ENTERPRISE INFORMATION PORTAL OVERVIEW INCLUDING RELEVANCE AND TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE IN A SMALL PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FIRM
by Marshall S. Major
A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Management Information Systems Boise State University
October 2002
The thesis presented by Marshall S. Major entitled ENTERPRISE INFORMATION PORTAL OVERVIEW INCLUDING RELEVANCE AND TECHNOLOGY ACCEPTANCE IN A SMALL PROFESSIONAL SERVICES FIRM is hereby approved:
_______________________________________________ Dr. Wita Wojtkowski - Advisor
Date
_______________________________________________ Dr. David Groebner - Committee Member
Date
_______________________________________________ Dr. Greg Wojtkowski - Committee Member
Date
_______________________________________________ Dr. John R. Pelton - Graduate Dean
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Date
DEDICATION PAGE
For My Lord, Jesus Christ
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This masters program and thesis has truly been a team project. From my wonderful wife and children forgiving my absences and lack of help around the house to my employer’s financial support and flexibility to the many academics at Boise State University and IFIP Working Group 8.2, it is with my humble thanks to them and to God for all that was necessary to get to this point. To my wife, Leslie, you see in me that which I never imagined. Without you I would not be the man that I am today. Thank you for your encouragement, love and forgiveness of all my hours away. I wouldn’t have completed this without you. To my boys Kade and Chase, I owe you the biggest apology for missing so much of your lives during my pursuit of this degree over the past five years. I love you! To Dr. Jim Snodgrass, my undergraduate advisor and the one who recommended this masters program, thank you for your support and encouragement. Thank you to my current graduate advisor, Dr. Wita Wojtkowski. Your encouragement pushed me to complete my masters and my thesis. Also, you opened my mind to the possibilities of pursuing my PhD and teaching someday. Finally, thank you to my employer, Moffatt Thomas, including my boss, Renn Yorgason, and my teammates Carol Garcia, Joyce Hettenbach and Matt Falconer for your assistance. I couldn’t have finished without your support and encouragement.
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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AUTHOR I am a 1991 graduate of the College of Idaho in Caldwell, Idaho now known as Albertson College of Idaho (http://www. albertson.edu). I graduated with a BA in Business with an emphasis in Management Information Systems and Marketing. In my senior year, I spent a lot of time researching the question “How much does someone need to know”. This question was framed in the context of “if we have calculators, do we need to know that 2 + 2 = 4 or do we just need to know how to work the tool”. In typical undergraduate style, I didn’t come to conclusions. However, it was the beginning of my journey to search out how technology affects and is incorporated into the lives of its users. After graduating with my bachelor’s degree, I spent 2½ years with ComputerLand of Boise, selling, installing and supporting Novell NetWare networks in K-12 educational institutions. In traveling throughout southern Idaho, I was challenged by finding ways for technology to benefit schools. The next 5½ years were spent at Givens Pursley LLP as the systems administrator. I managed and supported all of the technology at this 65 person law firm. While at Givens Pursley, I improved my technical skills and my people skills. Because I was the only technology person in this organization, I was forced to be creative in my solutions and tenacious in my problem solving. To this day, lessons stick with me that I learned about never giving up and of reducing the pain that the end users feel. Next was a ten month stint at Right! Systems, first as a billable network engineer and later as service manager. In this consulting role with small businesses, I found that there is an inherent mistrust of outside consultants. Most clients seemed to believe my only motivation v
was to bill them more hours. In most of my time as an outside consultant, I put band-aids on problems and was not allowed to fix deeper, often more comp lex, problems due to budget constraints and lack of outside consultant trust. My current employer, Moffatt Thomas, is a 105 person law firm in Boise, Idaho. For the past 2½ years, I have led a team where four of us support the technology and electronic litigation needs of this firm. Law firms, for whom I have now worked for almost eight years, have dynamics brought on by their ownership structure. They are generally partnerships where all owners have a say in how the organization’s money is spent. This brings complexities in how decisions are made and the technology strategies selected. To be successful, I have had to learn to balance the financial pressures of frugality and the longrange and often complex needs of the organization and its ownership model. In the end, my experiences with law firms, consulting and the dotcom implosion of 2000-2002, have given me humility and an understanding that IS, IT and corporate technology departments need to operate as service groups within the companies that they serve. It is in the pursuit of the confluence between business and technology where I now find myself, my career, and the focus of this Masters Thesis. My desire to bring technologies to businesses that are necessary and relevant have pointed me to Enterprise Information Portals, also known as portals. In this thesis, I examine portal deployment in a small business setting. To evaluate portals, I did a literature survey from academic and industry sources. Then I implemented a Novell Portal Services portal at Moffatt Thomas where I recreated our Intranet in a personalized and relevant framework.
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ABSTRACT An Enterprise Information Portal is a presentation methodology for information that exists in computers “out there somewhere”. From an end-user perspective, an Enterprise Information Portal is a customizable webpage that can contain financial information from corporate databases and data warehouses, e-mail and calendars from corporate messaging systems, stock quotes, news headlines, corporate communications, reference links, other relevant task resources, and much more. An Enterprise Information Portal is a fancy Intranet that is personalized for each user based upon their role, location and need. American computer users typically do not care where information originates. They simply want everything they need to perform their job accurately and timely, and for it to be easily accessible. Portals deliver on this ability to organize and present information from many sources including the Internet, corporate databases, document repositories (directories or document management systems) and Intranets. Portals, since their inception in 1998, have been successful in e-Government and large corporations but the question that is asked in this research is whether portals are an applicable technology for small businesses.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................iv AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF AUTHOR ......................................................v ABSTRACT................................................................................................................ vii LIST OF TABLES ........................................................................................................xi LIST OF FIGURES .................................................................................................... xii LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS.................................................................................... xiii ON LITERATURE REVIEW: A BRIEF ....................................................................xv CHAPTER 1 - WHAT IS A PORTAL? ....................................................................... 1 Portals Introduced ..................................................................................................... 1 Portal Definition........................................................................................................ 6 CHAPTER 2 - WHAT TECHNOLOGIES COMPRISE A PORTAL? ....................... 8 Technical Components.............................................................................................. 8 HTML ............................................................................................................. 10 XML................................................................................................................ 11 XSL ................................................................................................................. 12 LDAP .............................................................................................................. 12 Document Management and Content Management........................................ 13 PortalCommunities.com Portal Components .......................................................... 14 Other Information Sources - the Corporate Information Factory................... 18 Portal Action Request Analysis .............................................................................. 21 Microsoft vs. Java ................................................................................................... 22 Java.................................................................................................................. 22 Microsoft ......................................................................................................... 22 An Inquiry: Why Do Developers Choose Microsoft? ........................................ 23 CHAPTER 3 - WHY WOULD I WANT A PORTAL? ............................................. 25 The Value of Knowledge Management .................................................................. 25 Historical Technology Cycles ................................................................................. 26 Centralization and IT Synergy ................................................................................ 27
