specific professional work groups, such as the development group, the project managers group, the sales people group, etc.
In the ideal situation, we would strive for the portal to address both needs.
However, as we have noted in the past, it is not recommended to start with everything at once; we need to choose and prioritize between these two needs. Hence, it is important to understand and decide how to begin before starting.
Quite a few organizations have started by building a portal that addresses a particularly painful professional need, such as improving customer service, documenting and managing research and development, collecting information about competitors to promote company sales, etc.
Large organizations even start building portals whose target audience is determined by organizational affiliation, such as: a portal for the marketing department, a portal for the quality assurance department, a portal for the operations department, etc.
In this tip, we would like to present a slightly different perspective, which argues that there are cases where it is advisable to provide initial response as broadly as possible, to as wide a group as possible.
According to this approach, we will begin in certain cases with implementing a broad organizational portal that will include solutions for cross-organizational needs, including:
Human resource topics - salary, attendance, leisure, and welfare
Employee services - food services, vehicles, telephony
Information about the company - products, services, organizational structure
Operations
Computing - technical support, information security
Ethical code and behavioral norms
Activities will be continued by building professional sites under the organizational portal. The sites will be built according to content domains and not according to organizational affiliation to integrate knowledge in the professional content world that different employees in different units will contribute.
When is it recommended to start with an organizational portal?
When it's important to reach all company employees, this way, the knowledge management solution reaches every employee regardless of their organizational affiliation, and everyone benefits from it.
Establishing a portal for cross-organizational topics creates the visibility and momentum needed for continued activity and adaptation of additional solutions for additional needs.
When the content domains offered within the organizational portal are necessary on one hand, and easy to set up on the other, to create a quick win.
When starting through human resource topics is an important managerial-cultural statement for continuation.
When the organizational portal addresses an organizational need to improve organizational communication (communication between management and employees and interpersonal communication between employees), it thus enables communication of management updates, internal processes, and strategic goals.
When the organizational portal addresses the need to increase employees' sense of partnership and involvement in company activities, it provides a real solution to an organizational need through a more effective and less expensive channel than parallel tools. The portal provides a platform for feedback, constructive criticism, initiatives, and employee improvement suggestions.
In addition to the above reasons, an organizational culture that promotes knowledge sharing, preservation, and development is a key component in the organization's success or failure of any knowledge management solution implementation processes. Establishing an organizational portal is the first step in instilling a culture of sharing among all company employees, and it also conveys a message of transparency as an organizational value.
As part of building the organizational portal, a methodological approach for characterizing user needs is developed, as well as an approach that will lay the technological infrastructure for establishing professional portals in the future.
This approach includes, among other things, reference to the following topics:
A gateway page for the topic.
Relevant widgets for displaying information.
Templates for presenting information.
Planning connections to various operational systems.
Navigation logic.
Content tree.
Hot buttons.
Reports for analyzing site usage.
The organizational portal building process must be presented to employees from its earliest stages. It's recommended that they be involved in the process through focus groups or an organization-wide survey that gives employees a platform to express opinions about topics that will appear in the portal. In this way, building the portal is portrayed as an organizational task involving all employees. It creates a sense of commitment to the building process in particular and to the knowledge management process in the organization.
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