Andy Moore . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 Overture Article: Peek Into the Future. . . From Your Desktop TodayIn the ’60s there was a TV series called The Time Tunnel. Each week thedashing heroes would trot down a long Andy Warhol-era op-art hallway andleap through a “Portal into the Future.” For my money, it was the hippestshow around.

Today, the hippest view into the future could be sitting on your desk right now.The enterprise portal is the best evidence we now have that a genuine fundamental shift in computing is beginning to take place. And like with that fab ’60s TV show, the vision is slightly outpacing reality. For now. . . .

The IBM Software Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Making Portals Fit for E-BusinessPortals are the ideal area in which to weave KM best practices as portalimplementations mature into the essential workplace for individuals andworkgroups. And because the portal integrates with existing enterpriseapplications like CRM, ERP, SFA and others, the KM functionality extendsto them as well. We call this “contextual KM. . . .”

Eli Barkat, BackWeb. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 When Business Communication Is CriticalCompanies spend millions of dollars developing business content and makingit available via communication vehicles such as Web-based portals. But manyof them cannot guarantee that the information is delivered to users when theyneed it, in a form that users can readily comprehend and use. . . .

Jay Weir, Hummingbird . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Maximizing the Value of Enterprise Content and Knowledge AssetsIt is widely accepted that information represents the dominant opportunity togenerate competitive advantage. Consolidating this vast amount of informationfrom a variety of departments, branches and autonomous business units withina given region is one thing, but accomplishing it globally presents new andunique obstacles to fostering a complete enterprise view of content. . . .

Kamoon. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Securing the Power of Enterprise ExpertiseEmployees spend 30% of their time searching for information, resources andanswers and only 20% of an enterprise’s knowledge is retrievable (DelphiGroup). Securing answers for employees and capturing the tacit knowledge forfuture use are fundamental business goals and processes in all enterprises. . . .

BroadVision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Unifying the Extended EnterpriseEnterprises support more business applications than ever before. And userswant faster web browser-based access to more applications and information.Portals can help users get the right information quickly. Unfortunately, howpoint-solution portals “simplify” information access can increase IT expenseand complexity of content management and reduce information quality acrossthe enterprise. . . .

Lois Melbourne, TimeVision . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Who Knew? People Hold the Key to the Enterprise PortalThousands of records, endless statistics, facts, industry articles and reams of reference materials are kept in departmentally segregated corporate databasesof every flavor. Implementing an elaborate enterprise portal that only addresses providing access to these disparate bits of information does little. . . .

Special Supplement to

Best Practices in Enterprise Portals

Sponsored by

May 2002

XML, must be routinely applied—very littlestands in the way while the prevailing client-server model is turned upside down and isreplaced with something entirely new, andinarguably powerful.

Why Portals MatterAs cool as that sounds, Web services

would remain a momentary bump in theroad if it weren’t for yet another vital move-ment now taking place in business automa-tion. For to make these lofty business initia-tives come true, they must converge at thesingle point where value can be createdfrom those critical apps and vital content.And that single point is the glass in front ofall those complex carbon units sitting attheir desks, in their airline seats and at theirhome desktops.

The enterprise portal is the essentialfinal mile—hell, the final millimeter—thattruly brings people together with the toolsthat will make them succeed.

Portal clients are already in place, deliv-ering a personalized assortment of applica-tions and content. Presently, they are “mere”desktop views into the local IT resourcesand content repositories resident in theuser’s network. As such, they are little morethan very cool personal organizers.

But what if ... what if those resourceswere not part of the local IT shop’s offerings?What if the portal were to become the clientto the world’s largest operating system ... theWeb itself? Suddenly ANY app from ANYlocation and ANY content source could con-verge practically at will onto the user’s desk-top, laptop, whatever ... that’s the promise ofportals. It’s a fantastic “what if?”.

“Portals are the first thing that finallyanswers the age-old question of ‘how will Iever integrate all this together,’” says LarryBowden,VP Marketing for IBM Portals. (Thefact that there even IS something called “IBMPortals,” and that it exists to use, but remain

agnostic from, the many software divisions ofIBM such as Lotus, Tivoli, WebSphere, etc.,only underscores the mood-altering force ofthe portal in today’s largest enterprises.)

“The portal, the aggregation of the front-end, is the next-generation client,” Bowdendeclares. He draws out a scenario that isinexorably taking place right now:

“I propose that in a year or two, the oper-ating system for the Net becomes, literally,the application server. Those who are pro-viding the infrastructure to run on, the fail-over, the security pieces will be in the appli-cation-server business, moving it out to Web,versus the client-server world.

“So, if you have this operating system thatis essentially a virtual Web operating system,then what’s the client? And where are theapps? Web services are already evolving asthe apps. And the client is the portal—the sin-gle point of personalized interaction with allthe applications, content and processes.”

If you see that as a picture of what couldoccur, then it represents the biggest—-infact, the ONLY—truly fundamental changein the way humans work with the computingtools at their disposal since client-server.

“Someone will build a portal front endthat does a better job at leveraging thoseWeb services and presenting them to the enduser,” predicts Bowden, “and that someonewill dominate the computing space for theforeseeable future.”

The Reality Wake-Up CallThis is big stuff, and when something like

this happens, you owe it some kind of articu-late response. I don’t especially have one.

Clearly, the portal has a great opportunity.It’s easy to see how a portal client will lever-age an operating system (which in this case isthe application server infrastructure—nowresident in the local network but moving out

Special Supplement to

Peek Into the Future. . .From Your Desktop Today

In the ’60s there was a TV series called TheTime Tunnel. Each week the dashing heroeswould trot down a long Andy Warhol-erapop-art hallway and leap through a “Portalinto the Future.” For my money, it was thehippest show around.

Today, the hippest view into the futurecould be sitting on your desk right now. Theenterprise portal is the best evidence we nowhave that a genuine fundamental shift incomputing is beginning to take place. Andlike with that fab ’60s TV show, the vision isslightly outpacing reality. For now.

Changing the RulesThere are two game-changing trends tak-

ing place that are forever altering businessautomation. They are separate technicaladvances, but they are inextricably linkedtogether as though a single movement.

First is the emergence and growing accept-ance of net-resident mission-critical applica-tions and content. The term is “Web services,”and it is beginning to take on the sheen of afull-fledged revolution in the way businessapplications are created and deployed. Alreadyit is common for businesses to consume ASP-provided services for many of their high-touchoperations. So it’s not a great leap in mood—although it IS a huge upheaval in the tech-nical foundation—to accept the model of aWeb smorgasbord of business applications.Rapidly deployable, customizable and infinite-ly scalable assortments of mission-criticalapplications, robust, secure and fail-safe. Ahelping of ERP, a side of CRM and a littlesupply-chain interaction to wash it down.

This vision is not here today. The Webservices market is immature. But, assumingthe “little details” fall into place—standardssuch as SOAP (single object access proto-col); UDDI (universal discovery, descriptionand integration); WSDL (Web servicesdescription language); and the lingua francaof content-plus-application integration,

May2002S2

Andy Moore hasoften been a well-known presence inthe emergence ofnew technologies,from independenttelecommunicationsthrough networkingand informationmanagement. Mostrecently, Moore hasbeen pleased to witness

first-hand the decade’s most significant business and organizational revolution: the drive toleverage organizational knowledge assets(documents, records, information and objectrepositories) and the expertise and skill of theorganizations’ knowledge workers in order tocreate true learning organizations. He can bereached at andym@mint.net and welcomesfeedback and conversation.

Andy Moore

By Andy Moore, Editorial Director, KMWorld Specialty Publishing Group

Special Supplement to May 2002 S3

to the Web at large). It will ultimately manageand present to the end user Web services in aform that is easily consumable, easily acces-sible and customized and personalized to theindividual who uses them.

But in the meantime there are more localissues to deal with: how to build it, how todeploy it, how to pay for it and how to justi-fy it. Backweb’s CEO and Chairman EliBarkat has some opinions about that.

“The number-one reason for project fail-ure is their inability to attract the most criticalusers,” Barkat says. “If we’ve learned any-thing in the last 10 years of IT, it is that pro-viding passive access to information is notenough.” If you build it, they won’t come.

And in Barkat’s and Backweb’s mind,critical users are defined as the executiveteam and the sales force. These are not onlythe people who are creating the revenue forthe organizations, but in the case of the exec-utive team, they are the people who makethe spending decisions. Show THEM thevalue, and make a difference in the wayTHEY do their work, and you’ve got a deal.Sublimely simple, and self-evident.

Bowden agrees that despite the inherentvalue in portals in general, it is important topick your fights. “An iterative approach toimplementation is the only way to go withportals. EVERY case where a company triesto do the corporatewide, all-divisions, all-

function global design of a portal has failed,”he says. In other words, start small and grow.

There’s a hidden psychological factor at work, as well, says Bowden. “When otherdivisions or teams see the first implementa-tion, they usually state that they only need10% or 20% changed” to make it work forthem, whereas “they would have fought tothe death to convince a corporate portal taskforce that their requirements were totallyunique.”

