Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management

Joseph M. Firestone

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780750674744
• eBook ISBN: 9781136405846
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Is the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) knowledge management's killer app? Leading expert Joseph M. Firestone, the first author to formulate the idea of the Enterprise Knowledge Portal, breaks new ground and looks to the future with a practical, but comprehensive approach to enterprise portals and their relationship to knowledge management. Providing a clear and novel overview, Firestone tackles a wide range of topics ranging from functional EIP applications, estimating costs and benefits of EIPs, variations in EIP technical architecture, the role of intelligent agents, the nature of knowledge management, portal product/solution segmentation, portal product case studies, to the future of the EIP space. 'Enterprise Information Portals and Knowledge Management' is the book on portals you've been waiting for. It is the only book that thoroughly considers, explores, and analyzes: * The EIP orientation, outlook and evolution * A new methodology for estimating EIP benefits and costs * EIP and Enterprise Knowledge Portals (EKP) architecture * The approaching role of software agents in EIPs and EKPs * The current and future contribution of EIP and EKP solutions to Knowledge Management * The role of XML in portal architecture * A comprehensive, multi-dimensional, and forward-looking segmentation of EIP products accompanied by portal product case studies * Where EIP sector companies are headed and the pathways they will follow to get there

Part One

Introducing Enterprise Information Portals: Definition and Evolution

In Part One, I introduce the enterprise information portal (EIP) concept. In Chapter 1, EIPs are defined and specified in detail. Different types of EIPs are distinguished from one another, EIPs are distinguished from business portals and corporate portals, and the extension of EIP technology to e-business is discussed. In Chapter 2, the origin and evolution of the EIP is discussed, and the relationships of EIP applications to content management, ERP, data warehousing, DSS, data mining, and data management applications (the main components of EIPs as defined by Merrill Lynch), and issues of EIP integration are analyzed. Finally, the prospect of further evolution of EIPs is introduced, the enterprise knowledge portal (EKP) is proposed as the likely direction of EIP evolution. This issue is discussed at greater length in other parts of the book as well.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Defining the Enterprise Information Portal

EIP Definition is a Political Process

It is fortunate that the enterprise information portal (EIP) concept was introduced by two analysts with a concern for definition (Christopher C. Shilakes and Julie Tylman, 1998). Otherwise, given the sudden popularity of EIPs, there would be no restraint on the tendency of vendors to try to exploit the label by attaching it to their products. Even so, since the area is in a state of very rapid growth and differentiation, vendors and analysts with an interest in it are adding their own orientations and nuances to the EIP idea every day. Some do this by addressing the term EIP directly, others by defining related terms such as business portal, corporate portal, or enterprise portal.

Inevitably, the process of definition is a “political” business—an attempt to persuade the Investment/IT and ultimately the user community—to define EIP in a manner favoring one’s own vendor or analytical interests. If a vendor gets its favored definition accepted, it gets to say that a competing vendor is not really an EIP vendor, or lacks this or that required EIP characteristic. If an analyst or consultant gets its definition accepted, it gets a boost for its mind share and all the rewards that accompany such a competitive advantage over other consultants or analysts.

But if the process of EIP definition is political, it is politics constrained by the reality that any successful EIP definition must offer strategic advantage to the community. It must provide an image of the scope of the EIP area that the community will accept as providing both a clear idea of what an EIP is and a vision of what it ought to be. In order to clarify the network of meanings surrounding the EIP concept, and to provide my own view about how the term should be defined strategically, I will:

• Survey some of the definitions and characterizations offered by the early commentators and vendors in the EIP field who established the primary variations in meaning.
• Follow with a classification of types of definitions.
• Provide a synthesis and proposal on how the term EIP should be defined.
• Provide some definitions of my own, extending the EIP concept into the e-business environment.

This examination will introduce some of the concepts and vocabulary I will need to support my discussion of history, benefits, and architecture in later chapters, but it will not produce the forward-looking segmentation I will ultimately need for characterizing EIPs, analyzing EIP products and solutions, and forecasting the future of the EIP space. That segmentation will be presented in Chapter 12 following consideration of the foregoing subjects, knowledge processing and knowledge management, and finally the role of XML in EIPs.