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Portal Decision Questions ....................................................................................... 30 Data and Organizational Structure .......................................................................... 32 Work From Anywhere ............................................................................................ 33 CHAPTER 4 - WHAT ARE THE RAMIFICATIONS AND COMPLEXITIES OF HAVING A PORTAL? ............................................................................................... 35 Simple Software Survey.......................................................................................... 36 Psychology and People ........................................................................................... 38 Case Study Law Firm Introduction......................................................................... 40 Culture Affects Decision-Making for Word Processing Tools........................... 40 Software Acceptance Phases................................................................................... 45 Information vs. Knowledge ..................................................................................... 45 Information Classifications ..................................................................................... 46 Taxonomy ........................................................................................................... 46 Semantics ............................................................................................................ 47 Ontology.............................................................................................................. 47 Tacit and Explicit Knowledge ............................................................................. 47 Types of Data .......................................................................................................... 49 Information Structure Summary ............................................................................. 50 Technology Acceptance Model .............................................................................. 50 Employees to Focus On .......................................................................................... 51 Ramifications Summary.......................................................................................... 54 CHAPTER 5 - PICKING A PORTAL AND GETTING BUY-IN ............................ 55 Portal Architectures................................................................................................. 56 Simple Portals - Small Business or Departmental .............................................. 56 Large Portals - Sophisticated Architecture Often Teamed With ERP ................ 56 Partial List of Portal Vendors ................................................................................. 59 CHAPTER 6 - PORTAL IMPLEMENTATION – GENERIC APPROACH ........... 62 Implementation Tips ............................................................................................... 63 Company Culture .................................................................................................... 65 Ten Portal Pitfalls - Meta Group ............................................................................. 68 Calculating ROI ...................................................................................................... 71 CHAPTER 7 - PORTAL IMPLEMENTATION - SPECIFICS FOR A SMALL BUSINESS.................................................................................................................. 76
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Characteristics of a Small Business ........................................................................ 76 Characteristics of a Professional Services Firm...................................................... 78 Implementation ....................................................................................................... 79 Novell Portal Services Architecture.................................................................... 80 Gadget Revisited ................................................................................................. 81 Personalization.................................................................................................... 82 CHAPTER 8 - CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS............................. 84 The “KNOW” Economy ......................................................................................... 85 Downsides of Technology Dependence.................................................................. 85 Role of Technology................................................................................................. 87 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 87 Future Research....................................................................................................... 88 BIBLIOGRAPHY ....................................................................................................... 89 GLOSSARY ............................................................................................................... 95
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LIST OF TABLES Table 2-1 Business Areas........................................................................................................ 19 Table 2-2 Components of the Corporate Information Factory ............................................... 20 Table 3-1 Organizational Characteristics for Assessing Portal Need ..................................... 30 Table 3-2 Opportunities and Objectives That Could Be Met Through a Portal ..................... 31 Table 3-3 Organizational Perspectives ................................................................................... 33 Table 4-1 Skill Quadrants ....................................................................................................... 53 Table 4-2 Skill Quadrant Recommendations .......................................................................... 53 Table 5-1 Partial List of Portal Vendors ................................................................................. 59 Table 6-1 Three Generations of a Corporate Portal................................................................ 63 Table 6-2 Suggestions for Successful Tool Adoption ............................................................ 65 Table 6-3 Plumtree’s Cost Benefits of a Portal ...................................................................... 72
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LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1-1 Hummingbird Portal Product Elements .................................................................. 4 Figure 1-2 Plumtree “My Page” Portal Page Example ............................................................. 5 Figure 1-3 Generic Portal Ecosystem Components .................................................................. 7 Figure 3-1 Business Decision Cycles ..................................................................................... 29 Figure 4-1 Information Flow .................................................................................................. 38 Figure 4-2 Downtime Cost Estimates ..................................................................................... 39 Figure 4-3 Technology Acceptance Model............................................................................. 51 Figure 5-1 Business Units and Level of Influence on IT Spending........................................ 55 Figure 5-2 Corporate Portal Market Segments ....................................................................... 57 Figure 7-1 Portal User Experience.......................................................................................... 80 Figure 7-2 Gadget Components .............................................................................................. 81 Figure 7-3 Novell Portal Services Skin Example ................................................................... 82
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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS ACM ASP B2B B2C B2E CIF CIO CLI CRM CTO DTD EAI EIP ERP GUI HR HTML HTTP I/O ICIS IDE IEEE IFIP IS IT J2EE JRE KM LDAP MRP MSDN NPS ROI SDK SFA SOAP SQL TAM UDDI
Association for Computing Machinery Application Service Provider Business to Business Business to Consumer Business to Employee Corporate Information Factory Chief Information Officer Computer Literature Index Customer Relationship Management Chief Technology Officer Document Type Definition Enterprise Application Integration Enterprise Information Portal Enterprise Resource Planning Graphical User Interface Human Resources HyperText Markup Language HyperText Transfer Protocol Input / Output International Conference on Information Systems Integrated Development Environment Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers International Federation For Information Processing Information Services Information Technology Java 2 Enterprise Edition Java Runtime Environment Knowledge Management Lightweight Directory Access Protocol Manufacturing Resource Planning Microsoft Developer Network Novell Portal Services Return on Investment Software Development Kit Sales Force Automation Simple Object Access Protocol Structured Query Language Technology Acceptance Model Universal Description Discovery and Integration xiii
URL W3C WAN WSDL WSUI XML XSD XSL XSLT
Universal Resource Locator World Wide Web Consortium Wide Area Network Web Services Description Language Web Services User Interface eXtensible Markup Language XML Schema Definition eXtensible Style Language eXtensible Style Language Transformation
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ON LITERATURE REVIEW: A BRIEF At present, there is not a lot of research in the academic literature concerning portals. Academic literature reviewed for this work included MIS Quarterly, Jitta, IEEE, Brint, IS World, European Journal of IS, ABI Informs, ACM Digital Library, Business & Company ASAP, Computer Literature Index (CLI) and others as noted in References. Contributions also came from a working conference in July 2001 and a business meeting in December 2001 of IFIP Working Group 8.2 (http://www.ifipwg82.org/ ).
In addition, the ICIS 2001
Conference in New Orleans was a valuable information source as well as numerous suggestions by Dr. Wita Wojtkowski. There are many academic journal articles and academic research papers on the core technologies and skills that make up portals. Examples include journal articles from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) on XML, HTML, metadata, and from MIS Quarterly, articles such as “Aligning the IT human resource with business vision: The leadership initiative ” (Roepke, Agarwal & Ferratt, 2000). One University of Brazil masters student, Cláudia Dias, wrote a thesis in 2001 introducing corporate portals. This thesis is in Portuguese and was not incorporated into this research. It is the opinion of this researcher that lack of academic research specifically on portals can be partially explained by these factors: the technology is only a few years old and that it is not particularly innovative and ‘sexy’ from a technical standpoint. It is, however, an example of how core technologies such as XML, LDAP and HTML can be gathered together and used to meet real business collaboration, communication and personalization needs. This xv
research represents an attempt at contribution to academic as well as to practitioner literature on portals as an important business applications technology. The objective here is to bridge the gap between theory and practice. Thus, to supplement the academic literature, an extensive survey of computer industry trade journals such as InfoWorld, eWeek, ComputerWorld, CIO Magazine, and others mentioned in References, was carried out. In between the hype, three-letter-acronyms, posturing, rhetoric and marketing information, it is possible, in the trade journals, to find some good information about how businesses are using portals as well as tips on implementation. This thesis is organized in the following manner. First, the general notion of portal is introduced in chapter 1. The concept is explained more fully from a technical standpoint in chapter 2, titled “What technologies comprise a portal.” The next three chapters take on the organizational aspects of a portal. Chapter 3 is entitled “Why would I want a portal?“; chapter 4 reviews “What are the ramifications and complexities of having a portal” and chapter 5 relates some challenges regarding “Picking a portal and getting buy- in. ” Chapters 6 and 7 examine implementing a portal both in general (chapter 6) and specific (chapter 7) viewpoints. In Chapter 8, conclusions and recommendations are presented. Thus, all chapters of this thesis attempt to answer the question: are portals a viable technology for small businesses that are information intensive ? The method used in this research was to implement the portal in a law firm, and evaluate it, from both technological and organizational perspectives.
