Portals, Portals, Everywhere
The term "portal" is quickly becoming a standard, though changing, part of our Internet and Intranet lexicon. It's difficult to pick up a trade magazine these days without reading about portals or portal technologies. Lucent is partnering with Sprint while Microsoft is working with Nextel--and of course there is Yahoo! and the other well known web portals. All parties are trying to capture an up-and-coming segment of the portal market in an effort to fill an existing or anticipated need. When thinking about the term portal, we easily make the leap to Netscape, AOL, and the others. But I did mention this term has gone through some metamorphosis recently. For instance, at the American Mathematical Society, I am partnering with our director of electronic product development to formulate a knowledge management program. The plan includes, among other things, reshaping the department Intranet to become a portal to our knowledge assets. This is a shift away from the types of portals represented by Yahoo! and others of the type; our Intranet portal seeks to offer a better access method to our internal knowledge assets. And the AMS is not the only organization trying to provide better access to its information; corporate portals are an emerging trend in organizations across the globe.

Background
During the initial stages of portal development, there were search engines providing access to the multitude of documents populating the burgeoning web. In their second phase of development, we began to see sites like Yahoo! and Excite and Infoseek that categorized web sites under meaningful classification headings. This reduced the time looking through long hit lists and maximized the useful content presented to the searcher. In a further maturation of the portal concept, these kinds of sites have adopted additional content that seek to further develop the sense of electronic community. Threaded bulletin boards, chat, and personalization have all helped to enrich the portal concept.
As a natural part of the development process, we have now seen a divergence of the portal concept to embrace, not just worldwide resources but those assets that reside within the corporation. In this quickly developing arena, corporate portals have now become the hot topic and are being heralded as an efficient method for employees to access mission-critical information online. As we move ever deeper into the era of information abundance, corporate decision-makers and workers alike are swamped in data, which, contrary to being helpful, is like a life preserver just out of reach. Information needed to make efficient and timely decisions, at any level, lies within the organization's information architecture but is oftentimes outside easy reach. The corporate portal is, in many corners, proclaimed as a panacea for the information glut facing so many enterprises today. In the same way Yahoo! and America Online provide a single point of access to the World Wide Web, the corporate portal is enabling this same type of access to corporate knowledge assets.

Corporate Portals--What Are They, Who Uses Them and What Is Their Future?
In defining the model of the corporate portal, the literature is ripe with an array of differing classifications ranging from a simple networked desktop interface to specific software programs designed especially to gather, organize, and distribute a rich set of content to a relatively narrow community of users. Perhaps the most important terms, conceptually, are a personalized single point of access to a corporate knowledge base and to assets residing outside the organization's firewall. The system brings together sets of structured information from database systems and unstructured data from document management systems, e-mail and web pages. Another important aspect of corporate portals is their ability to automate the classification of enterprise resources and deliver this data to individuals in the organization. In turn, this information becomes the highly focused knowledge base enabling workers and decision-makers to make sound and timely decisions.
Portal deployments are becoming an important part of many companies' attempts to harness the knowledge that resides within the company's information architecture. A recent study on portals conducted by The Delphi Group revealed some interesting findings into this developing trend. An abstract from the full research report shows that:

• Fifty-five percent of organizations surveyed already have portal projects in some stage of implementation
• User response data shows a dramatic ramp in portal deployments, particularly late in 1999 and through the year 2000
• By the beginning of 2001, nearly ninety percent of larger organizations will have moved into portal deployments, with eighty percent showing corporate portals in production mode
• Over sixty percent of respondents view the corporate portal as providing a new "dashboard" capability for contemporary knowledge work: Half those numbers already see the portal emerging as a "new paradigm" for computer-based work, supplanting the current Windows environments that dominate corporate desktops