In Barkat’s view, it’s not only a matter ofstarting small, but also one of providing acritical component that is missing from mostportal vendors’ basic offering: access to theportal for the disconnected user. The high-value, critical users—the executives, the

line-of-business managers, the field servicesand sales reps—he targets have one thing incommon: They are road warriors. Most ofthe time when they need access to criticalinformation and applications, they are dis-connected ... on a plane, in a hotel, at a cus-tomer’s site. All the portal technology in theworld can’t help them if they can’t get to itwhile they are in the act of creating theirhighest value.

So, just as it is self-evident that e-mail isnot much good if you can’t access it fromthe road, access to the portal for the discon-nected, high-value, revenue-generating indi-viduals is a must-have. “Not only is remoteaccess a way to achieve ROI, but it is alsothe way to achieve success with your firstphase portal,” says Barkat. Industry ana-lysts, CIOs, executives can get the concepteasily; portals are good, but offline access toportals for the most important constituents isa no-brainer.

The Adoption CurveSo, on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being full

implementations of full-functioned portalsand the corresponding Web services deliveredfrom the back-end, where in the adoptioncycle are we?

The short answer is: we’re still in knee-pants, for the most part. (It depends some-what upon where you live. “The Europeansare ahead of us in portals,” says Bowden.“They take a more sophisticated approach ...they take their time, and evaluate vendorsmore thoughtfully,” he says.)

But the real adoption of portals and Webservices is still a long time away, if the evolu-tion of previous generations of computing isany teacher (and it probably is). First, therehas to be a maturity in the development in theoperating system; somebody has to stake theclaim for THE operating system for the net.Nobody is there yet, although several (such asBEA and IBM with Websphere) are trying.

Next, you introduce the client. Just asDOS led to Windows in the client-serverevolution, so will a portal client appear thatdominates. We are on the brink of that rightnow. Today’s portals are actually ahead ofthe game, because they act like networkaccess points, even though the back-endservices are still coming from the local serv-er in a one-to-many paradigm, just like theyhave for years.

This is good, because portals are beingimplemented in such a way that, when Webservices do arrive, they can be plugged intothe user’s by-then familiar and beloved portalenvironment in a completely transparent way.Users reared on the localized version of theportal—call them “native portlets”—willscarcely realize the difference. You can createthe same end-user experience right now, andas Web services come along, replace the waythose applications are delivered.

This is a roadmap for deployment of anynew technology. Get buy-in from criticalusers, train and familiarize the communitiesto such a degree that they “wouldn’t have itany other way,” then slowly and behind-the-scenes deploy these off-loaded, services-based, cost-saving and productivity-enhanc-ing tools over time.

Underlying this vision is a message tothe marketplace: This is a “bet-your-busi-ness” proposition. Shifting from an IT-shopmodel to an outsourced services model is aquantum step. The providers of the networkand the various services you’ll shop for mustbe solid as rock.

And the other key message to take away isthis: In this vision of the future, the portal ismission-critical. It is no longer a way for theaccounting department to get their accountingpackage delivered to their desktops (or inBackweb’s vision, their tray tables).

When it becomes your single point ofcontact for all of your applications, all ofyour content and all of your processes ... ifit’s not up and running, then neither are you.

Looking Even FurtherWhat’s left to automate? Are we finally

at that stage that there’s “nothing left toinvent,” so we just close up the Patent Officeand go home?

Actually, just about the opposite is true.If the infrastructure is ubiquitous, and youare freed from the constraints of a “homebase,” the devices on your lap or in yourpocket are essentially points of access intothe same rich environment ... portal accessdevices of equal stature. The PDA, forexample, is theoretically no different thanthe big PC back at your office. Granted, theform factors imply that the graphics have toappear a little differently, but they are essen-tially the same.

So as you move from one of your “per-sonas” to the next ... from your office per-sona, to your road warrior persona, to yourat-home persona to your golf-course per-sona, your ability to stay connected in exact-ly the same way is not diminished. You willbe able to, for the first time, live in a fully vir-tualized world where there are no seamsmarring the relationship you can have withyour resources.

It’s just a matter of time. ❚

Andy Moore is an editor by profession and temperament, havingheld senior editorial and publishing positions for more than twodecades. As a publication editor, Moore most recently was editor-in-chief and co-publisher of KMWorld (formerly ImagingWorld)Magazine.Moore now acts as a contract editorial consultant and con-ference designer.

As KMWorld’s Specialty Publishing Editorial Director,Moore acts aschair for the current series of “Best Practices White Papers,” overseeingeditorial content, conducting market research and writing the openingessays for each of the white papers in the series. He can be reached atandym@mint.net and welcomes feedback and conversation.

“What if the portal were

to become the client to

the world's largest

operating system …

the Web itself?”

environment; instigate the formation ofcommunities with or without IS involve-ment; capture the work efforts of bothstructured and serendipitous groups fromthe workplaces; and index and categorizethose efforts for future retrieval and reuse.

From Portal to Electronic WorkplaceLike most current corporate technology

concepts, the portal emerged from the main-streaming of the Internet and the WorldWide Web. The average user was often over-whelmed when trying to navigate throughthe vast amount of accessible information.Consequently, “search” sites like Yahoo andAOL emerged to guide users to their desiredInternet destinations. These initial portalsoffered no personalization and thus had lit-tle incentive for loyalty from users whofloated from site to site.

Portals radically changed when itbecame “all about me” and the user couldpersonalize them by configuring hyper-links to favorite news, stock market infor-mation, sports teams, weather and localcontent sites. It provided stickiness andincreased the likelihood of re-visits. To fur-ther ensure the loyalty of their customerscompanies like AOL and Yahoo! have con-tinually improved the usefulness and utili-ty by adding features like instant messag-ing, community groups, free Web pages,family picture galleries and free e-mail cre-ating a virtual homespace where peoplespend inordinate periods of time.

Enterprise users have come to expect thesame kinds of Internet portal featuresfronting their corporate resources, whichare even more disparate and difficult to nav-igate than the Internet. The addition of collaboration tools, interaction with trans-action systems, extensions to mobiledevices along with the inclusion of cus-tomers, partners and suppliers to the corpo-rate Web site is evolving the portal into anelectronic workspace for conducting e-busi-ness. This provides users a way to manage

the resources, relationships and value chainof an organization to better do their jobs.

A Portal FrameworkA portal workplace is not achieved sim-

ply by putting an attractive design over amultitude of content sources and applica-tions that were previously difficult to accessand navigate. In fact, the challenge of build-ing a high-level portal is not in the userinterface; it’s providing unified businessprocesses that cuts across many IT systemsto provide such things as single sign-on,comprehensive search, application accessand integration, personalization, deploy-ment, administration, collaboration, Webcontent management, expertise location,business intelligence, metrics analysis, secu-rity and a host of other options unique toeach company. The vendor you select mustbe able to either provide all these capabili-ties directly or through a series of partners,integrate them together and make sure theyscale and are maintained.

While the UI makes it look easy, as wellit should, its substance consists of a wholelot of middleware integrating with existinginfrastructures pieces—a condition that isbest served through a robust portal frame-work that can flex to many diverse require-ments rather than a single product. Thisapproach has proven successful beyondIBM’s expectations in the creation of theWebSphere Portal family. The customerbenefits by extracting completely newvalue from its existing applications, con-tent and expertise—in effect, transforminga loosely related compilation of assets intoa single, cohesive e-business workplace.Every portal implementation has a specificfocus. Business-to-employee (B2E) portalsfocus on enterprise application integration,community development and peer collabo-ration, whereas the business-to-business(B2B) portals focus on extranet securityand vertical utility. Business-to-consumer(B2C) portals concentrate on scalability,transaction handling and customer reten-tion. On top of any of these could be a ver-tical focus with its own, additional set ofrequirements as might be found in a phar-maceutical industry portal whose goal is toaccelerate that FDA drug approval process.Previously, these requirements have beenmet by multiple portals and served by awide variety of portal vendors, each spe-cializing in a particular area. For example,let’s say a large, commercial bank uses abusiness-to-employee (B2E) portal to dis-pense information about company news,provide a venue for employee benefitenrollment, and access to customer rela-tionship management content. This bankalso has a customer-facing (B2C) portalthrough which commercial customers canaccess and view accounts, shift funds,

Special Supplement to

Making Portals Fit for E-Business

The term portal has become a common partof the workplace vernacular. The definitionof a portal varies because people see so manypossibilities for it. Interpretations range fromthe simple to the complex; a portal is definedas anything from a single interface connect-ing to a variety of hyperlinked resources withsearch capabilities, to an e-business work-place with contextual personalization, col-laborative workspaces and wireless access.A meaningful way to have a portal discus-sion is to focus on what portals can provideto the organization. And using the plural“portals” is no accident. Organizations arelikely to have more than one as they havemultiple e-business problems to solve.

What’s the KM in Portals?Portals are the ideal area in which to

weave KM functionality and best practicesas portal implementations mature into theessential workplace for individuals andworkgroups. And because the portal integrates with existing enterprise applica-tions like CRM, ERP, SFA and others, theKM functionality extends to them as well.We call this “contextual KM,” the embed-ding of functionality that enlivens anapplication with the ability to Locate,Learn, Capture, Reuse.