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Even though the Internet isn’t a centralized computing structure, a portal is a centralized presentation layer. Whether organizations implement a portal or not, this research will illustrate not only advantages of a portal, but it will also present ideas for changing how data is structured, defined and captured, and why that change is important
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to consider.
CHAPTER 1 - WHAT IS A PORTAL? One can never read all the books in the world, nor travel all its roads. -- Author Unknown
Portals Introduced The American Dictionary of the English Language defines a portal as “A gate; an opening for entrance; as the portals of heaven” (Webster, 1828). The portal discussed in this research is not so lofty an opening as the portal to heaven; however, it is an important window to a company and its valuable intellectual assets. The word “portal”, in a technology sense, is overused and difficult to define. For example, there are portals on the Internet for general consumer entertainment at Yahoo (http://my.yahoo.com), information at Brint (http://www.brint.com) and specific population groups like the Austrian Academic Portal (http://www.portal.ac.at/). These portals can often be customized by the end-user to better meet their needs to fight information overload and, as illustrated in the quote above, we cannot read or do it all. In the most simple of terms, a portal is a window to the Internet.
A. Goodman (2002) at traffick.com, a self-described
“Guide to Portals and Search Engines,” has this to say about portals: Today, like it or not, the term "portal" is going strong. The rapid growth of new ways of leveraging the Internet for communal and corporate purposes has spawned at least four common meanings for the term portal. In addition to (1) major consumer web portals like Yahoo, we're witnessing a blistering pace of growth in (2) corporate portals or Enterprise Resource Portals; (3) vertical, affinity, or niche portals; and (4) industry or B2B portals (Goodman & Kleinschmidt, 2002).
2 There are also other types of portals defined as follows: •
Corporate Portal – “A corporate portal is usually structured around roles that are found inside your organization” (Collins, 2001, p. 2).
•
Enterprise Information Portal – “An Enterprise Portal… expands the Corporate Portal to include customers, vendors and other roles outside your organization” (Collins, 2001, p. 2).
•
Consumer Portals or Horizontal Enterprise Portals - Exemplified by my.yahoo.com. These are not connected to organizations beyond each individual consumer website. Consumer Portals often include shopping, weather, stock prices, news, search engines, chat groups, etc. It is generally customizable with stock tickers, calendars, e- mail, weather, news.
•
Vertical Enterprise Portals - “deliver organization-specific information in a user-centric way” (Strauss, 1999 p. 36). Vertical Enterprise Portals generally require login and an authenticated presence for personalization.
From here forward, the term “portal” will be used to describe a combination of a Corporate Portal and a Vertical Enterprise Information Portal as the focus of this research as a secure, authenticated, personalized portal that extends to organizational employees as well as clients and business partners. In 1998, Merrill Lynch published a ground-breaking investment article (1998) on the Enterprise Information Portal market. It was this article that prompted researchers and authors such as Clive Finkelstein, author of Building Corporate Portals with XML, to begin to focus on the portal market. This Merrill Lynch research article was the first to use the term “Enterprise Information Portal”. According to Hummingbird, one of the major providers of portal software and portal solutions, (http://www.hummingbird.com/products/eip/) a truly effective enterprise information portal must include the following:
3 •
a single point of access (single login)
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unified search across all information sources
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personalization
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application integration
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collaboration
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system security
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scalability
•
openness
Hummingbird (2002) identifies common elements of its portal solutions as shown in Figure 1-1.
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Figure 1-1 Hummingbird Portal Product Elements
Most portals, including the consumer portal http://my.yahoo.com, include a custom and personalized web page that can be populated by applications to which the user has access.
Depending on the portal vendor, the portal applications can be called gadgets,
portlets, nuggets or webparts. For simplicity and consistency with industry terminology, in this research, these custom portal applications will be referred to as gadgets. The user
5 chooses the gadgets that they want to display on the portal page. To give an idea of the layout of a personalized web page in one vendor’s corporate portal, the picture below shows Plumtree Software’s (http://www.plumtree.com) “My Page”. (Plumtree Software is the leading software provider of portal software with over 360 customers including Ford and GE).
Figure 1-2 Plumtree “My Page” Portal Page Example
Figure 1-2 above illustrates how there are many different sources that are being accessed through this one interface.
Plumtree Software has used a tabbed design for
organizing its pages and each of those tabbed pages can include combinations of information internal to and external to the organization.
A practitioner book about portals that is
6 extensively used in this work and referred often in the chapters that follow is Corporate Portals by H. Collins. Collins (2001) lists the following portal features: •
A consistent view of organization
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Information organization and search capabilities
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Direct access to corporate knowledge and resources
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Direct links to reports, analysis and queries
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Direct links to relative data and knowledge experts
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Individual identity and personalized access to content (p. 7-12) Portal Definition
The following definition of a portal has been developed for this research: A portal is a collection of technologies (i.e., HTML, XML, web services, LDAP directory, databases) that function together as a presentation tool to securely expose corporate data, add to it information on the Internet and customize and simplify access to that information. A portal grants access for organizational employees, clients and business partners to information for which they are allowed access and it hides information which has not been approved. It gives this custo mized access through a secure login to a directory and from that directory, the rights and privileges that are granted access to portal applications and data.
The portal itself does not hold the web pages nor does it hold the users. Instead, it is the aggregator and presenter of information to a widely varied group of users. A single portal can look different depending on what device is attached to it and what role the authenticating user holds within the organization. Chapter 2 will discuss in more detail the
7 technical components of this portal ecosystem. In the portal ecosystem investigated in this thesis, we examine the portal, its base technologies and concepts that work together to create a system and the interactions of that system within an organization. Figure 1-3 graphically illustrates the middleman role that the portal plays :
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Figure 1-3 Generic Portal Ecosystem Components
To assess the middleman role of the portal, we ask the question; Are portals a viable solution for small businesses that are information intensive? The method used and described later in this research will be to implement the portal in the case study law firm, and evaluate it from both technological and organizational perspectives.
