Using Portal Technology to Improve and Streamline Business Processes and Decision-Making, Randall Eckel
Today’s progressive organizations have empowered knowledge workers with front line decision-making responsibility and expect them to make good decisions—yet organizations have not provided the tools to enable knowledge workers to be effective. As a result, they are empowered but not fully informed.
With the advent of corporate and enterprise information portals, businesses gained tools to help knowledge workers aggregate, access and navigate through data from internal databases, internal document repositories and Web sites. As the technology has evolved, navigation has become more sophisticated, content more relevant, and interfaces more user-friendly and intuitive. Even accounting for these advancements in portal technology, portals remain passive presenters of information—allowing information and applications to “coexist” but not much more.
With traditional corporate or information portals, knowledge workers must manually and mentally transform their data into useful information that can be acted upon. A typical business function within a traditional corporate portal, such as finding information relevant to a customer inquiry, requires users to navigate through multiple pages and perform separate searches, sorts and filters to get related information from each data source. Nowhere in this process is the ability to collaborate with others for insight and experience.
Gather More Information and Experience in Less TimeThe ability to make a sound business decision involves identifying and locating information, collaborating, analyzing and taking action. Each task represents a significant commitment of human capital, with all of the associated expenses. Multiply these expenses by the number of functional areas and business processes in an enterprise, and the benefits of improving and streamlining the decision cycle become apparent.
What’s needed is a collaborative decision management solution within an enterprise portal architecture that delivers more relevant information and experience to the user in less time. In other words, an enterprise portal that represents the convergence of collaboration, knowledge management and business intelligence. Such a portal accesses content from disparate data sources, synchronizes information around a role, process or project, allows users to collaborate with subject matter experts throughout the decision network for insight and experience, and extends the portal to the value chain both inside and outside of the firewall.
Enterprises possess tremendous intellectual capital. The challenge has been, and continues to be, providing access to that capital and capturing it for development of best practices and shared learning. We believe that users should be able to create new or ad hoc workspaces focused on a specific topic, decision or project, populate it with relevant information, invite others to participate, and effectively share information. The decision-making process is now collaborative and interactive. Prepackaged workspaces, designed for specific roles or tasks within an enterprise or for vertical markets, should also be available, and we call these Collaborative Decision Applications (CDA).
For example, a sales associate using a CDA for sales teams and customers can have workspaces for clients, opportunities and prospects. These deliver synchronized customer-specific information from structured data sources such as accounts payable and receivable, CRM and ERP systems, and unstructured data sources including documents, discussions, news groups, information feeds and e-mail. These workspaces can easily be shared among the entire account team—both inside and outside the organization.
The ideal portal incorporates all of the functionality and performance associated with mature enterprise information portals and introduces a level of capability that elevates the portal to a tool that improves an enterprise’s business intelligence, knowledge management and collaboration abilities—effectively turning these formerly independent capabilities into a core competency for business.
About InfoImage
With the patent-pending InfoImage Federated Portal ArchitectureTM, InfoImage Decision Portal speeds the decision-making process at all levels of the organization and provides unmatched interoperability and scalability in the enterprise portal market. InfoImage enables business intelligence, knowledge management and collaboration across the value chain. Certified by BenchmarkQA, InfoImage enterprise decision portal software supports three million users through a network of federated portal servers. As the first vendor with certified results showing global scalability, InfoImage offers multinational organizations the ability to collaborate throughout the enterprise regardless of the number of users. Founded in 1992, Phoenix, Ariz.-based InfoImage has offices across the United States and is online at InfoImage.