Locate, Learn, Capture and Reuse rep-resent the strong themes of KM that res-onate most with the following business userpains: people want to locate the content andpeople who can help them do their jobswith more continuity and quality. Theywant to learn from the collective experienceof the organization as represented by itsindividuals and they want to capture thoselearnings for future reuse.

The KM functionality in the WebSpherePortal family addresses each of these elements: the ability to access disparatecontent and present it to the user in a per-sonalized fashion; discover links betweencontent and expertise; communicate withpeople from anywhere within the portal

May2002S4

By the IBM Software Group

Special Supplement to May 2002 S5

inquire about products and receive accountattention. In addition, the bank also hosts abusiness-to-business (B2B) portal throughwhich short-term loans from commercialbanks to smaller retail banks are negotiat-ed. Managing these multiple vendor rela-tionships and code bases creates a complextask for an organization’s IT team.

The portal has evolved into a more inte-grated framework; what began as a way tolocate content has become a platform fromwhich to execute multiple transactions, con-duct e-business and collaborate with peersand partners. As you can see our definition ofa portal is based upon the varied needs of themarket: B2B, B2C, B2E, E2E. A portal mustbe quickly deployable but broadly customiz-able, be able to incorporate many diversecontent and application sources, provide col-laboration for those who need it and in gen-

eral be a flexible enough platform fromwhich to design, launch and maintain anelectronic workplace for users. In bold termsthe portal evolves the traditional, productivi-ty tool-centric, stovepiped work environmentto the more critical mobile, personalized,collaborative workplace. For most people ifyou took away all their productivity tools butlet them have access to a mail file and theInter/intranet then they would have 95% ofwhat they need to do their job.

Extending Portals from “Me” to “We”As mentioned above portals really

thrived when focus shifted to serving theneeds of “me.” Of even greater importance,especially in the enterprise, is the “we”—people congregating in a portal workspaceas a project team, a group with a commonrole or a community of interest. The “we”extends beyond your immediate organiza-tion to suppliers, partners, investors, cus-tomers and others who represent yourextended value chain. WebSphere Portalfamily includes Lotus software that helpsusers do things as a team or communityacross traditional boundaries like role,group, company, organization, or country.The online workplace that serves the individual is naturally extended to thegroup/community level. Customizing aportal space where they can work togethertakes personalization to a new level of use-fulness. When groups and communities caneffectively and efficiently organize them-

selves online, projects get done faster withbetter participation and decision-making.The community functions of WebSpherePortal enable user-initiated communities torapidly form around specific projects andissues. It provides tools for membershipmanagement and collaborative computing,such as instant messaging, discussions,document libraries with check-in andcheck-out, group calendar, task manage-ment, shared bookmarks and more.

Weaving Collaborative Services into the Portal

Previously, users traversed the portallandscape in search of content relevant tothem. In general, they “viewed” it. In addi-tion to out-of-the-box workplaces, Lotus alsoprovides a series of modular software com-ponents that provide collaboration servicesto build any type of WebSphere Portal thatenables users to now “do” things with thecontent that involves other people. For exam-ple, a discussion thread represented in a port-let (the little window on a portal page con-taining content) may list the subject of eachtopic in one column and the name of theauthor in the other. WebSphere Portal takesthis basic capability and enhances it by visu-ally indicating the online status of the author.The user can then right-click the author’sname and initiate an instant chat, audio/videosession, whiteboard sharing, virtual meeting,send mail or add them as a new member to acommunity portal. With the addition of theLotus Discovery Sever the user can view theauthor’s biography, expertise or find all oftheir authored documents.

Collaboration must be a natural exten-sion of the content and daily activities per-formed between users. These capabilitiesare integrated into the portal so that the col-laborative functions are in context; they areavailable anywhere a piece of content orname occurs—which is far more productivethan having awareness and chat services in aseparate application that may be on anotherpart of the screen or an unrelated page withno connection to the content. According to asurvey done by META Group, 70% of thoseimplementing a portal desire collaborationwithin their portal environment.

The IBM Portal StrategyIBM provides an end-to-end portal

solution for our customers that can beimplemented in a modular fashion as theirneeds for employee, partner, customer andsupplier portals evolve. This strategyincludes creating additional value fromexisting investments in enterprise applica-tions, data and security. The very nature ofa portal is to bring relevance, personaliza-tion and cohesion of the entire organization-

al information structure to each individualand community to assist them in decision-making and job execution. WebSphere Portalfamily provides access to critical businesscontent but also facilitates action by connect-ing people so that they can collaborate onwhat they discover.

Key elements to the IBM portal strategyinclude:

◆ One size doesn’t fit all: Not all portal needsare the same. WebSphere Portal family de-livers a three-tiered set of offerings formaximum portal implementation flexibil-ity (E2E, B2E, B2B, B2C). Some organi-zations may need all the parts, some willneed only a few and some are going tostart small and have requirements to grow.

◆ Best of breed technologies across IBM:WebSphere Portal family combines thebest of breed portal technologies from allIBM Software Group brands—Lotus® ,WebSphere, Tivoli® and DB2™ DataManagement—into a single family of of-ferings that cannot be matched by othervendors.

◆ Horizontal framework: Customers havedemonstrated a desire for a core frame-work that can link to existing infrastructurecomponents, such as security (single sign-on), directory, e-mail and enterprise appli-cations. This core framework ensures thatan organization can extract additionalvalue from its existing infrastructure andinvestment in technical skills to supportmultiple portals (E2E, B2E, B2B, B2C)from a single platform. The framework iseasily extended through a wide variety ofportlets and use of open standards.

◆ Partners and services: The portal is a tool inservice to the larger concept of an onlineworkplace, the requirements of which varyfrom one implementation to another.Whether building a solution to address em-ployee relationship management, customerrelationship management, sales force au-tomation, supply chain management, a com-bination of these or some other customizede-business solution, IBM has the partnersand services available to construct an infinitevariety of vertical and specialized solutions.

WebSphere Portal serves organizationsthat see the portal as more than a place toaccess news or search for content. Forward-thinking organizations see it as an onlineworkplace with permeable boundaries thatcuts across the value chain, connecting colleagues, customers and suppliers andenabling e-business. WebSphere Portal pro-vides—and links—a broad set of functional-ity to serve the objectives of the variety ofportal applications it can create. ❚

For more information on IBM WebSphere Portal family visit:http://www.ibm.com/websphere/portalfamily

“Portals radically changed

when they became 'all about

me' and the user could

personalize them.”

away from the office. A portal’s businessvalue is therefore diminished when its criti-cal users aren’t accessing and using it.

To solve this problem, IT leaders shouldconsider offline access at the inception ofevery project. This not only improves thebusiness value of the system, but makes itmore visible to the key stakeholders who pro-vide support and funding.

Guidant Corporation faced this problemhead on. Headquartered in Indianapolis,Guidant is a $3 billion medical technologycompany that develops and manufacturesproducts to treat cardiovascular disease. Inan industry where lives depend on thoroughunderstanding of product information,Guidant needs to make sure that its nation-al network of 1,300 medical device salesrepresentatives can rapidly assimilate infor-mation about new products.

“It’s an ongoing challenge: How do weget marketing and training material in thehands of our reps in a timely manner so theyare equipped to meet with customers?” saysWilliam McConnell, vice president andchief information officer at Guidant. “Weare a high-tech business, and 65% of ourrevenue comes from products that are lessthan 12 months old.”

Since 2000, Guidant has been develop-ing a multi-phased strategy for sales forceautomation that includes reporting, med-ical device tracking, and online delivery ofsales and training information. At the heartof this initiative is an offline portal called“Pipeline” that delivers important informa-

tion directly to the reps’ laptops wheneverthey connect to the network.

According to John Peasley, lead managerfor sales force automation at Guidant, corpo-rate sale reps are continually on the road, soGuidant needed a bulletproof remote-accessstrategy that could address the issues of asales force dependent on dial-up Internetconnections. “In the past, all of our commu-nication processes were voicemail or paperoriented,” he recalls. “The sales reps lived onfaxes and voicemail. Since our focus is onmaking the representatives productive, wewere particularly interested in improving thedelivery of training, marketing, and salesinformation—offline as well as online.”

Delivering Rich Content

Peasley knew that being able to delivercomputer-based training modules directly tolaptop computers would be an incredibleadvantage for these mobile sales profession-als. “We are strong believers in multimediatraining and sales information such as colorslides and video presentations,” he says.“The best computer-based training modulesincorporate rich video and interactive ani-mation to make the learning experiencemore appealing to users.”