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CHAPTER 2 - WHAT TECHNOLOGIES COMPRISE A PORTAL? Technology, like art, is a soaring exercise of the human imagination. Art is the aesthetic ordering of experience to express meanings in symbolic terms, and the reordering of nature— the qualities of space and time—in new perceptual and material form. Art is an end in itself; its values are intrinsic. Technology is the instrumental ordering of human experience within a logic of efficient means, and the direction of nature to use its powers for material gain. But art and technology are not separate realms walled off from each other. Art employs technology, but for its own ends. Technology, too, is a form of art that bridges culture and social structure, and in the process reshapes both. --Daniel Bell (b. 1919), U.S. sociologist, educator (Bell, 1980)
In addition to identifying components of portal ecosystem, Figure 1-3 graphically illustrates where the portal is situated in this Internet/Intranet communication system. The portal is not a web server and it is not a content manager. It is also not a user directory. It is a presentation and aggregation layer that puts a personalized web interface on many corporate information resources. This chapter will examine the alphabet soup of protocols, standards, technologies and products that make up a portal. Standards and technologies explained here include HTML, XML, XSL, XSLT, LDAP directories, and content management. These standards and technologies are what is required to create web pages that are customized by users and defined by their roles within the organization and the groups to which they belong.
Technical Components Portals can be used in a variety of contexts, from the very specific to the very general, and targeted at consumers, other businesses or employees. However, there are several technical capabilities that are essential to portals in any or all of these cases:
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Content aggregation and publishing, including XML
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Search tools, search engines and taxonomy generators
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Application integration, including e-commerce and collaboration applications
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Personalization, data capture, collaborative filtering and data mining
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Security / permissions services through a directory
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Links to multiple internal and external entities
Although individual portals may combine any or all of these capabilities, depending on the desired business value and tolerance for related costs, they share the fundamentals of providing access to information within a useful context. C. Finkelstein (1999), co-author of Building Corporate Portals with XML, is quoted in an Advisor.com article about portals by S. Fraser (1999) as having said the following about the data tha t is presented through a portal: A corporate portal provides a central gateway to the knowledge resources - the databases and systems of an enterprise. It is based on data warehousing, Internet, and intranet technologies, using metadata and XML to integrate both structured and unstructured data throughout the enterprise. Structured data exists in databases and data files used by current and older (legacy) systems in an enterprise. Structured data typically comprises only 10 percent of the data, information, and knowledge resources of the business for most enterprises; the other 90 percent exists as unstructured data in textual documents, reports or e- mail, or as graphics and images, or in audio or video formats. These unstructured data sources are not easily accessible to data warehouses, data marts or operational systems, but corporate portals utilize metadata and XML to integrate both structured and unstructured data seamlessly, for easy access throughout the enterprise. Data warehouses and data marts focus on data and information, while corporate portals also support processes and workflow management. They provide a central point for easy access, via a Web browser, to all of the systems and databases that each staff member needs, to carry out their allocated responsibilities (1999).
10 We posit that exposing an organization’s information resources that exist in both structured and unstructured data as discussed in the quote above is a fundamental goal of a portal. Through exposing both structured and unstructured information, organizations can more effectively make decisions and reduce time spent on redundant activities. Metadata mentioned in the quote above is data the describes the content for which it is associated.
HTML Hypertext Markup Language is a presentation language that makes it possible to display the same data in the same way on multiple platforms. Webopedia.com (2002) has the following to say about HTML. HTML defines the structure and layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags and attributes. The correct structure for an HTML document starts with (enter here what document is about) and ends with . All the information you'd like to include in your Web page fits in between the and tags. There are hundreds of other tags used to format and layout the information in a Web page. For instance,
is used to make paragraphs and … is used to italicize fonts (Webopedia, 2002). A tag, as discussed in the quote above, is “a command inserted in a document that specifies how the document, or a portion of the document, should be formatted. Tags are used by all format specifications that store documents as text files” (Webopedia, 2002). A tag commonly starts with a “<” and ends with “>”. Then there are beginning tags
and ending tags
. Tags in HTML are defined by a W3C standard (http://www.w3c.org). As a result of being standards-based, the tags in HTML web pages cannot be defined arbitrarily by a developer.
11 XML eXtensible Markup Language is a tag-based language that is a way to store data and describe the data’s context at the same time.
“It allows designers to create their own
customized tags, enabling the definition, transmission, validation, and interpretation of data between applications and between organizations” (Webopedia, 2002). Different than HTML, XML allows developers or users of XML to define their own tags as needed.
This
sophisticated data approach separates content from layout and allows for multiple modes of presentation. A common XML example, books.xml, is given below.
Gambardella, Matthew XML Developer's Guide Computer 44.95 2000-10-01 An in-depth look at creating applications with XML. Ralls, Kim Midnight Rain Fantasy 5.95 2000-12-16 A former architect battles corporate zombies, an evil sorceress, and her own childhood to become queen of the world. Corets, Eva Maeve Ascendant Fantasy 5.95 2000-11-17 After the collapse of a nanotechnology society in England, the young survivors lay the foundation for a new society.
It is this self-describing nature of XML data that gives this standard its power. The title of a book above is framed within tags that identify the start and end of a specific field of data. An Internet web page can be created easily that displays the books.xml file above in an
12 e-commerce application as a table showing only title, author and price. Because the data has been defined (tagged), the application or web page can be written to interpret the data and display only what is wanted.
XSL Webopedia.com (2002) states “Extensible Style Language, XSL, is a specification for separating style from content when creating HTML or XML pages. The specifications work much like templates, allowing designers to apply single style documents to multiple pages” (2002).
XSL is a standard like HTML and XML that is offered by the World Wide Web
Consortium (W3C) (http://www.w3c.org). W3schools.com’s XSL tutorial (2002) states that XSL consists of three parts: •
XSLT - a language for transforming XML documents
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XPath - a language for defining parts of an XML document
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XSL Formatting Objects - a vocabulary for formatting XML documents
…think of XSL as a language that can transform XML into XHTML, a language that can filter and sort XML data, a language that can define parts of an XML document, a language that can format XML data based on the data value, like displaying negative numbers in red, and a language that can output XML data to different devic es, like screen, paper or voice. This combination of self-described data in XML and a definition of how that data should be formatted in XSL give a flexible and powerful presentation capability to both structured and unstructured data.
LDAP Lightweight Directory Access Protocol is a set of open standards for accessing information directories. The LDAP directory that we have used throughout this research is
13 Novell’s eDirectory 8.6.2 (http://www.novell.com/products/edirectory/ ).
A directory
typically holds information about each user (i.e., name, address, and password), what groups they belong to and what rights and privileges they have on the local network.
Document Management and Content Management In a typical small website, content contributors pass information to a webmaster that puts the information onto the website. The image to the right shows the Webmaster Solution where members depend on limited staff to publish content. This concept and image was taken from Open Software Services, LLC (http://opensoftwareservices.com/) and their discussion about Content Management Systems. As the size and complexity of a website grows, there comes a point when the “webmaster as content manager” model is no longer feasible because it creates an information bottleneck. It is at this point where a content management system is added to the site. The document flow must change to one where the individual contributors have a publishing system that empowers members to collaborate.
Content
Management
System
vendors
include
Vignette
(http://www.vignette.com/), Interwoven (http://www.interwoven.com/) and Documentum (http://www.documentum.com/). These vendors have different approaches to the storing and presenting of content, but they all work to solve publishing, storage and workflow challenges of large web sites.
