Master File: Fitting together the information puzzle

IS managers need support to find, arrange and exploit essential information. They are seeking ways to use Enterprise Information Portals, collaborative environments and visualisation tools as gateways across their extended enterprises. Meanwhile, vendors are blurring the lines between the disparate categories of knowledge management tools. But you won't easily find out-of-the-box solutions, nor should you be under the illusion that a portal is the answer to inefficient business processes. Here's your complete guide to enterprise portal implementation.

An IS manager's job is best visualised as that of an exalted plumber trying to keep the enterprise information pool in check in one sense, and widely available on tap in another sense. Think of intranet, extranet and Internet resources as three joined pipes for corporate information to flow through, and the picture is complete.

The very word portal comes from the Latin "porta", or gate. Enterprise portals (also called enterprise knowledge portals and collaborative portals) are the software equivalent of sluice gates, plus the entire brickwork surrounding the gates.

The gate lets you marshal the flow (which would otherwise become an unmanageable torrent) of information to your employees, to consumers in general (example: Yahoo) or to specific audiences such as people with common interests, private customers, corporate customers, business partners, suppliers-jointly designated in business-speak as "stakeholders".

The concept is not entirely new. It is precisely the idea first used by groupware systems such as IBM's Lotus Notes and more recently corporate intranets in general.

Unfortunately, in many organisations multiple intranets and groupware applications have been deployed in isolation, adding even more silos of information to the corporate coffers. In short, the portal approach is the natural evolution of intranets and groupware solutions into a common information infrastructure.

Enterprise portals provide an attractive jumping-off point to the Web, let your users choose the information they want to see, and provide numerous value-added services and other hooks. These software products promise all the usability and consolidation features of a Web site, but tuned to the unique job requirements of an organisation's own employees and their collaborative business processes.

In the way they function, enterprise portals are designed to transform your static and scattered intranets into standard, easy-to-navigate gateways to information sources. As your organisation scales to embrace the Internet, your vanilla Web site will most likely have to evolve into an enterprise portal. The reason behind the inadequacy of the Web site is that it does not translate the rich historical processes of your business. Your organisation has spent years evolving a peculiar information systems infrastructure, typically one or more operating platforms with some combination of mainframe, Unix and Windows environments. The infrastructure also typically includes various applications designed to automate business processes.

Depending on your firm's sophistication and technical evolution, these applications interoperate to some degree. Then again, your typical Web site infrastructure contains content, comprising both structured application data and unstructured text, HTML (HyperText Markup Language) pages, and other material.

Meanwhile, the evolution of access technologies continues. Broadband technologies provide an ever-growing pipe to end-users, which spurs their appetite for access, which drives the growth in pipe capacity, and so on. Ultimately, all organisations would gravitate to an enterprise portal to establish their Internet presence. The reason? Your legacy, stand-alone application and integration servers, hooked into intranets, cannot sustain an enterprise portal strategy.

Most recently, the spurt of interest in the knowledge management (KM) industry is helping to drive demand for all kinds of business portals, and the simplicity of portals fosters extremely high levels of usage on an enterprise scale.

Most industry analysts agree that the market is real: Merrill Lynch & Co., for instance, predicts that by the end of this year, the portal tools and services market will exceed $14.8 billion (approximately Rs 72,076 crore).

Portal is a generic term that must be defined in your specific business context, since your functional requirements can vary substantially. What is indisputable is that the enterprise portal is a single point of contact and community between your firm and all your stakeholders and prospects. Like the popular consumer portals, an enterprise portal organises various information using indexes and visual presentation. An enterprise portal is designed to meet unique demands placed on an organisation at the network's edge. It is an Internet site owned and operated by an organisation to support its operations.

The most effective portals also provide single-point, customised access to structured and unstructured data, such as manuals, documents, e-mail and Web sites. Firms often establish Web sites, intranets and extranets to stay abreast of current trends. In the process, they create a costly and difficult-to-mange information overload.

Properly managed, the enterprise portal can be an organised tool to optimise corporate information resources and re-engineer operations to maximise the return on investment (RoI) from e-commerce business process.

The enterprise portal's most significant payoff is that it gives you relevant knowledge to facilitate decision-making. Set up intelligently, an enterprise portal can transform a general-purpose computer into a self-service desktop that provides users with a quick, flexible gateway to corporate data. Portals, which include basic productivity tools (word processors, spreadsheets and groupware systems), are usually enhanced with collaborative applications, including chat, forums and calendaring, that improve communications and minimise redundant efforts. The portal aggregates, categorises and delivers pertinent content to critical business audiences, while lowering operating costs, increasing sales, facilitating better customer service and making the supply chain more efficient. Since individual users need to be authorised, enterprise portals offer another level of corporate security as well.

But be warned. Enterprise portals are neither easy, cheap, out-of-the-box solutions, nor should you be under the illusion that a portal is the answer to inefficient business processes. If you are facing inherently poor data and systems quality, a portal will not improve it, nor will it generate a wave of automatic knowledge management. And portals will most certainly not be able to change your company culture.

Like with any major plumbing job, implementing an enterprise portal is complex and involves a significant amount of planning and design. The process of establishing an enterprise portal goes from creating an initial advisory team to ensuring that employees use the portal once it is completed. Corporations must decide which type of enterprise portal most effectively addresses their information needs. One of the major tasks is to decide the primary functions that the portal would serve. You can have a wide range of choice here, depending on what your business is all about. For example: business intelligence (BI) portals, supply chain portals, Web content management portals, expertise portals and telecommuting portals.

Enterprise portals are based heavily on the involvement of individuals and workgroups within a company. So, when a company is considering the depth of portal usage for itself, it is essential that the technology be introduced and sponsored by the CEO, or at least a senior line function manager. The IS department has been historically good at delivering service (for example, making tools available), but it is not that well adapted for promoting the benefits of streamlining processes and information.