To realize the vision, Peasley and histeam used BackWeb® ProactivePortal™technologies to develop the Pipeline infra-structure. Now, whenever a Guidant salesrep connects to the network, Pipeline auto-matically identifies pertinent content fordownload. BackWeb delivers alerts anddigital packages of any size or format,including audio, video, graphics and HTMLcontent. If Guidant needs to deliver anurgent or time-sensitive message, such asan announcement about FDA approval or a

Special Supplement to

When BusinessCommunication Is Critical

Companies spend millions of dollars devel-oping business content and making it avail-able via communication vehicles such asWeb-based portals. But many of them can-not guarantee that the information is deliveredto users when they need it, in a form that userscan readily comprehend and use. The prob-lem is exacerbated for mobile workers and“disconnected” users such as executives, salespersonnel, partners, and distributors. Thesehighly mobile, critical portal users are typi-cally responsible for generating revenue; unfortunately, they have the most difficultyobtaining the information they need.

The Problem with PortalsAccording to a recent study by Tech-

Republic and its parent the Gartner Group,roughly 40% of all IT projects fail to meetbusiness requirements and the average ITorganization annually ties up 10% of its ITstaff on work that contributes no value to thebusiness. In many cases, the problem stemsfrom the way online information is managedand exchanged. Most corporate communica-tion systems are built around EnterpriseInformation Portals that are ideal for aggre-gating information and managing content,but they don’t guarantee usage or ensure thatimportant information gets to the peoplewho need it. This is because portals–andmany other information systems, for thatmatter–are designed for people who are con-nected to the network, not for those criticalusers who must access information while

May2002S6

By Eli Barkat, Chairman and CEO, BackWeb Technologies

An Internet visionarywho has beeninstrumental in therebirth of pushtechnology, Barkat isalso well known for his remarkable historyas an Israeliparatrooper. His visionfor BackWeb is tocreate e-businesssolutions thatincorporate theccompany’s patented

Polite technology.With the emergence of theenterprise portal as an important tool for worldwidebusiness, Barkat sees an increasing need for Global1,000 companies to leverage the Internet to streamline core processes and manage critical change.He has helped make BackWeb a de-facto criticalcommunications standard and an industry leader ofproactive communications technologies.

Eli Barkat

Chairman and CEO

“Highly mobile individuals generate revenue;

unfortunately, they have the most difficulty

obtaining the information they need.”

Special Supplement to May 2002 S7

bulletin about a product issue, an alert willflash as well.

“We monitor the frequency with whichsales reps log on and interact with their salesreports so we can determine if we are deliv-ering useful reports and how we can improvetheir offline access to critical portal content,”says Peasley. “We have two administratorsmanaging the system on an ongoing basis.The offline portal solution was developed inabout four months.”

Getting the MessageBackWeb includes capabilities to allow

critical information to be delivered to theappropriate user in the appropriate way.Users subscribe to content they want toreceive and specify which content will bedelivered offline. Once downloaded to theirlaptops reps can review the material at theirleisure. They can establish preferences forhow information is prioritized, request noti-fication of delivery to a mobile device whenthey are offline, and even request that thecontent be made available for offline usage.Information Technology (IT) managers cangenerate reports to discover how often usersinteract with the content, when they lastreceived content, and which content theyinteract with most frequently.

“We can monitor content-usage in aclosed-loop fashion to ensure that each repis equipped for the job,” says McConnell.“Generally, we send out content with a ‘nor-mal’ priority. But BackWeb lets us flag usersby identifying a critical piece of content.”

To preserve network resources, BackWeb’sPolite® technology allows Guidant to sendinformation only when adequate bandwidthis available. Byte-level file transfer enablesthe content to be sent in increments whenev-er the rep connects to the network. Users canreceive content in the background withoutcreating performance interruptions to othernetwork applications such as email andbrowsing.

Measuring ResultsMcConnell says delivering information

through the offline portal gives Guidant ahuge competitive advantage. Guidant salesreps are constantly in hospitals or movingbetween hospitals. Now, he is confident thatthey will always have the right material topresent to physicians. “Our remote accesstechnology is very robust and stable,” hesays. “BackWeb overcomes the constraintsof dial-in technology, allowing us to com-municate with the field organization at anoptimal level.”

Peasley estimates that using Pipelineinstead of a courier service such as FedExsaves about two thousand dollars per mailing.Other hard savings stem from reduced on-sitetraining efforts: sending multimedia trainingmaterials through Pipeline means face-to-face training can be cut down or eliminated—at a cost of about two hundred dollars per rep,per day. Sales ramp-up is shortened by sever-al months because field reps now receive top-quality training videos delivered directly totheir computers. And with the BackWeb

closed-loop reporting and Rapid Survey fea-tures, the field reps are tested for comprehen-sion and certified on new products within afew days, as opposed to a few months.

“Reps who have come from competingcompanies tell us that our training and infor-mation delivery infrastructure is a cut aboveother companies like ours in the industry,”says Peasley. “They are ecstatic when theysee our sophisticated tools and the volume ofexcellent marketing sales and training infor-mation we can deliver through Pipeline. Wenow have the ability to send all kinds of con-tent and monitor its receipt. BackWeb hasbecome an essential part of our sales forceautomation strategy.”

The Benefits of Offline AccessAs Guidant has demonstrated, a com-

plete information delivery strategy shouldassess what information is truly important toan organization’s success and then ensurethat it reaches the right people’s attention—even when they are offline or workingremotely. Our research reveals that 50% ofportal ROI is based on disconnected users. Inother words, the people who drive revenueare typically the ones who spend the mosttime out of the office. Executives, field salespersonnel, partners, distributors—these arethe customer-facing people, and also theones who are often on the road. You can’texpect them to come into the office to gath-er information, yet that’s where the informa-tion typically resides.

Guidant’s example also emphasizes thatin order for an IT project to deliver lastingbusiness value, it must take into account theneeds of the disconnected user from the verybeginning.

“We have overwhelming support for thevalue that this technology is providing,”McConnell concludes. “Ninety percent ofthe reps are using it, and they are gettingthe information they need. In our case, theROI is more anecdotal than measurable,but the feedback we’re getting is that thetechnology is improving productivity andhelping the reps do their jobs.”

Additional InformationTo learn how to ensure a successful

portal implementation, register for theBackWeb & Epicentric Web Seminar withguest speaker Craig Roth of Meta Group atwww.backweb.com/profitableportals ❚

BackWeb helps companies maximize their content investmentsby prioritizing,delivering and promoting the usage of critical informa-tion to customers, suppliers, partners and employees across the enter-prise. BackWeb ProactivePortal technologies allow companies toensure that the right people have the right information at the righttime. Many Fortune 500 companies rely on BackWeb to manage crit-ical communications across the enterprise, maximize their portalinvestments, and streamline their e-businesses.

BackWeb guarantees the usage of critical content by critical portal users.

Offline EnableYour Portal

AcceleratePortal Usage

Via Notification

CriticalCommunications

GuaranteedPortal Usage

Closed-loopReporting

◆ Search and Retrieval—Full-featuredadvanced search technologies are requiredto access, manage, and organize informa-tion stored in many and varied sourcesthroughout the enterprise. Intuitive yetpowerful search capabilities that enableusers to look for mission-critical informa-tion and have it presented in a variety offormats to suit their particular need or pref-erence is essential.

Superior search and retrieval tools arecapable of indexing and accessing infor-mation stored in a wide range of busi-

ness systems, e-mail packages, docu-ment management systems, file systemsand other repositories, regardless ofwhether the information is structured orunstructured. This capability of access-ing all types of data from a singlesearch is also referred to as “federatedsearch.”

◆ Categorization—These tools are thelifeblood of knowledge management ini-tiatives. They are a key building block inthat they add context to content. Thesetools are capable of automatically generat-

ing business taxonomies (or leveraging andenriching an existing taxonomy if oneexists), a comprehensive list of concepts orcategories by which to organize enterprisecontent. Solid categorization enginesdevelop an intuitive, precise “table of con-tents” that enables users to find the infor-mation they require faster by providingthem with a contextual map of searchresults—organizing related information bysimilar theme or concept.

◆ Crawlers and Agents—Another key fea-ture of a knowledge management solutionis the provision of “intelligent agents”capable of pushing required informationto users. Agents allow users to define cri-teria or alerts or changes to documents,Web site content, or new information fromother sources.

Crawlers are enabling technologies thatprovide for Internet content and otherexternal information sources to be includedin user- and agent-based searches. This canalso involve “brokered” searches wherebya search and retrieval solution brokers outsearches to Internet-based search enginesand then organizes those results as part ofits own search.

◆ Other Key Features—Document Summarization: Providingcontextual summaries of documents,offering a “preview” format of the relatedresult. This enables readers to see the doc-ument in a minimized form with searchterm highlighting (capsules and para-graphs with the search term query high-lighted)—especially useful for lengthydocuments.

Multiple Language Support: In today’sglobal economy, the ability to search andreturn result sets across a variety of notonly major European languages but alsoAsian languages is essential.

Application “Hooks”: The ability ofknowledge management tools to accessand categorize enterprise business sys-tems is critical. Hooks, or activators, thatenable knowledge management technolo-gies to index, categorize, retrieve, and dis-play comprehensive, flexible result setsfrom packages such as Siebel, SAP, andJ.D. Edwards are extremely valuable toorganizations looking to ensure that theentire range of business content is avail-able to knowledge workers conductinginformation-based activities.

