IT Panel Says Start Small With Knowledge Management Portals

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July 29, 2002 (Computerworld) -- New York


Apanel of IT executives last week said there seems to be a common denominator for the successful rollout of knowledge management portals: Buy-in from senior management is often best achieved by starting with content-specific portals for small groups of end users.


"We've found that the [portals] that get used are centered around communities [of users] that develop the content," said Dan Holtshouse, director of corporate business strategy and knowledge initiatives at Xerox Corp. IT managers can then highlight their achievements to help secure additional funding, according to Holtshouse and other panelists.


But portal project leaders should beware of potential pitfalls, including a tendency among IT staff to overdo the user interface for a knowledge management portal or lose sight of the portal's overall goals for end users.


That was the advice that came from Holtshouse and other CIOs and chief knowledge officers who spoke at a summit hosted by Basex Inc., a consulting firm in New York.


"Don't introduce a steep learning curve," said Anders Hemre, director of enterprise performance and chief knowledge officer at Ericsson Research Canada in Montreal.


Hemre was one of several panelists who acknowledged that his team had overengineered the user interface for his company's portal. "We had to simplify it," he said.


Ericsson's development team also ran into other problems. For instance, Hemre said, it had to replace the base portal technology six months into the project, not because there was anything wrong with the technology, but because "we realized that it would be a hard sell throughout the organization."


Viant Corp., a Boston-based IT services firm, had trouble deciding whether its 6-month-old knowledge management portal was being developed "for a team, an enterprise or an individual," said Chris Newell, the company's chief knowledge officer. "You have to know who this is being built for, and we screwed that up."


Viant also had to smooth out some technical wrinkles. At first, the portal's search capability "was terrible," Newell said. His portal team evaluated focus groups of end users to see how they did their work and realized that it had to simplify the user interface, he said.


Xerox took a similar approach, spending six months learning the workstyles of its customer service engineers. Portals were then customized for those users' needs, Holtshouse said.


In addition, the panelists agreed that it's often difficult to pull together numbers-oriented ROI criteria for portal projects that are focused on intangibles such as knowledge sharing. To gain buy-in, Newell spoke to top business managers at Viant and asked what kinds of returns they were expecting from the knowledge management system. After being told that they hoped to save time through improved data search capabilities, he made his proposal to senior management, "and that seemed to work," Newell said.

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