EIP Definitions

Here are some views defining the EIP and related concepts from analysts and commentators. According to Shilakes and Tylman (1998, P. 1), “Enterprise Information Portals are applications that enable companies to unlock internally and externally stored information, and provide users a single gateway to personalized information needed to make informed business decisions.” They are: “an amalgamation of software applications that consolidate, manage, analyze and distribute information across and outside of an enterprise (including Business Intelligence, Content Management, Data Warehouse & Mart and Data Management applications.)”

And here are the essential characteristics of EIPs according to the same authors (pp. 10–13):

• EIPs use both “push” and “pull” technologies to transmit information to users through a standardized Web-based interface.
• EIPs provide “interactivity”—the ability to “question’ and share information on” user desktops.
• EIPs exhibit the trend toward “verticalization” in application software. That is, they are often “packaged applications” providing “targeted content to specific industries or corporate functions.”
• EIPs 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.” An EIP is able to access both external and internal sources of data and information. It is able to support a bi-directional exchange of information with these sources. And it is able to use the data and information it acquires for further processing and analysis.

Content management systems process, filter, and refine “unstructured” internal and external data and information contained in diverse paper and electronic formats. They archive it and often restructure it and store it in a corporate repository (either centralized or distributed). Business intelligence tools access data and information and through querying, reporting, online analytical processing (OLAP), data mining, and analytical applications provide a view of information both presentable and significant to the end user. Data warehouses and data marts are integrated, time-variant, nonvolatile collections of data supporting DSS and EIS applications, and, in particular business intelligence tools and processes. And data management systems perform extraction, transformation, and loading (ETL) “tasks, clean data, and facilitate scheduling, administration and metadata management for data warehouses and data marts.”

The Shilakes and Tylman definition of EIP is an attempt at a comprehensive definition, emphasizing both the basic functions of an EIP, and the subsidiary applications that are presently converging to produce EIP products and applications. It seems to leave little to the imagination, but it does have a stronger decision support rather than collaborative processing emphasis, and it also emphasizes the idea of the EIP as a gateway to wide-ranging data, content, and applications. In contrast, Gerry Murray of IDC (Gerry Murray, 1999) views the corporate portal as more than a gateway.

According to Murray, “portals that focus only on content are inadequate for the corporate market.” Corporate portals must connect us not only with everything we need, but with everyone we need, and provide all the tools we need to work together. This means that groupware, e-mail, workflow, and desktop applications-even critical business applications—must all be accessible through the portal. Thus the portal is the desktop, and your commute is just a phone call.”

Murray distinguishes four types of corporate portals. Enterprise information portals connect people with information by organizing large collections of content on the basis of subjects or themes they contain. Collaborative portals enable teams of users to establish virtual project areas or communities along with the tools for collaboration they offer, and to work cooperatively within these communities. Expertise portals link people together based on their skills and expertise, as well as their information needs. And knowledge portals do everything the first three types do and an unspecified something “more.”

So Murray’s emphasis is not so much on the corporate portal as a gateway to content, or even decision support, but rather on the portal as an application that may provide comprehensive support for the end user’s job role. For Murray, the EIP is only the first and most limited stage of portal development, and it is only a gateway to content of all varieties. Much more important are the collaborative, expertise, and knowledge portals that promise to provide comprehensive job support.

The conflict between the Merrill Lynch and IDC definitions of EIP lies in Murray’s restricting his EIP definition to applications providing a gateway to content alone. While the Shilakes and Tylman definition emphasizes decision processing more than collaborative processing, it is clearly meant to include collaborative, expertise and knowledge management (KM) applications as part of the EIP. This is implied by their statement that “EIPs provide “interactivity”—the ability to “‘question’ and share information on” user desktops. And it is made quite explicit that they mean to include collaborative applications in their ensuing discussion of the content-management segment of EIPs. There they explicitly endorse the development of KM applications in the content-management segment and also state (Shilakes and Tylman, 1998, p. 18) that they believe EIPs “will marry Knowledge Management with structured data management.”