Application Programming Interface(API): The ability of organizations to tai-lor knowledge management tools, includ-ing information search and retrieval andcategorization tools, is essential. From aninformation search and retrieval perspec-tive, this equates to enabling organizationsto develop custom interfaces, leverage avariety of advanced features, and include

Special Supplement to

Maximizing the Value of Enterprise Contentand Knowledge Assets

Without question, information drivesbusiness today. It is widely accepted thatinformation represents the dominantopportunity to generate competitive advan-tage. A recent Columbia University studyfound that investments in intangible assetsgenerate a return on investment eight timesgreater than similar investments in tangibleassets. Consolidating this vast amount ofinformation from a variety of departments,branches, and autonomous business unitswithin a given region is one thing, butaccomplishing it globally presents new andunique obstacles to fostering a completeenterprise view of content.

In the new economic reality, there aretwo strategic initiatives that organizationsare undertaking more commonly in orderto maximize the value of enterprise contentand intellectual capital—knowledge man-agement practices and enterprise informa-tion portals (EIP). The following articleoutlines these two initiatives and some ofthe key considerations associated withtheir deployment.

Knowledge Management

It has been well documented that knowl-edge management is 90% culture/peopleand 10% technology. Knowledge manage-ment requires a commitment to informationsharing, collaboration, as well as a top-levelmandate in order to deliver on its potential.Knowledge management can be definedsimply as “The process of turning informa-tion into useful knowledge.” But what arethe tools organizations need to develop theculture of the knowledge enterprise? Whatspecific functionality should they look for inknowledge management technologies?Cultural challenges aside, what do organiza-tions really need?

“Tools” of the Trade—The essentialknowledge management “tools” include:

May2002S8

By Jay Weir, Product Marketing Manager, Hummingbird Enterprise Portals Solutions, Hummingbird, Ltd.

“Cultural challenges

aside, what do

organizations

really need?”

Special Supplement to May 2002 S9

natural language capabilities. From a categorization standpoint, API enablesorganizations to develop, manage, andmodify business taxonomy, provide a vari-ety of knowledge agents for users, and ini-tiate supervised or unsupervised catego-rization, or a combination of the two tomonitor and fine-tune the contextualiza-tion of enterprise content.

In sum, knowledge management tools arerapidly emerging as the primary means ofleveraging business information. Combinethese tools and techniques with the benefitsand capabilities of an enterprise portal andorganizations can begin truly realizing andcapitalizing on the wealth of informationavailable to them.

Enterprise Information PortalAs organizations move forward with their

e-business initiatives, it is imperative that theynot only consider the integrity, scalability, andopenness of the solution, but also the ability toleverage existing IT infrastructure investmentswithin the new model. Being able to seam-lessly integrate mission-critical legacy appli-cations, enterprise business packages, cus-tomer relationship management solutions,custom applications, and other vital systems,without extensive programming and architec-ture changes is of real benefit. Organizationsare looking to the enterprise portal as the“touch point” for achieving these goals.

Similar to the caveats of knowledge man-agement—that cultural issues must beaddressed in addition to the provision of tech-nology enablers—enterprise portals demand afundamental change in the way stakeholdersconduct business. Not to say that this has to bean overly painful exercise—in fact one of theadvantages of deploying enterprise portals liesin the improved and simplified user experi-ence they generate—but simply that training,focus group survey, and stakeholder inputmust be sought throughout the portal deploy-ment to ensure that the various audiences “getwhat they want.”

Cultural and process issues aside, thereare still fundamental elements that organiza-tions should expect in a portal offering. Theseinclude:

◆ Sound Security Model—Above all, trueenterprise portals—those that include inter-nal and external audiences, informationsharing, and extended enterprise function-ality (e.g., customer facing portals and B2Bportals)—must ensure the integrity ofenterprise content. Organizations shoulddemand that portal offerings deliver thebenefit of single sign-on (access to allapplications and information on a per-usersecurity profile via one password), userauthentication (based on existing securityprofile—LDAP, NDS, ADS, NTLM andother industry-standard security mod-

Aird & Berlis LLP (A&B) is a prominent, full-service corporate law firm with a large, diversified,national and international practice. The Canadian-based firm represents some of the world’s largestcorporations as well as a wide array of entrepreneurial businesses, associations, government agenciesand individuals.

Gary Torgis, the firm’s Executive Director, recognized that A & B’s continued success was dependent upon utilizing the best current technologies to support its business strategies. He turnedto Paul Knapp, Director of Information Technology, who was charged with the task of improving thefirm’s ability to deliver cutting-edge service to current and new clients.

The solution that they chose includes Hummingbird Portal™, and Hummingbird DM™, to allowthe firm to meet existing client collaboration requirements, while providing a highly flexible architecture enabling the firm to adapt to the dynamic requirements of the legal community.

“The way in which law firms are providing service is changing,” said Knapp, “Clients are starting to expect the accessibility and collaborative features provided by solutions likeHummingbird Portal.”

The open, flexible architecture of Hummingbird Portal was a major factor in the firm’s decisionto purchase this product. “Future collaboration with our clients is going to continue to evolve indirections that we can’t completely identify at the moment,” said Knapp.

How They ChoseKnapp was impressed that Hummingbird Portal’s architecture allows easy integration of new

applications and enhancements to functionality. “You don’t want to spend a significant amount ofmoney and find out a year down the road your portal can’t handle new software that’s critical to yourorganization’s competitiveness,” he said.

Before the portal was implemented, A&B lawyers and administrative staff collaborated withclients primarily through e-mail,a method of communication that raised security concerns.“One of ourcriteria when deciding on a portal solution was airtight security,” said Knapp.

The ability to use predefined or custom-made e-Clip plug-ins to extend the portal was also akey consideration. e-Clip plug-ins are Hummingbird Portal components that integrate dynamicinformation such as e-mail inboxes or sales reports, as well as interactive services such as threadedconversation, online procurement, an employee directory, or data from enterprise applications andbusiness systems into the centralized Web-based workspace of the portal. A&B is working withHummingbird partner AMH Communications, a consulting firm specializing in portal, documentmanagement and knowledge management solutions for the legal vertical, to develop customizede-Clip plug-ins.

The ResultImplementing the portal allows the firm to give its clients more power over documents that are

used in their legal matters. For example, clients supply A&B with templates for legal documentsthat require updating on a regular basis. Previously, these templates were e-mailed to a clerk atA&B who copied them online to be updated. Now, customers can come through the portal using acustom e-Clip to directly edit and update their own templates.“They have the security to replaceany template putting the control along with tight security right into the client’s hands,” saidKnapp. “We’re definitely meeting with positive comments from our clients. There is no more confusion as to which template is the latest and did the correct one get updated.”

The firm has also integrated its existing Hummingbird document management system intoHummingbird Portal. Employees who need to access the firm’s documents from remote locationsgo through the portal, accessing a Hummingbird DM e-Clip. This approach eliminates the need toinstall Hummingbird DM on each computer, saving money and IT resources. The firm is currently inthe process of placing all documents into a centralized library that can be accessed from any location by authorized users. This technology keeps A&B at the leading edge of the industry wherelawyers, staff and clients have quick and easy access to all documents whether they are in the officeor on the road or at their home office.

With Hummingbird Portal in place,Torgis and Knapp are confident that A&B remains preeminentamong the firms looking to leverage technology for competitive advantage.

Knapp has a message to other firms about to make such a decision.“Get off the fence. Firms thatare not moving forward with software tools like Hummingbird Portal are quickly going to discoverthat they cannot remain competitive in the current and future marketplace.”

Portal: Firm Ground for Law Group A&B

els), data encryption, and other securityfunctions that protect the integrity of appli-cations and information. Ideally this shouldbe provided natively, without requiring athird-party security product for the sake oflowering administration and decreasingdeployment efforts.

◆ Built-in Collaboration—Collaboration isa rapidly growing market segment. Themarket has seen the introduction of collab-oration tools of all stripes—both asynchro-nous tools and synchronous, “real-time”tools. However, the trend is clearly movingaway from deploying these solutions as ameans of communication and towarddeploying collaborative solutions seam-lessly tied to business processes and aimedat generating efficiencies, reducing costs,and accelerating mission-critical projects.

Organizations should look to portal offerings that include out-of-the-box col-laboration functionality to facilitate team-based, project-oriented collaborationactivity, with a security framework to pro-tect data integrity and provide for con-trolled external participation, cross-appli-cation functionality to provide streamlinedcollaborative activity, task management,auditing, and other fundamental collabo-rative capabilities.

◆ Search and Categorization—A parallel toknowledge management—which is naturalgiven that one of the primary goals of por-tal deployments is to initiate better infor-mation access and management. It isimperative that portal solutions providenative information search and retrieval andcomprehensive categorization technolo-gies. With portals promising users a stream-lined, intuitive experience, it is critical thatsearch and categorization functionalitydeliver precise, meaningful result sets in avariety of formats conducive to the facilita-tion of “speed to knowledge” for users.

