Enterprise Portal Research Articles

The enterprise portal – is it knowledge management?

Currently we are in the middle of the information age, suffering from information overload on the one hand and a lack of knowledge on the other. Enterprise portals (EPs) are seen as the antidote to these problems by becoming more and more the ultimate knowledge management (KM) tool. The current hype about EPs is focused on their application as KM tools. Very little attention is given to other aspects of KM, namely the organisational, human and cultural aspects. The article will provide an overview of the technical and strategic relationship between EPs and KM and illustrate that EPs are only the technology component and should not be mistaken for the essence of KM. What is needed for successful KM in an organisation is not technology alone, but also a knowledge‐sharing culture, knowledge‐sharing policies, organisational processes, performance measurement and business strategies.

An identification and classification of enterprise portal functions and features

Enterprise portal is a type of new information system that can help companies and their employees to manage, share, and use previously disparate information. There are more than 60 vendors that are offering corporate portal solutions. With so many vendors, selecting the right one can be a difficult task. The primary objective of this research is to identify and evaluate the functions and features in enterprise portal products. In particular, this study develops a simplified model that can be used for identifying and classifying the functions and features in corporate portal software. The results of this study may be useful to information technology managers, educators, and students involved in knowledge management, business intelligence, information systems resources management, and data management. System developers, software engineers, project managers, financial managers, and data architects can use the functions and features identified in this study as benchmarking tools for evaluating portals capabilities.

Social networks: from the Web to the enterprise

Social networks are just one layer of functionality for next-generation enterprise portals. They are implemented in the context of other knowledge discovery and management functions. At Verity, we place them at the top of a three-layer knowledge infrastructure. At the bottom is a discovery layer that addresses the general area of search, including parametric and role-based search, security, and ranking mechanisms. In between these basics and the implicit structures of social networks is the content organization layer, which addresses issues of classification, taxonomies, and profiling. The key to next-generation enterprise portals is to integrate all three layers into a knowledge management experience that demonstrably improves user productivity.

A model for enterprise portal management

The article identifies the risks and challenges of using enterprise portal technology for managing corporate information and knowledge. Many of the risks and challenges are attributed to the inherent limitations of the software solutions for information and knowledge management. It is argued that the risks of adverse effects from the inherent limitations of artificial agents can be reduced if the technical solution, i.e. the portal architecture, is embedded into adequate relational human architecture. The article proposes a management model for enterprise portals analogous to the management model for newspaper production, and argues that the model provides the adequate organizational structure for overcoming the inherent limitations of enterprise portals.

Knowledge management, insights from the trenches

In 1999, the Software Productivity Consortium-a not-for-profit alliance of industry, government, and academia-asked our members to indicate which technological advances they need most urgently. Most respondents stressed the need to better leverage an increasingly vast and complex array of intellectual assets. Such assets represent today's new capital, marking a profound shift from more traditional types of capital. To address this urgent need, the Consortium launched a knowledge management (KM) program to develop our competency in knowledge management so that we can better serve our members and to provide products and services that will help members develop their own KM competencies. We focused first on making access to Consortium assets easier through an enterprise portal. Then, to address the larger KM issues, we also partnered with George Washington University and its new Institute for Knowledge Management, which seeks to establish a sound theoretical foundation for KM. Here, we recap the lessons we have learned in pursuing our KM mandate and set forth what we believe are the keys to KM's future success.

Enterprise knowledge portals: two projects in the United States Department of the Navy

Two projects in the US Department of the Navy to develop enterprise portals for facilitating knowledge discovery and dissemination are discussed. The authors describe efforts within a global organization to capitalize on current knowledge management concepts and technologies for knowledge access and sharing in order to provide users with more personalized, responsive, and integrated information systems. The Next Generation Library supports knowledge management and networking objectives, as well as providing high‐quality content access at the desktop. The Naval Postgraduate School Knowledge Portal, still under development, is designed to link internal administrative databases with current message traffic and external scholarly information resources.