14 PortalCommunities.com Portal Components An excellent generic portal site is portalcommunities.com which includes the following components of a portal environment: •
Application Server: Application servers are typically J2EE compliant and provide the underlying development and run-time infrastructure for the portal. Examples of application servers include iPlanet, BEA WebLogic, IBM Websphere, Oracle 9iAS and Sybase Application Server. Many of the application server vendors are incorporating "portals" as add-ons to their base product. For example, IBM Websphere Portal Server, Oracle Portal, BEA Portal and Sybase Enterprise Portal are all built on top of the corresponding application server and in some cases are sold as one package. Several of the stand-alone portal products, such as Plumtree, Epicentric and Corechange have Java components or are Java-based and take advantage of an application server.
•
Web Server: The Web Server works in conjunction with the application server to provide the run-time environment for client requests. The web servers used with portals are standard HTTP web servers, such as Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS), apache, etc. When an end user brings up the portal page, the web browser makes a request of the web server. The web server then passes the request to the application server. The portal (and its associated Portlets) runs on top of the application server.
•
Database: Most portals have an underlying database (such as Oracle, DB2, Sybase, or SQL Server) that they use to keep track of information specific to the portal - such as users, personalization settings, available web services/Portlets and security. This use of the database is in addition to a transactional system's database (e.g. ERP, CRM or SCM system) tha t a portal might query to present application specific data to end users.
•
Taxonomy : Taxonomy is a classification scheme to organize a collection of information. Ideally, taxonomy would take a group of documents and make it easy to browse, search or otherwise navigate information that the user is interested in. Taxonomy is analogous to a folder structure, with the additional functional components of metadata for document classification as well as the rules for categorization. Most enterprise portals have taxonomy for this purpose, as well as some may have automatically generated taxonomies generated based upon the metadata provided.
15 •
Crawler: A crawler is an automated process that reads, indexes and classifies documents at a pre-determined interval. A web crawler, for instance, would crawl target web pages periodically to determine if the content has changed. The content is then indexed into the taxonomy so that end users can easily find it. The crawler doesn't necessarily make another copy of the crawled document; rather it indexes it by creating a virtual card that describes the document. The card then lives in the portal index.
•
Metadata repository : A metadata repository contains metadata about the content within the portal and about the structure of that content. This includes the metadata about the taxonomy, as well as the metadata for the individual documents. For example, each of the documents placed in a folder called Clients might have a metadata field called "Client" which would have one or more values. The value of the Client field for a particular document is metadata about that document.
•
Portlet: A Portlet can be thought of as a "building block" of a portal. It is a user-interface for presenting data and functionality from multiple applications on a single web page. Portlets encompass the presentation layer and the business logic. They also tie into the back end data sources. Called different names by different vendors (Portlets, Gadgets, Blocks, Web Modules, Web Parts), many portal vendors have portlets for connecting to enterprise systems (such as SAP, Siebel, etc.) as well as for collaboration, news, and other functions.
•
Categorization Engine : A categorization engine is used for sorting documents into the folders of taxonomy. The categorization engine may do this based on metadata in the documents, based on business rules, based on the content of the document, based on search criteria or filters, or some other scheme.
•
Filters : A filter is generally available in taxonomy to restrict the documents that are admitted into a particular folder, or that are returned as part of a search. A filter can be word based (if a document has the word 'IBM"), concept based (if the document is like this other document), or rule based (if the field called CLIENT has a value of IBM).
•
Index: An query and usually a repository portal.
index is a collection of information that allows for fast retrieval. Within the context of a portal, an Index is combination of a full-text index and a meta-data for the documents/content that is included within the
16 •
Virtual Card: Within an index or metadata repository, a virtual card is a description of a single document or piece of content within the portal. The card usually contains information about where the content physically resides, and contains the values of one or more metadata fields about that document. The card is the "placeholder" for the document within the portal.
•
Web Service : A web service is a program that accepts and responds to requests over the Internet. Typically, a web service accepts requests in an XML-based format. The actual format of the request and the response depends on the XML standards that are being used. One such standard is SOAP. There are public registries and languages - such as UDDI, WSDL - which are used to catalog the different available web services. A calling program can query the registry (UDDI) to find an appropriate web service, and then use WSDL to figure out which parameters the service needs, and finally use a calling protocol and XML standard like SOAP to actually make the call to the Web Service.
•
Development Standards and Protocols : A very important component of any development project is to understand what the current industry standards are for developing Portal Solutions and how they relate to each other. A brief summary of the most common is provided below. o
XML: Extensible Markup Language. XML is a language used to represent almost any type of data. XML is similar to HTML (they are both descendents of SGML, a generalized markup language). Whereas HTML is used to tell Web browsers how to show information to the end user, XML is more typically used to send information between programs. The XML files usually do not have information about the display of the information - the program that receives the data, often by using an XSL style sheet and XSLT, usually handles this separately. The structure of an XML file is usually defined by its DTD (document type definition) or XSD (XML Schema Definition).
o
XSL, XSLT: Acronyms for Extensible Stylesheet Language and Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation. While XML documents contain data, XSL documents contain rules for "transforming that data" into a presentation that the user can understand. This presentation format might be HTML for web browsers or it might be WML for wireless devices or PDF for printing out the information.
o
DTD and XSD: Document Type Definition and XML Schema Definition. Both DTD and XSD are ways to define the
17 structure and layout of XML documents. DTD and XSD become important for validating that an XML document is in the right format for passing information between different systems, or for passing information from a back end system to the portal. o
WSDL: Acronym for Web Services Description Language. WSDL allows a Web Service to describe what actions it supports. A "stock quote" web service, for example, might have two actions that other programs can call - getStockQuote, which takes a ticker symbol and returns the closing stock price, and getTickerSymbol which takes a company name and returns one or more ticker symbols. WSDL is an XML based language that allows both calling programs and Web Services to describe legal ways to invoke the program. WSDL is important for portals because portals will typically aggregate information from multiple web services onto a single screen and so need to communicate with each one in the appropriate format.
o
SOAP: Acronym for Simple Object Access Protocol. SOAP is an XML based standard for making function calls across the Internet to another application. SOAP provides the underlying calling protocol (which can be used as an alternative to HTTP GET/POST), a wrapper so that the calling application can send parameters to the program it is calling, and a method for getting results back from that program. Because SOAP is XML based, it is completely platform independent. SOAP is quickly becoming a leading protocol for invoking and getting results from Web Services.
o
UDDI: Universal Description Discovery and Integration. UDDI refers to a specification for finding web services and a public registry where Web Services can publish information about themselves. UDDI can be used to get back XML based "descriptive information" about Web Services. This descriptive information might be in an XML format such as WSDL. UDDI has broad support from all segments of the Internet industry.
o
WSUI: Web Services User Interface. WSUI is a specification for standardizing the display of Web Services to end-users. This extends the traditional web services model, which is used to get and retrieve XML data, by providing a framework for how that data will be displayed to end users. WSUI is akin to a standard way to describe Portlets. In the WSUI model, a Portlet makes a call to a web service, gets back XML, and then users XSLT to transform that XML into HTML, which can then be displayed within the portal.