◆ Application Integration—As organiza-tions strive to maximize their currentinvestment in IT infrastructure, streamlinesystem integration processes, and sharedata and information beyond internal audi-ences, they are looking to enterprise portalsto facilitate rapid and cost-effective solu-tions. Organizations should expect aneffective, comprehensive plug-in architec-

ture that enables them to bolt-in existingand future applications seamlessly. Manyportal solutions offer plug-ins to industrystandard applications and business systemsas well as information sources, the Internet,and other information stores. Organizationsshould also ensure that a development kit isavailable to create custom plug-ins thatextend beyond those made available byportal vendors. Advanced portal solutionsoffer what is called “application collabora-tion” that enables individual business appli-cations to carry out cross-application tasksvia a portal-based menu. For example, auser can publish a sales report created in areporting solution to a document manage-ment system, check it into a collaborativeproject folder, or route the document forreview and approval—all from a drop-down menu, avoiding the need to workacross various applications to carry out sep-arate tasks.

◆ Customization—It goes without sayingthat portal solutions should be customiz-able to suit corporate standards, look andfeel, or interface design goals. Further tothe overall look and feel of the portal, theremust be facilities that enable individualusers to tailor their portal workspace to suitindividual role, requirement, or preference.

◆ Openness and Scalability—True enter-prise portals are deployable across bothUNIX and Windows platforms, can inte-grate systems from desktop to mainframe,and are accessible from not only desktopand laptop stations, but also by a variety ofdevices, including mobile phones andPDAs. Additionally, while many portalimplementations start small (20 to 100users), the goal is ultimately to deliver trueenterprise class deployment. Organizationsshould ensure that the portal is capable ofgrowing—accommodating the tens ofthousands of possible users.

◆ Advanced Capabilities—Some portalsoffer a wide range of advanced features.Among the more interesting of these areincluded:

Messaging: The ability of having intelli-gent agents notify users (based on admin-istrator, group, or individual criteria) ofsuch things as content change, new con-

tent, task timelines, system messages, orother alerts.

Publishing Features: Many portaldeployments have a goal of informationsharing and knowledge management.Some portals offer the ability to publishcontent from the portal workspace touser communities, portal pages, mes-saging systems, or directly to portalusers and groups.

Intuitive Page Creation: A drag and dropmodel that allows users to build their ownportal pages for personal, group, or enter-prise use is often desirable and generatesthe benefits of not only improved userexperience, but also those of facilitatingstreamlined knowledge sharing and foster-ing best practice replication.

What is critical to portal deployments is that the fundamentals are in place—ensuring that a sound framework to buildon is provided. No portal will deliver 100%feature/functionality out-of-the-box, but ifthe standard elements of security, applica-tion integration, scalability, and the otherkey feature/functions outlined above arepresent, then organizations will have ahighly adaptable foundation on which tobuild their portal solution.

ConclusionIt is important to keep in mind that foster-

ing a 360° view of enterprise content involvesnot only the interoperation of a wide range oftechnologies and business solutions, but alsothe commitment of users to support it. In fact,users (whether internal or extended enter-prise) can be considered the hub of anyknowledge management or portal initiative.Even if the ideal technology infrastructure isin place to facilitate the solution, it meansnothing without users. Fortunately, knowl-edge management strategies—especiallywhen coupled with enterprise informationportals—benefit both organizations and users.They not only generate concrete businessvalue (bottom line return, reduced cost ofownership, etc.), but also drastically changethe efficiency and manner in which usersaccess, manage, work with, and leverageenterprise content—for the better. ❚

Headquartered in Toronto, Canada, Hummingbird Ltd. is a globalenterprise software company that employs 1300 people in 40 officesworldwide.The company's revolutionary Hummingbird Enterprise™,an integrated information and knowledge management solutionsuite, manages the entire lifecycle of an organization's informationand knowledge assets. Hummingbird Enterprise creates a customized360° view of enterprise content with a portfolio of products that areboth modular and interoperable.Today, five million users representing90% of the Fortune 500 and 85% of the Fortune 100 companies relyon Hummingbird products and solutions to connect, manage, access,collaborate, publish and search their enterprise content.

S10 Special Supplement to May 2002

"Knowledge management tools are

rapidly emerging as the primary means of

leveraging business information."

Special Supplement to May 2002 S11

captures the questions and answers in a FAQdatabase and provides measurement tools forenhancing the entire question-and-answerprocess. Such a solution drives increased pro-ductivity for sales forces, project teams,channel partners and employees across theenterprise by enabling them to find and inter-act with the right person who can deliver crit-ical information when it is needed most andto proactively manage the Q&A process.

“Enterprise expertise management is acritical component to generation-three portals,providing a complete Q&A process and man-agement tool. EEM is the next step in interac-tion management by giving a defined struc-ture for finding the right person to answer aquestion or need while taking into accountexpert availability, workload balance andoverall business priorities to achieve the bestresults for requestor and expert. EEM bringsadditional results-driven functionality toenterprisewide portal deployments,” saysGene Phifer, Vice President & ResearchDirector, Gartner, Inc.

In knowledge-centric enterprises, it iscritical to have a central place for employeesto find answers. Many companies lack theinfrastructure and business processes tomatch the user’s inquiry to the most appro-priate expert or to capture the information.This means, if the question has not been pre-defined in existing databases, the companydoes not have the ability to route to the appro-priate expert and leverage their knowledgeworkers. As a result, the inquiry either goesunanswered or costs the organization a con-siderable amount to provide an answer.

With an EEM solution, a company hasthe power to define the entire Q&A processwith action-oriented workflows and businessrules. When an employee submits a question,it is automatically routed to the right expertalong a defined workflow. The questions canbe managed with unique processes for dif-ferent communities, divisions, departmentsand the overall enterprise with their owninteraction management policies. In addi-tion, the critical Q&A information exchangeis captured for future reference.

Kamoon Partners with Tacit for Unisys Solution

Kamoon Inc., a provider of EnterpriseExpertise Management (EEM), and TacitKnowledge Systems, Inc., a provider ofExpertise Automation for the enterprise,partnered to integrate the two companies’products.

“Kamoon provides an enterprise solutionthat helps companies achieve their knowl-edge management goals of enabling theirdifferent communities to work uniquely andscale to enterprise knowledge needs. Wedeliver results for our customers by enablingthe capture of tacit knowledge, providingvisibility into the process, and ultimately byhelping the employees accomplish theirbusiness goals,” said Yali Harari, Kamoon’sPresident and CEO, of the partnership.

“In large, dynamic organizations, indi-vidual employees have a tremendous amountof knowledge to offer each other, but unfor-tunately, much of this expertise goes undis-covered and unused,” adds David Gilmour,President and CEO of Tacit KnowledgeSystems. By adding expertise profiling,“companies make it possible for the full tal-ent of each individual to be continuouslydelivered within their knowledge portals andonline communities, and in the future, any-where else the company wishes to make itavailable,” says Gilmour.

Unisys, the information services andtechnology company, has recently signed onfor delivery of this integrated solution for itsown Enterprise Expertise Management sys-tem. The integrated solution will give knowl-edge workers all over Unisys the ability toaccess key knowledge, share expertise andcollaborate easily across job functions. Thelarge-scale deployment required a sophisti-cated expertise profiling system to map all35,000 experts quickly and accurately and amethod to continually update profiles basedon new experience and skill sets.

“We wanted a solution that would giveour knowledge workers the ability to accesskey knowledge, share expertise and collabo-rate easily across job functions, businessunits and geographies,” said Susan McCabe,Director of Knowledge Management atUnisys. “Kamoon Connect with Tacit ESPoffered us a solution with simple user inter-faces, dynamic, automatic profiling and flex-ibility to support the unique needs of themany unique knowledge communities atUnisys. We believe this combination of capa-bilities will support rapid adoption, continualuse and high returns.” ❚

For more information, please visit the company atwww.KAMOON.com or call 201-242-9311.

Securing the Power ofEnterprise ExpertiseKamoon’s EEM matches the Tough Questions to the Correct People

Employees spend 30% of their time search-ing for information, resources and answers,yet only 20% of an enterprise’s knowledge isretrievable (Delphi Group). Securing answersfor employees and capturing the tacit knowl-edge for future use are fundamental businessgoals and processes in all enterprises. Thecosts of the current “search-for-answers”process includes:

◆ Valuable time spent searching for experts,questions and answers that do not exist inexplicit knowledgebases.

◆ Delayed sales cycles.

◆ Product-development tacit knowledge thatis lost from future learning opportunities.

◆ Critical deadlines that are missed.

◆ Repeating the same time-consumingprocesses for the same questions, with nocapture of answers for future use.

◆ The impact on results and service of “bestguess” instead of the right answer.

◆ Lack of management visibility insight intothe question-and-answer (Q&A) process.Matching available experts and resources

to needs is fundamental to business process-es in all enterprises. Even if your companyhas traditional knowledge managementsearch capabilities, where do your employ-ees turn when they need to find the right per-son and do not know who that person is?Can your company track the interaction andcapture the information exchange, once theperson is found?

Complete enterprise expertise manage-ment (EEM) drives productivity by: findingthe right expert; enabling the Q&A interac-tion process; securing an answer; capturingthe questions, answers and behavior; andenhancing the Q&A process for futureneeds. Accomplishing these goals enablesemployees to spend more time selling andcompleting their projects instead of search-ing for answers.