Colin White (1999, p. 1) defines an EIP simply, as providing “business users with a single web interface to corporate information scattered throughout the enterprise.” Within this broad definition, he classifies EIPs into two main categories. Decision processing EIPs help “users organize and find corporate informa-tion in the set of systems that constitute the business information supply chain.” This type of information is highly structured and comes from operational data and data warehouse information and from “external systems.” Decision processing EIPs use business intelligence tools and analytic applications to create reports and analyses and then distribute them throughout the enterprise using a variety of electronic means. Collaborative processing EIPs help “users organize and share workgroup information, such as e-mail, discussion group material, reports, memos, and meeting minutes.” This type of information is relatively unstructured and comes from individuals and work groups. It is processed with collaborative groupware and workflow tools.

White views decision processing and collaborative processing as connecting within the groupware and workflow systems where collaborative processing takes place, and decision processing reports and analyses are ultimately distributed. Indeed, he sees the distinction between the two types of EIPs as blurring over time. And he blurs the distinction somewhat himself by recognizing that decision processing EIPs employ collaborative processing to track decisions and actions taken based on the use of structured business information. “The combining together of corporate business information, user knowledge and collaborative processing is sometimes labeled knowledge management. Decision processing portals could be described as knowledge management portals, but given the number of different definitions in use for knowledge management, the term knowledge management portal is best avoided here.” (White, p. 3)

White is apparently in basic agreement with the original Merrill Lynch definition of EIPs. His overall definition is open to different interpretations depending on how one defines “corporate information.” But his segmentation into decision processing and collaborative processing EIPs, discussion of the process connections between the two types and his discussion of the likely evolution of EIP products to incorporate both classes of functionality together remove any ambiguity. They suggest that he sees the ideal EIP as providing a gateway to both collaboration and decision support as well as support for knowledge management. That is essentially the Merrill Lynch view as well.

A term closely related to EIP is business portal. In a report from The Data Warehousing Institute, Wayne Eckerson (1999, p. 1) defines a business portal as an application that “provides business users one-stop shopping for any information object they need inside or outside the corporation.” He therefore emphasizes the gateway aspect of business portal applications as fundamental to the concept. He also emphasizes the importance of shared services such as “security, metadata repository, personalization, search, publish/subscribe,” as well as a common look and feel to the gateway.

Eckerson places very little emphasis on collaboration or workflow applications in either his definition or his specification of the business portal concept. He points out that users can publish information to the business portal repository to foster collaboration and further indicates that document management vendors will have to convert or extend their workflow capabilities (Eckerson, p. 2) in order to enter the portal space. But this is the extent of his emphasis on collaboration as a primary business portal–based function. His business portal seems therefore to be most similar to Murray’s concept of the EIP, an information gateway that supplies a variety of structured and unstructured content to users through a Web-based gateway for the purpose of decision support. It is not an EIP from the standpoint of either the Merrill Lynch or White definitions, and it is quite distinct from Murray’s collaborative, expertise, and knowledge portals.

Another term closely related to EIP is corporate portal. Hadley Reynolds and Tom Koulopoulos (Reynolds and Koulopoulos, 1999) emphasize the user-centric focus, and workflow and task-integrative functions of corporate portals. They see corporate portals as centralizing “enterprise information access in a graphically rich, application-independent interface that mirrors ‘knowledge-centric’ workflow,” and as providing “a single point of integration through the enterprise.” (Reynolds and Koulopoulos, pp. 28–29) They, too, see corporate portals as integrating the “islands of automation” formed by today’s application-based desktops and eventually creating an integrated business environment “providing information access, delivery, and work support across organizational dimensions.”

The corporate portal and the public portal have fundamentally different purposes. (Reynolds and Koulopoulos, p. 32) Public portals have a unidirectional relationship with their viewers. Their purpose is to attract large numbers of repeat visitors and to buil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part One—Introducing Enterprise Information Portals: Definition and Evolution
• Part Two—Benefits of Enterprise Information Portals and Corporate Goals
• Part Three—Architecture of Enterprise Information Portals and Enterprise Artificial Systems Integration
• Part Four—On Knowledge and Knowledge Management
• Part Five—Artificial Knowledge Management Systems and the Role of XML
• Part Six—EIP Frameworks, Portal Product Case Studies, and Applications to E-Business
• Part Seven—The Future of the EIP
• Appendix: List of Acronyms
• Index
• About the Author