18 •
User Profiles: Each Portal contains a profile for each of its users. This profile is used for customization and personalization. Each of the Portlets in a portal has access to this user profile and can use it to store preference information about a user or a class of users. This profile is also how the user "configures" the home page of a portal and chooses which Portlets show up and what information they should show.
•
Content Management System: Most enterprise portals contain a Content Management System, which allows approved end users to submit information into the portal. There is typically an approval process that eventually results in the content becoming available in the correct part of the portal's taxonomy. A Content Management System can deal with documents in their original formats (Microsoft Word, PDF, etc.) or might contain Web Editing features to allow end users to author web pages.
•
EAI (Enterprise Application Integration): EAI serves as the umbrella term for all software and services meant to integrate enterprise applications with one another. Given the complexities of each type of application (sales, manufacturing, service, HR, purchasing, etc.) this can be a difficult and expensive proposition. A number of vendors have released software that makes this effort much simpler - including Crossworlds, WebMethods, Tibco, NEON, and MQ Series, etc. EAI impacts the portal because the portal ideally will show consolidated information from multiple back end systems. An EAI layer is needed so that the queries can be coordinated and the results consolidated (portalscommunity.com, 2002).
Other Information Sources - the Corporate Information Factory First introduced in the late 1980’s by W. H. Inmon and described in his book Corporate Information Factory, “the corporate information factory (CIF) is the physical embodiment of the notion of an information ecosystem” (Inmon, Imhoff & Sousa, 1998, p. 8). An information ecosystem as defined by Inmon et al. (1998, p. 6-8) is a paradigm of capturing and storing data in context to support the following business areas illustrated in Table 2-1.
19 Table 2-1 Business Areas Business operations
Business intelligence
Business management
Supported by capabilities used to run the day-to-day business. These systems have traditionally made up our legacy environment and have provided a competitive advantage by automating manual business processes to gain economies of scan and speed to market. Systems that exemplify business operations include accounts payable, accounts receivable, billing, order processing, compensation and lead list generation. Supported by capabilities that help companies understand what makes the wheels of the corporation turn and help predict the future impact of current decisions. These systems play a key role in the strategic planning process of the corporation. Systems that exemplify business intelligence include medical research, customer profiling, market basket analysis, customer contact analysis, market segmentation, customer profiling, scoring, profitability trending, and inventory forecasting. Supported by capabilities that are needed to effectively manage actions resulting from the business intelligence gained. If business intelligence helps companies understand what makes the wheels of the corporation turn, business management helps direct the wheels as the business landscape changes. Systems that exemplify business management include product management, contact management, inventory management, resource management, and customer information management. These systems generally augment and / or evolve from business operations.
20 Components of the corporate information factory (Inmon et al., 1998) are as follows:
Table 2-2 Components of the Corporate Information Factory Applications
An integration and transformation layer Data warehouse
Data mart
Operational data store
Metadata
The Internet and Intranet
The family of systems from which the corporate information factory gathers raw detailed data. There are two types of applications; integrated and unintegrated. Integrated applications represent those systems that have been developed according to the guidelines set forth by the corporate information factory. Unintegrated applications are traditionally represented by those core operational systems that have been used to drive day-to-day business activities like order processing, accounts payable, etc. Over time, these unintegrated applications will become integrated as their role transcends beyond traditional business operations to support business management. Where the data gathered by the applications is refined into a corporate structure. A subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant (temporal), and non-volatile collection of summary and detailed data used to support the strategic decision- making process for the enterprise. Customized and summarized data from the data warehouse tailored to support the specific analytical requirements of a given business unit. A subject-oriented, integrated, current-valued, volatile collection of detailed data used to support the up-to-thesecond collective tactical decision- making process for the enterprise. The information catalog infrastructure to the corporate information factory. This catalog provides the necessary details to promote data legibility, use, and administration. The lines of communication along which data flows and different components interact with each other (Inmon, p. 9).
This research will not delve deeper into the components listed above. Nevertheless, we note that these components create a critical foundation for information delivery and decision- making activities (Inmon et al., 1998, p. 9).
21 Portal Action Request Analysis When a customer requests actions, such as searches or information retrieval, the Portal Server locates and initiates the appropriate Portal Gadgets. These gadgets work to perform the requested task and send the results back to the Portal Server, which formats and sends the reply back to the client. Gadgets can be a simple pass-through to an HTML page or they can be complex applications. They use the technologies and data stores as outlined above. Both the portal itself and the gadgets run on a servlet engine inside an HTTP web server. An HTTP web server is software that renders and presents HTML pages to browser applications. A servlet engine is a persistent applet or computer program that runs within an HTTP web server and takes specific requests away from the web server, processes them and then hands them back to the web server in HTML format for it to render. An applet is a program that runs from within another application and cannot be executed directly from the operating system.
A servlet engine, in this case, provides a execution method for
applications like the portal and its gadgets. The portal and gadgets are executed through the URL address in a browser and intercepted by the servlet and then rendered back through the browser
by
the
web
server.
The open source Apache HTTP web server
(http://httpd.apache.org/) was the web server used for the research done for this paper. The servlet engine
used
throughout
this
research
was
the
Tomcat servlet
applet
(http://jakarta.apache.org/tomcat/index.html) which is written in Java (http://java.sun.com). For this research, both the Apache web server and the Tomcat servlet were successfully used on both the Red Hat 7.1 Linux and Novell NetWare 6 server operating systems.
22 Microsoft vs. Java As in many other parts of the computer industry, there is a battle going on between Microsoft and other software vendors. Depending on category of software product, this could be Microsoft Windows vs. Apple MacOS or Microsoft Windows 2000 Server vs. Novell Netware 6 or in this case, Microsoft Visual Studio vs. Java.
Java Java is both a platform and a programming language. This dual nature has created some confusion. As a programming language, it performs and is closely related to C++. A key difference with Java applications is that programs are not fully compiled until execution and they require a special environment to be available for the compilation and execution of the program. Java as a platform, in its second role, is a special environment called the JRE or Java Runtime Environment. Java applications require the JRE to create a world in which they can run. There exists a JRE for almost every programming language. On execut ion, the partially compiled Java program known as a Java bytecode file or a class file is pulled into the JRE, compiled for the operating system and executed. The same Java bytecode file can be theoretically used on all operating systems through the runtime environment written for that operating system. It is this ability to run on multiple operating systems or portability that has been the foundation to the success of the Java programming language.
Microsoft Microsoft over the past 20 years has successfully executed a strategy that cultivates long-term competitive advantages over other software producers.
The key long-term
23 competitive advantage that Microsoft holds is its relationship with developers. For this research, two developers who exclusively use Microsoft programming languages and tools were asked the same question, “Why do you use Microsoft programming tools”. The first developer questioned was Mark Duenãs, Senior Developer, for Amphire Solutions, Inc. (http://www.amphire.com).
Amphire is a cutting edge programming company that is
currently using Microsoft Visual Studio .Net, Microsoft’s newest programming development environment, to develop e-commerce solutions for the food service industry. The second developer questioned was Scott Nichols, Software Engineer Level 1, for Micron Technology, Inc. (http://www.micron.com), a world- leading producer of computer memory products.