The report concludes: "Over the next two years corporate portal sites will rapidly become the interface of choice for professionals to interact with previously disparate corporate information and processes, as well as with the Internet" (Delphi On Portals). In an effort to stay ahead of the information deluge, big names in industry, research, and government are driving the portal market. For instance, Monsanto's Nutrition and Consumer Products Sector realized that its abundance of information was causing both duplicated efforts and longer than desired research and development cycles. The organization's initial efforts at standard intranet development were less than effective so they migrated to the Plumtree Corporate Portal. In comments about the deployment of this technology Brett Gould, webmaster for Monsanto Nutrition, noted, " . . . In reality, the only other option was to combine a bunch of other technologies. Plumtree was the first and the only application that made sense because it wasn't going to require hiring a staff to run the Intranet, and we got functionality that, even with a big staff combining a whole bunch of technologies together, you couldn't otherwise get" (Plumtree web page). Others like the Department of Energy, W.W. Grainger, and Allegheny Ludlum Corporation all deploy corporate portal technologies to provide users the information they need, at any location, wherever it's located.

Summary
The benefits of portal deployment for large, fast-moving organizations would seem self-evident: Greater access to corporate knowledge, personalization, and a single point of access to information resources. The corollary to this is increased productivity and effectiveness and, in the long term, lower information delivery costs. Development costs associated with portal deployment, however, can be substantial. These may include: Hardware, software (both licensing and development costs) design, systems integration, and maintenance. Andy Snider, managing director of VIS, a Waltham, Massachusetts-based portal developer notes that start-up costs-- including the software to build customized interfaces and aggregate enough data to make projects worthwhile--range from $150,000 to $300,000 (Fitzloff). All of this also depends upon having made the investment in structuring the organization's information architecture in a way that lends itself to the deployment of portal software.
As organizations continue to expand and distribute their personnel across greater areas, more employees are required to do larger components of their jobs online. In this era of growing information abundance and complexity, technology is fast becoming available that will assist workers to move efficiently through the waters of corporate knowledge. With the proper planning, strategy and financial investment, portals may truly be the door to the next generation of knowledge management.

Works Consulted
Fitzloff, Emily. "Portal patrol: Corporate portals help early users control data deluge." Web page, [accessed 30 June 1999]. Available at http://www.idg.net/new_docids/corporate/everyone/since/management/blossomed/companies/knowledge/overnight/new_docid_9-131015.html.

Karpinski, Richard. "How To Build A Corporate Portal." Web page, [accessed 30 June 1999]. Available at http://www.planetit.com/techcenters/docs/E-Commerce/Technology/PIT19990310S0017.

Knowledge Management. "DigiDesign." Web page, May 1999 [accessed 2 July 1999]. Available at http://kmmagn2/km199905/featurea2.htm.

Knowledge Management. "Dynegy." Web page, May 1999 [accessed 1 July 1999]. Available at http://kmmagn2/km199905/featurea3.htm.

Plumtree Software. "Monsanto: Food, Health, Hope" Web page, [accessed 2 July 1999]. Available at http://www.plumtree.com/monsanto.html

----. "Corporate Portals: A Simple View of a Complex World." 21pp.

Notes: Available as a PDF email attachment after completing a "Special Offer" form located at the Plumtree web site http://www.plumtree.com/.

< Roberts-Witt, Sarah L. "Corporate Portal: Monsanto's pilot of Plumtree server fosters information and strategy sharing at its Nutrition and Consumer Products Sector." Web page, December 1998 [accessed 3 July 1999]. Available athttp://kmmag.com/kmmagn2/km199812/wwin1.htm.

Ruber, Peter. "Framing a Portal Strategy: Early adopters show what's behind the door of unified corporate knowledge." Web page, May 1999 [accessed 1 July 1999]. Available at http://enterprise.supersites.net/kmmagn2/km199905/featurea1.htm.

The Delphi Group. "Delphi On Portals." Web page, May 1999 [accessed 3 July 1999]. Available at http://www.delphiweb.com/demo/demo-newsflash-results.tpl.

----. "Enterprise Portals Shape Emerging Business Desktop." 14pp. 1999.

The Delphi Group. "The Language of Knowledge." Web page, [accessed 1 July 1999]. Notes: Available as a PDF download after completing a contact form.

For more information, contact Tim McMahon txm@ams.org.