EEM technology matches inquiries to theright expert, facilitates the right interactionprocess through action-oriented workflow,

Kamoon Inc.

solution portals “simplify” informationaccess can increase IT expense and the com-plexity of content management and reduceinformation quality across the enterprise.

Why Portals Are Popular

Point-Solution Portals

Point-solution portals are generally inex-pensive and relatively easy to implement.Business units often create these depart-

ment-level solutions without corporatedirection. Such “quick fix” portals causedecentralization, undermine corporate secu-rity, raise IT costs and reduce content andbrand quality.

Because they put a thin veneer over mul-tiple web sites, enterprise-information por-tals can disguise and encourage proliferationof sites company-wide. Yet each new siteincreases system cost and maintenance—upto $1 million annually per fully transactionalsite, according to the Gartner Group.

Content dispersed in decentralized sys-tems can easily become outdated or inconsis-tent, making users wonder which informationis correct. When content consistency suffers,so does brand, as more people compose intheir own “voice,” regardless of corporatestrategy and style. If customers and partnersmust visit multiple sites, their annoyance levelis heightened by having to deal with differentinterface styles at each point. A customer rela-tionship management system may provide asingle view of the customer only to the organ-ization, not to the customer. And manyemployees must visit different internal sites tocomplete simple tasks.

Next-Generation Portals

The next generation of portals can elim-inate proliferated web sites as separate enti-ties. This helps organizations gain oversightof their web presence and improve contentquality and consistency of branding andinformation online. Next-generation portalsreduce IT costs. Companies with dozens ofsites, each requiring upkeep, could realize a

Special Supplement to

Unifying the Extended Enterprise

Portals promise to simplify the process ofaccessing relevant information—while CIOsmust deliver immediate benefits despite in-creasing system complexity and reduced ITbudgets. Enterprises support more businessapplications than ever before. And users wantfaster web browser-based access to more ap-plications and information. As these demandstax web infrastructures, web sites are prolif-erating without central oversight.

Portals can help users get the right infor-mation quickly. Unfortunately, how point-

May2002S12

Dr. Pehong Chen is arenowned expert andleader in the field ofnew media andenterprise self-servicesoftware technologies.Prior to foundingBroadVision in 1993,he was vice presidentof multimediatechnology at Sybase,responsible for thecompany's interactiveinitiatives. Earlier, hefounded and was

president of Gain Technology, a leading supplier ofmultimedia software tools, where he pioneeredmultimedia as an enabling technology for a newgeneration of business applications. Gain was acquiredby Sybase in 1992.

Having personally started and run two successfulsoftware startups, Dr. Chen uses his experience andresources to help others do the same. In 1993, heprovided startup capital for Siebel Systems, now aworldwide leader in front office automation software,and served on its board of directors until 1996.

Dr. Pehong Chen

President, CEO andChairman of the Board

BroadVision, Inc.

As BroadVision’s CIO and SVP of engineering, Shawn Farshchi understands IT pain pointsand is in a position to do something about them.

Q: What keeps CIOs awake at night in 2002?

A: In 1999 and 2000, it was fixing the Y2K issue and supporting all the new e-business initiatives. Then 2001 showed up and the economy took a nose dive. The result for IT organizations was: number one, they had to cut their budgets and their headcount; numbertwo, they still had to show value to the business; and number three, as companies becamemore conscious about spending money, integration became a priority. Now the biggest challenge for IT managers is how to keep the organization going with constrained resourcesand how to get integration happening between many, disparate systems.

Q: What are CIOs doing about integration, given the lack of resources?

A: The brave ones are attempting the integration in-house. Others are falling back on outsourcing. Outsourcing makes it drastically easier because you don’t have to worryabout the integration or the resources required to maintain them.

Q: What do you lose by outsourcing?

A: You lose the quick response˜or you pay heavily to get it. When you lose expertise in-house, you also lose ingenuity.The vendor is also serving several different companies,so they don’t really understand every single business that they are providing services to.

Before the outsourcing trend, IT was making a big comeback. Rather than just providingphones and e-mail and things like that, they were getting involved in business processes. Byoutsourcing it, the expertise goes away and resources are shifting back to the business side.Instead of IT becoming more knowledgeable about business, the finance guy has to understand what does it mean to run one financial application over another. So there’s a lotto be lost when you outsource.

IT Strategies for Tough TimesExcerpts from an interview with Shawn Farshchi, CIO and SVP of Engineering

30% savings on administration and devel-opment costs from next-generation portals,plus save on hardware, databases and mid-dleware necessary to run multiple sites.

Next-generation portals also enable col-laboration across enterprises and consolidateback-end systems and databases under onecommon interface. They offer a personalizedentry point with information and businessprocesses targeted to users. Partners, suppli-ers, customers and employees can quicklylocate the information they want. Next-gen-eration portals increase productivity and fur-nish a consistent user experience, eliminat-ing conflicting or outdated content. Besidesself-service, next-generation portals offerpersonalization, integration, content man-agement and scalability.

Personalization involves creating a website based on who the user is, what he orshe is doing or what he or she saw, boughtor saved. It reduces operating expenses byenabling employees, business partners andcustomers to complete certain transactionswithout assistance. It also increases rev-enue potential by strengthening customerloyalty and providing more opportunities topurchase products or services.

Customization—configurable homepages or access control—does not “learn”over time or target information moment tomoment. In next-generation portals, person-alization also supplies relevant informationto users based on known characteristics—forexample, where they work, their interestsand their online behavior. This portal reactsin real time to users’ needs and provides apersonalized path to information. Some por-tals can personalize the quality of servicebased on the user’s role or activity.

Next-generation portals must provideoptions for integrating to legacy systems—and for handling duplicate systems result-ing from mergers. These include integra-tions by enterprise application integrationvendors or point-to-point integrationsusing J2EE technologies. The portal mustdisplay these integrations simply and allow

users to add them to configurable homepages. Portlets let users access databases,applications, other sites and external datafeeds, such as stock quotes.

Content management facilities ensurethat the portal’s content is appropriate, cate-gorized, targeted to the right users andapproved. These features range from pub-lishing content directly into the portal with-out stringent workflows to highly controlledprocesses in which content is reviewed, ver-

sioned, tracked and managed at every step.Portal users can obtain syndicated contentfrom other sources.

To reliably support business-critical inter-actions with customers, partners, suppliersand employees, a next-generation portal mustperform well under peak loads. Scalabilityfeatures such as persistent caching, automat-ed fail-over, load balancing, quality of serviceand distributed, delegated administration areessential for an enterprise-class solution. ❚

BroadVision is the world’s leading supplier of enterprise self-serv-ice (ESS) applications and technology that enable organizations to cre-ate immediate business value by fundamentally transforming the waythey do business—moving interactions, transactions and servicesfrom a resource-centric paradigm to a personalized self-service modelthat enhances growth, reduces costs and improves productivity.

More than 1,200 leading companies and government entitiesaround the globe use BroadVision-powered applications to enable theirenterprise self-service initiatives.They are leveraging the web to their wire-less devices to unify and extend their enterprise’s applications, informationand business processes to better serve their employees,partners and cus-tomers in a personalized and collaborative way.

BroadVision’s customer base represents a broad spectrum oforganizations, including British Telecom, The Boeing Company,E*Trade, Ericsson, FleetBoston Financial, GE Supply, Home Depot,Rockwell Automation, Sears, State of California, Toyota and Vodafone.To learn how BroadVision can help your business create a next-gener-ation portal, please contact your BroadVision sales representative atContactUs@BroadVision.com or visit www.broadvision.com.

Special Supplement to May 2002 S13

“Departmental 'quick fix' portals cause

decentralization, undermine corporate

security, raise IT costs and reduce

content and brand quality.”

Product Highlights:InfoChannels: Managers may push info to targeted groups; Users maytune in to specific content, or receive notice of document events

Single sign-on access to pre-set apps and info

User management (LDAP) integration

Advanced personalization by business rules, context, access rightsand user role and preferences

InfoExchange Portlets: Access external data feeds, legacy and ERPsystems

Touchpoint integration: Wireless, POS, etc.

Collaboration pages: Document sharing, threaded discusssions,task/meeting management, knowledge communities

Workflow, Process/Task Automation

Alerts/Event Notification

E-mail integration

BroadVision InfoExchange Portal

Reprinted with permission, The Delphi Group, May 2001

results. But, how can we accurately identifyexactly who possesses knowledge on specifictopics or who is involved in particular initia-tives at any one given time?

There are numerous methods of docu-menting hierarchical structures, functionalareas as well as program or project struc-ture within your organization. One suchmethod is automatically producing and dis-tributing accurate, real-time organizationalcharts that can be easily accessed via theenterprise portal.

