Just over the horizon is a new frontier
where a knowledge worker’s commute might last only as long as the drive time to the nearest WiFi coffee shop.
The evolving technology to create this oft-predicted “end of business-as-we-know-it”
environment is arriving, thanks to cooperation between the software giants and reasonable costs for emerging technology platforms, including portal implementations.
“The next frontier for businesses to raise
their performance is to help knowledge
workers to be more productive and innovative,” says Bill Russell, executive vice
president of Allegient. “Portals represent
one of the fundamental enablers for new
ways for people to work together virtually
in a much more tightly integrated fashion,
and far more efficiently and effectively.”
Smart Business asked Russell about
how the new portals are advancing collaboration, workflow, and information management, and how companies should be
preparing now to step into and thrive in
this exciting frontier.
How have portals evolved from their initial
applications?
Portals originally debuted as a platform
that companies could use to do what I refer
to as mass customization, or personalization, of static information. Workers could
log in and have delivered to them standard
information that was most closely related
to their primary job or role.
Now, portals have evolved and are
becoming an actual place for knowledge
workers completing their work, or at least
organizing their work and their collaboration around that work. Work within the
portal is not constrained by a person’s title.
It can be very specific to the person’s role
or contribution on a particular initiative,
and the portal presents only the information and the business process piece that is
specific to what that person needs to work
on for that issue.
How are portals creating all new levels of
collaboration within companies?
It’s not as if knowledge workers aren’t trying to deal with their information needs.
The problem is that it’s usually through all
types of disparate systems or capabilities
like e-mail, Web sites, an intranet, document management systems and others.
Some consulting firms like Gartner,
Forrester, and others now estimate that a
typical knowledge worker is spending as
much as 50 percent to 60 percent of their
day just sorting through emails, different
information or document systems, trying
to put themselves in a position to deal with
a business issue, event, or need.
Portals, in a single integrated environment, can bring together the right people
and the relevant information by focusing
three elements including the content and
information management piece, the collaboration piece, and the business process or
workflow piece. The emerging portals pull
it all together.
What are examples of projects or events that
are best administered through portals?
Procurement crosses all kinds of traditional business functions that typically
involve people from across the enterprise.
A portal can lay out the procurement
process, involve the right individual at the
right step of the process, and bring them the information needed to make a choice
or to make a decision – or to approve and
advance the event. The entire procurement
decision process happens within the context of that portal’s system and results in a
purchase order through the appropriate
vendor.
What process might companies first target
when considering an initial portal implementation?
Companies should first consider dynamic and human-centric processes that may
happen frequently and are a bit unpredictable and event driven, such as the on-boarding of new employees. A new
employee has to get a cube or a desk, plus
identification and passwords, employee
benefits documents and much more, typically crossing many responsible functional
departments well beyond HR. Most companies have very inefficient and sloppy on-boarding programs that make for a poor
first impression and high costs. An embedded on-boarding portal application allows
the hiring manager to enter the portal to
start the process and transaction, and then
the company and new employee can work
through the different departments who
advance the on-boarding of that employee.
By the way, if anything, the typical exiting
of an employee is usually worse, even
more fraught with inefficiency, cost, and
now risk for the typical organization.
Have we reached a point where all businesses must implement the new portal technology to compete and survive?
At the end of the day, this is about helping
information workers to become a lot more
productive. If we are entering a knowledge-based economy, then we’re talking
about knowledge workers who have to
make decisions every day to help the business or the enterprise operate more productively, and to do that, it’s going to take
this type of capability.
BILL RUSSELL is executive vice president of Allegient. Reach
him at (317) 564-5701 or [email protected].