Going up the scale of evolution, if you use the Internet in your business model, your Web presence is as important to your brand identity, customer perception and overall performance as your storefronts, selling process and channels. Most Web sites now contain stores of information, managed by dozens of servers threaded into intranets and LANs (local area neteworks).

Properly designed and managed, enterprise portals can help your company better organise all this information, partly by letting stakeholders create custom views of it. Apart from information, an enterprise portal also organises tools, applications and transactions that you offer to employees, customers and other stakeholders.

You can custom design enterprise portals to support and reach specific views of your applications, data and transactions, as well as to offer access to external resources such as chatrooms, and news and procurement sites. Enterprise portals are also the platform for active delivery of information and commercial transactions. A client's view of the portal will contain resources and data different from an employee's view, but a common architecture will provide both. Personalisation, access and delivery are the key elements. Enterprise portals, however, will also support linkage between and integration of information and processes (both online and offline) and the provision of new services and products.

Linkage is the interconnection of different applications, data and transactions to support a user action. For example, linking ordering, inventory status and credit checking into a single user action may require coordination of three different systems. To accomplish this linkage, the portal must be able to maintain a user's context, including security, transmit the right instructions and values to each system, and ensure that each operation occurs in a proper sequence.

Integration requires that the portal be able to integrate data from different places and make it work together. For example, a customer-care application may pull information from many sources, filter that information, and then present it in a single screen. Properly designed enterprise portals create enormous opportunities for organisational effectiveness and agility. They make it possible for firms to explore new business models, products and ways of connecting with entities.

Success will require careful design, robust infrastructure and an architecture that can sustain value through rapid changes to portal content and organisation. As enterprise portals become the new standard definition of e-business, organisations will need to provide this level of service and connectivity to stakeholders, or risk damaging their competitive posture.

Ideally, your enterprise portal must provide non-stop, continuous availability, personalisation and integration of enterprise data and applications to every stakeholder. As an IS manager, the major headache you are likely to encounter is in implementing portals in line with existing systems and infrastructures.

To start with, few portals today are turnkey, and many final implementations will likely include a mix of portal software and other supporting technologies. Most of the hype around portals and portal-building tools centres on the business benefits provided by their user features-improved customer service, innovation, faster time to market and competitive advantage-will always resonate with executives and management.

Development is a key consideration. Some portal solutions simplify the process of building interfaces, and even provide templates or pre-built interfaces that include many of the common items you might expect in an intranet portal (search interface, company stock ticker, links to HR information, space for breaking company news, etc.). Some portals require much more manual customisation or HTML programming in order to build the custom interfaces you want.

Bhilwara Infotech Ltd.
Tracking a project's lifecycle

Sanjivashankar Dubey: A simple yet effective tool

Bhilwara Infotech Ltd (BIL), a SEI-CMM Level 4-compliant IT consulting and services company, provides e-commerce, e-CRM (Customer Relationship Management), ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) and WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) solutions. It also provides client-server application development, software maintenance, quality consultancy and technology migration.

For its own use, BIL wanted an effective and timely communications tool to administer its projects' management lifecycles. Improving time to deliver a project was critical, and so was quality control. Maintaining all records on paper was a cumbersome process, hence it wanted an online application that would maintain records and track cost escalations. Also, BIL wanted multi-platform support, which could be used on a number of application servers.

It began evaluating Web servers to develop a simple, yet foolproof application for SFA (sales force automation) and e-mail responses. Commenting on the selection process, Sanjivashankar Dubey, CEO and president, BIL, says: "Our objective was to develop an application that would track all activities involved in application development for a project. We evaluated various Web servers, including Jrun from Alliare, Borland's Enterprise Application Server and WebLogic from BEA Systems. However, we found that Linux on IBM's WebSphere Advanced Server offered the most comprehensive development platform."

The organisation developed Risk Management System (RMS) v1.2, an application that keeps track of all comments and requests for a particular project. It was built using Java Web Server 2.0 and Visual Age 4.0 (Enterprise Edition) on IBM's DB2, a relational database management system.

-R. Srinivas

Andhra Pradesh Technology Services Ltd.
Gateway to government

Suresh Chanda: In-house tool

Andhra Pradesh Technology Services Ltd. (APTS), an IT services consultancy firm, didn't look beyond its frontiers for an EIP package; it developed its own version, KM-ATOM (Knowledge Management-APTS Office Management). Initially built as a file management system, new features were added to the tool to make it work on the lines of an EIP. KM-ATOM has already been deployed at 18 state government offices in Andhra Pradesh, and has been sold to a few autonomous bodies in Chennai, Kolkata and Gujarat.

APTS managing director Suresh Chanda says, "In e-governance, the idea is to bring about transparency in governmental procedures. Initially, in KM-ATOM we provided the file management system to help citizens find the status of their files. With the system being operational for one year, we thought of making it more dynamic and extensive for small government offices. Hence we have added newer modules to it." Chanda is one of the core members of the APTS research and development team to have developed this EIP system.

The Andhra Pradesh government calls this EIP system the building block of its offices in bringing transparency. At APTS, for instance, all files that are either created internally or have an external origin (through electronic data interchange) are recorded and immediately updated to the system. Key functionaries have been given access to their respective sections of the portal. They can work on a given file and forward it to their superiors for necessary action online.

"All these result in considerable time and paper savings. The best part is a file can be accessed from anywhere, anytime," claims Chanda. APTS plans to add more features to KM-ATOM, like information on employees' transfers and postings, leave and increment sanctions, and service verification. Chanda plans to sell this package for Rs 25,000.

-K. Jayadev in Hyderabad