Getting OrganizedIt is no wonder that the organizational

chart is the most recognizable, globally usedbusiness graphic. If people are your mostvaluable asset, then understanding wherethey are allocated across the enterprise isvery important. However, typical organiza-tional charts only represent the reportinghierarchy in an organization and often timesdon't represent workload distribution, skillallocation or cross-team functionality. Thesecomponents are paramount to understandingyour organization’s capabilities as you begin

to construct a map of your knowledge equi-ty. When team members use the enterpriseportal to follow the organizational structure-based map, they will identify knowledgerepositories within the company and willautomatically:

◆ improve communication,◆ improve learning,◆ decrease decision-making time,◆ increase data integrity, and◆ grow the corporate knowledgebase.

TimeVision, Inc. produces the web-basedsoftware products, OrgBuilder™ andOrgPublisher™, which automate theprocesses of constructing, maintaining,distributing and analyzing organizationalcharts. Organizational charts built withOrgBuilder or OrgPublisher can include anorganization's administrative reporting struc-ture, extensive profiles of each employee’sskill sets or knowledge expertise, program orproject team structures, functional division

Special Supplement to

Who Knew? People Hold the Key to theEnterprise Portal

Thousands of records, endless statistics, facts,industry articles and reams of reference mate-rials are kept in departmentally segregated cor-porate databases of every flavor. Implement-ing an elaborate enterprise portal that onlyaddresses providing access to these disparatebits of information does little to build your cor-porate knowledge store, increase learning,enhance cross-departmental communiction,decrease decision-making time or boost over-all data integrity. Many enterprise portal im-plementations simply miss the point; or rather,they overlook the human element. The humanbrain transforms information into knowledge.People, not database records, are the crucialcomponents of successful enterprise portal implementations. Successful enterpriseportal implementations build in methods forconstructing, graphically displaying, easilymaintaining, distributing and analyzing all ofthe organizational structures that compriseyour company. These structures can becomethe navigable map of knowledge equity in yourcompany and serve as an intelligence filter forthe ongoing flow of corporate information.

The Human FactorKnowledge processing is enhanced by the

interaction of unique minds involved in col-laboration. Different people can be presentedwith the exact same information, but based ontheir own knowledge and specific experi-ences, produce different results. The resultsyou gain when these same people can quick-ly and easily locate one another and collabo-rate are far and above what can be gained viamultiple text queries into a standard enter-prise portal. With economic limitations forc-ing every organization to do more with exist-ing resources, it is imperative that we tap intoour own corporate teams' store of experience.In doing so, we can evaluate performance,benchmark systems and assign stellar teamsto new projects and shake up under-perform-ing teams with a new mix of resources so thattheir knowledge can in turn produce stellar

May2002S14

Lois Melbourne is co-founder and presidentof Irving,Texas-basedTimeVision, Inc.,the leader inorganizational-charting software. Loisoriginally formedTimeVision as asoftware trainingcompany, partneringwith her husband, atechnical expert andmarket visionary,

possessing over 18 years of human resource andtechnology experience.Within a year, they released thefirst version of org charting software to help companiesmanage the task of creating, updating and distributingorganizational charts.

Prior to founding TimeVision,Lois worked as a sales andmarketing executive and a film production specialistfocused on the human side of business and technology.

Lois Melbourne

Co-founder and President

By Lois Melbourne, Co-founder and President, TimeVision, Inc.

“Many enterprise portal implementations

simply miss the point; or rather, they

overlook the human element.”

Special Supplement to May 2002 S15

structures, geographically based structures,matrix reporting structures, and more.

Whether or not a company stores exist-ing human resource data in traditional ERPsystems, corporate databases or a simpleemail list of employee names, organizational charts can be automatically created, main-tained and distributed via the enterprise por-tal. You construct org charts in two ways:1) Using OrgPublisher, which is an organiza-tional charting software that allows you toautomatically generate, publish and analyzehuman capital information or 2) UsingOrgBuilder, which is a graphical database.OrgBuilder uses either existing human capi-tal data or allows you to manually input datathen distribute the process of constructingand maintaining multiple organizationalcharts to multiple resources.

OrgPublisher, TimeVision's flagshipproduct, publishes existing human resourcedata in the form of an organizational chart,out to a web environment. Once published,the org chart, containing comprehensivehuman capital information, can be easilysearched by end users. Search results can besaved and shared to expedite future efforts.From a knowledge management perspec-tive, end users can simply search the pub-lished organizational charts via the enter-prise portal for resources (subject matterexperts) that possess specific skills, partici-pate in specific teams, reside in specificregions of the world or share other similarcharacteristics. One knowledge resourcecan be worth 1,000 documents.

OrgBuilder is a graphical database thatallows multiple team members to create and

maintain multiple knowledge-based organi-zational structures, such as program andproject teams or matrix reporting structures.Information captured within OrgBuilderorganizational charts can be shared with itsoriginal data sources via synchronizationservices that are developed for each uniqueenvironment. OrgBuilder also provides end

users with direct access to personal infor-mation such as education, skill set or sub-ject matter expertise. Allowing each teammember to own and report on their expert-ise increases the adoption rate of systemslike this. As org charts are updated andmodified, they can be published and easily

accessed via an enterprise portal usingOrgPublisher.

Org charts built with OrgBuilder orOrgPublisher provide the accelerant thatfuels the transition of information in yourorganization to knowledge.

Extending Your ReachOnce a knowledge equity map (org

chart) that clearly points out internal knowl-edge resources is implemented, the next stepis to construct a picture of external knowl-edge resources such as business partners,customers and supply chains. Portal-basedcollaboration and knowledge exchangeswith such alliances will fuel rapid globalexpansion.

Information about external resources isinherently captured in existing systems, butrarely put to use. It is possible to constructteam-based organizational charts that clearlydisplay external relationships and knowledgestores by centralizing this information.

TimeVision’s product, OrgBuilder, pro-vides a means by which to capture this infor-mation, and has a security model in placethat allows you to invite external resourcesinto the process of building and maintainingteam charts. The point is, you must capitalizeon the knowledge you have and extend yourknowledgebase to incorporate every resourcein which you have invested time.

The Time Is NowYou cannot separate human capital man-

agement and knowledge management. It is imperative that you tap deeply into yourhuman capital, using best thinking combinedwith best practices to extract portal-basedinformation and turn it into expansive enter-prise-based knowledge. There are products,such as TimeVision’s OrgPublisher andOrgBuilder, that assist you in building andmaintaining an accurate picture of your com-pany's organizational structures to fully real-ize the benefit of enterprise portal-basedknowledge sharing. Such products extendyour investments in data, systems and peoplewhile creating valuable collaboration as aby-product. By putting your people first,success will follow. The enterprise portalis no different. ❚

Founded in 1994, Irving Texas-based TimeVision, Inc. is the lead-ing global provider of Internet/Intranet-based,organizational chartingsoftware used by more than 1,500 companies and organizations innearly 50 countries. Customers include American Airlines, the Bank ofMontreal, Colgate-Palmolive, Compaq Computers, Heinz NorthAmerica,the Internal Revenue Service,Metropolitan Life Insurance Co.,Reliant Energy and XO Communication, among others.Stand-alone orcombined,TimeVision's products OrgPublisher and OrgBuilder providethe most comprehensive solution for creating, maintaining, distribut-ing, and analyzing organizational information across the enterprise.

For a free 30-day trial of TimeVision’s products OrgBuilder andOrgPublisher, please visit www.timevision.com

OrgPublisher automatically produces and distributes accurate, real-time organizationalcharts that can be easily accessed via the enterprise portal.

“Tap deeply into

your human capital,

using best thinking

combined with best

practices to extract

portal-based

information.”

www.infotoday.com

Produced by:

KMWorld MagazineSpecialty Publishing Group

For information on participating in the next white paper in the “Best Practices” series. contact:paul_rosenlund@kmworld.com or kathy_rogals@kmworld.com • 207.338.9870

Kathryn Rogals Paul Rosenlund Andy Moore207-338-9870 207-338-9870 207-236-0331kathy_rogals@kmworld.com paul_rosenlund@kmworld.com andym@mint.net

For more information on any of the companies who contributed to this white paper, visit their Web site or contact them directly:

www.kmworld.com

BroadVision, Inc.585 BroadwayRedwood City CA 94063

Phone: 650.542.5100Fax: 650 542.5900E-mail: ContactUs@BroadVision.comWeb: www.broadvision.com

Hummingbird Ltd.1 Sparks AvenueToronto Ontario M2H 2W1

Phone: 877.FLY.HUMMFax: 416.496.2207E-mail: getinfo@hummingbird.comWeb: www.hummingbird.com

IBM CorporationWebSphere Portal Solutionwww.ibm.com/websphere/portalfamily

Kamoon Inc.400 Kelby Street, 7th FloorFort Lee NJ 07024

Phone: 201.242.9311Fax: 201.242.8200 E-mail: info@kamoon.comWeb: www.kamoon.com

TimeVision, Inc.5215 N. O’Connor Blvd., #300Irving TX 75039

Phone: 214.574.5020Fax: 214.574.5014 E-mail: productinfo@timevision.comWeb: www.timevision.com

BackWeb Technologies2077 Gateway Place, Suite 500 San Jose CA 95110

Phone: 408.933.1700Fax: 408.933.1800E-mail: info@backweb.comWeb: www.backweb.com