An Inquiry: Why Do Developers Choose Microsoft? In this section of the thesis, we summarize verbal responses to an inquiry concerning the choice of developer’s tools. In our opinion, this is an important question to ask, because it also sheds light on the developers’ cho ices concerning portals and associated technologies. Mark Duenãs, Senior Developer for Amphire Solutions - “Microsoft really does a lot for the developer. If cost were equal, Microsoft provides a much easier development environment than everyone else. They provide tools that others do not. It is simply easier and faster to get things done. MSDN is so complete and the articles fully explain the technologies so that it is easy to incorporate new technologies quickly and easily. If you can keep up with the technology and are up and current, the MSDN Magazine previews everything that is in beta and gives advanced techniques. The MSDN Magazine is 1-3 months ahead of what is coming with programming tools. If you have a company that is not moving forward much, it might be a good environment for Linux, but for moving forward quickly, Microsoft is the fastest and it makes it easiest for developers.” Scott Nichols, Software Engineer Level 1, Micron Technology “I love Microsoft products. Their IDE and GUIs are far superior to everyone else. They have a heavy focus on developers. There are free downloads from MSDN, tons of support. I like the development tools and I can get the job done faster and there is such a large software base I can always find examples
24 and I can always find help when I need it. There are tons of sample code and projects. There is also a large customer base I can pull from. The rest of it is that I like Visual Basic. It is an easy and quick development environment. Their approach is simplicity and trying to make it easy for the developer. The visual studio environment has twice the tools as other environments. Sun’s J2EE looks weak in comparison. Microsoft benefits the developer but it comes at a price. Even though open source is nice and free, I don’t like it if it takes longer and is harder. Same with open source databases. Open source is only great if you have seasoned developers who can leverage open source software but when you have to pay experienced developers it doesn’t necessarily save money. When I lay all the options out and compare them, Microsoft products give me more. Once I learned Microsoft’s programming model, I was able to program to Word, Excel, Access, web, SQL server and continuing throughout their product line. I would like to do more in Java, but every time I try it is harder and slower. We use everything at Micron. On the fly compilation required by Java doesn’t work for our large applications. We use Perl on Unix, some ColdFusion, Visual Basic for small apps (departmental use for up to 200 concurrent users) and C++ for corporate wide products. Micron lets developers choose their environment and Microsoft wins out most of the time due to its ease of use and speed of development.” From these responses we conclude the following: the open source model has many proponents throughout the world. Java is a free development environment and its ability to run on many operating systems has a strong attraction especially in education, government and third world countries.
However, the efficiencies and speed of development with
Microsoft tools better suits those organizations where the cost structure of an all Microsoft environment is acceptable. While the portal technology discussed earlier in this chapter is not cutting-edge, it is powerful and it takes standards defined by the W3C (http://www.w3c.org) and uses them to effectively present structured and unstructured corporate data in a relevant way.
25
CHAPTER 3 - WHY WOULD I WANT A PORTAL? Science and technology multiply around us. To an increasing extent they dictate the languages in which we speak and think. Either we use those languages, or we remain mute. --J.G. (James Graham) Ballard (b. 1930), British novelist. Crash, Introduction (1974)
The Value of Knowledge Management Economic drivers in the current business environment are very different from those faced by economies based on agriculture or industrialization. Peter F. Drucker in a 1994 Edwin L. Godkin Lecture at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University stated that “productivity of knowledge work…will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society” (Drucker, 1994).
Tools for knowledge
workers require reduction of costs for actions given in the examples cited below by Hoffman (2002). •
Reduce Lost Time: a typical employee spends 30% to 40% of his time looking for information
•
Cost of Rework: about $5,500 per employee
•
Cost of Redundancy: the average document is copied 9-to-11 times
•
Cost of Handling Paper: filing costs $20 per document
•
Reduce Loss of Intellectual Assets: When an employee leaves a company, 70% of his knowledge walks out with him
The examples above can all be improved through a portal and this chapter will discuss the reasons why.
26 Historical Techno logy Cycles The years between 1960 and the mid 1980s showed us how powerful centralized computing could be. However, end users didn’t like the restrictive nature of the green screen terminals and they were increasingly reluctant to learn the obtuse command structure for a particular application (Shift-F7 to print in WP5.1 for DOS). The late 1980s and the 1990s showed us how we could have our own personal graphic desktop (Windows and Macintosh) with access to client/server computing architectures. This ability for personalization has led to a software explosion on each individual desktop. This incredible variety of software has contributed to lower productivity and higher support costs per desk in the distributed computing environment. Gartner found that in the years between 1994 and 1998, “a significant trend in IS budgets has occurred - end-user support and help desk, as function line items, have moved from just 4 percent of the IS budget to 18 percent. This signifies that IS organizations now officially support their distributed computing environments instead of leaving end users to their own devices” (2001). As a result of the rising costs of distributed client/server computing architecture, there is once again a shift back to centralized computing. In centralized computing, there is a single group that manages all of the technology for an organization. The Giga Information Group examined three architectural models for centralized or hosted business applications: 1) conventional client/server, with the client and server separated by the wide area network (WAN); 2) conventional client/server, with both client and server components executing in a data center and only user I/O traversing the WAN (i.e., Microsoft Terminal Server and Citrix); and 3) architectures in which the conventional client/server architecture has been replaced by a server-based “business-logic” component,
27 which interacts with users via HTML or other browser-based technologies over the WAN. Each of these models has distinct benefits and drawbacks in the application service provider (ASP) space” (Friedlander, 2000). Portals rest in that third area of “server-based businesslogic”.
Centralization and IT Synergy Portals are a centralized computing architecture where users have the ability to customize their pages and populate them with the resources that are relevant to them. Even though the Internet isn’t a centralized computing structure, a portal is a centralized presentation layer. On the Internet, users know that the resources they use are not local and that they could be anywhere. Users also do not seem to care about where the data is stored, as long as they have what they need when they need it and know that it is secure. By creating an environment where information is captured and presented electronically, access to that information is stored centrally where it can be used and leveraged corporately. Gartner, Inc. (http://www.gartner.com), a research and advisory firm, in a July 3, 2002 research article about IT budgets and spending predicted the following about the need for IT synergy: By 2003, one third of large enterprises (i.e., more than $1 billion in annual revenue) in mature industries will attempt to recentralize infrastructure and IT spending. Those that are successful will recapture 85 percent to 90 percent of total IT spending. Through 2003, IT managers who do not actively seek synergies of enterprise IT capabilities will show IT spending levels 15 percent to 25 percent higher than competitors. Harvesting synergies is a term associated with three enterprise goals for business and IT managers: •
Sharing enterprise IT best practices to enhance revenue generation
28 •
Exploiting IT economies of scale within an enterprise (i.e., centralizatio n, cost cutting and consolidation)
•
Increasing cross business-unit capability and flexibility A centralized computing architecture based on Internet technologies can deliver
customized web pages through a portal to each user or employee based upon a profile or job description. A portal combine s internal and external resources to deliver the best information possible. It can also help management to guide and communicate with a central focal point within the organization for information. Technology is a tool to help organizations work more effectively. Organizations have particular tasks that they are chartered to do.
Technology may be able to aid that
organization in performing that task better, faster, cleaner, easier, less expensively, etc. However, technology can be used to distract employees (i.e., e- mail SPAM and crashing programs), decrease productivity (i.e., inappropriate Internet browsing and e-mail jokes), and produce incorrect information (i.e., a data warehouse table that did not include the correct fields). Whether organizations implement a portal or not, this research will illustrate not only advantages of a portal, but it will also provide ideas for changing how data is structured, defined and captured and why that change is important over time. IBM Global Services says that “portals are valuable to users when they simplify complex information, are context-specific, provide useful services and/or foster collaboration and community building” (IBM, 2002). International Data Corporation (IDC) researchers found that in a traditional office environment, a user typically must leave their primary application to collaborate via an e- mail application and there is “a schism between how
29 people get information and what they can do with it” (Mahowald & Levitt, 2001). The personalization of portals provides opportunities to keep users in one application, the portal. For example, at the case study law firm, the use of Novell Portal Services allows a single portal page to include world news, corporate news, stock ticker information, links to legal research sites, corporate GroupWise e- mail and corporate GroupWise calendar. The approaching retirement ages of the baby boom generation will produce fewer people to perform the work in corporate America. This, combined with statistics such as “IT workload expected to increase by 50% by 2005” (People, 2001), creates a need to more efficiently do our jobs. Technology, if used appropriately, can work to combat these trends. Moreover, business decision cycles as shown in Figure 3-1, can be directly benefited by a technology like portals that aids in the capture and dissemination of information.
Business Decision Cycles
Gather Information Take Action Collaboration Activities
Figure 3-1 Business Decision Cycles
Engage in Research
30 Portal Decision Questions Collins (2001, p. 50-51) has assembled a series of problems that might exist in an organization and they have been categorized and summarized in Table 3-1 to assess the need for a portal.
Table 3-1 Organizational Characteristics for Assessing Portal Need Attribute Consistency Centralized Data Access Web-Based Applications Web-Based Applications Centralized Data Access Filter Information Overload Filter Information Overload Consistent Interfaces and JustIn-Time Training
Problem Employees in the organization need consistent information to make routine decisions. Employees need information from many different systems to make strategic decisions. Employees must complete most company-related activities online. Employees need to be able to access company information from an intranet site through a browser. Employees must access company information from multiple data sources and applications to complete their assigned activities. Employees cannot locate or navigate efficiently through company information or the intranet site. Employees are not aware of information or resources available in the company to complete their responsibilities. Employees require extensive training to use portions of the applications and systems they need to use to complete their responsibilities
Before deciding to start a portal project, Collins (2001) also recommends that the organization answer the following questions: “Why should a corporate portal be implemented? What unique solutions will it provide? Why hasn’t another business solution provided these unique solutions?” (p. 54).
31 Collins (2001, p. 55) identified opportunities and company objectives that could be met through a portal solution. These are summarized (with corresponding attributes) in Table 3-2.
Table 3-2 Opportunities and Objectives That Could Be Met Through a Portal Attribute Role-Based Access
Role-Based Access Role-Based Access
Single Interface
Single Interface Single Interface
Opportunities and Objectives Retrieve information from corporate IT systems and present the results according to the roles, specific tasks, and preferences of individual employees. Present employees with information relevant to their daily tasks without making them search for it. Gather information about each employee, facilitating communication between the people who need information and the people who can supply the information. For instance, an account manager may need to learn the details of a customer’s tax audit from the consulting team leader who was responsible for composing and documenting the results. By knowing the name of the customer, the account manager would be able to use a few mouse clicks to locate the name of the team leader and contact him through e- mail, telephone, or other tools available. Allow employees to act on the information presented in the desktop without requiring them to switch to a different system or interface for the purpose of sharing the information and collaborating with other employees. Present a desktop interface through a web browser that requires minimal technical training. Support multiple business processes for a single department, a single process across multiple departments, or multiple processes across multiple departments.
We note that the questions asked by Collins require a new way of thinking about corporate information, resources, data and processes. Organizations must rethink how data is captured and stored so that it can be presented through a portal.
32 Data and Organizational Structure In many organizations, business information is kept in silos or individual containers that are not linked to any other data. At the case study law firm, one example of a data silo is that address books and client contact information are kept separately by each individual attorney. They do not share with one another. “Most organizations… have rarely orga nized their information and service offerings around the personal needs of their community members” (Katz, 2002). It is in this identification of personal information needs where the portal begins to show the organization-changing nature of this information presentation layer. In order to expose information through the portal, a gadget can be created that queries a database, performs a function, accesses a web site, displays a document that only this individual uses or otherwise captures some piece of information that this individual uses to do his/her job. The organizational dynamics of portals will be explored more fully in chapter 4. Individual needs of users are dependent on their role within the organization. That role will dictate the type of information to which they have access. Data contexts for business intelligence, business operations and business management, as discussed in chapter 2, can be compared to Collins’ (2001, p. 1) organizational role perspectives. These are summarized in Table 3-3.
33 Table 3-3 Organizational Perspectives Operational perspective
Strategic perspective
Operational issues are the ones faced by employees responsible for completing transactional, day-to-day and well- established tasks. Employees responsible for operational issues in your organization are constantly looking for ways to improve or simplify existing processes or tasks. Strategic issues are those faced by employees responsible for ensuring that the overall mission of your organization is met or exceeded. Employees responsible for making strategic decisions in your organization are tracking financial and other information that accurately measures how well your organization is performing. This group of employees is always looking for the appropriate objectives that can be combined with qualitative measures to respond accurately to your customers. The information presented to strategic decision makers is used to monitor and analyze the performance of your organization so that, when necessary, appropriate modifications can be made for your organization to rema in effective in the marketplace.
Small businesses, like the law firm studied in this work (see chapter 7), require decision makers and business owners to fulfill both operational and strategic roles.
The
ability of a portal to easily present information critical to all roles of a particular user, speeds decision- making and improves the quality of those decisions. Depending on their role within the organization, the character and perspective of the information will be different. An accountant in an organizational role may look at total sales with a different perspective than an executive in a strategic role. They might look at the same information with different goals. These perspectives must be taken into account when capturing, storing and presenting data.
Work From Anywhere Gartner predicts that 802.11b wireless network is the “next killer application” (Maarouf, 2001) and Citrix Systems’ slogan “solutions for the virtual workplace” shows the
34 software development trend toward the support for knowledge workers to enable work from any location. On August 8 2002, Sprint announced a new nationwide digital cellular service on the new 3G standard (Wilinsky & Amrein, 2002). 3G stands for 3rd Generation wireless and it delivers anyplace data access via a cellular phone, a PDA (personal digital assistant) or a laptop
The service is called Sprint PCS Vision and information is available from
http://www.pcsvision.com/. This service allows access to the Internet at speeds roughly the same as modem 56kb dial- up access. Fees are charged depending on the amount of data downloaded.
This new access from anywhere paradigm will give access to e- mail and
research from anywhe re. An early example of the work- from-anywhere access is Rim’s Blackberry which allowed wireless e- mail at any location. Technology can have a positive effect on the business strategy, management, structure, internal and external relationships, and operations. However, that same technology can waste a lot of time and money. In the economic tightening of 2002, we need to make the most effective use of our investment in technology. This research intentionally has ignored a majority of the vendor hype concerning the benefits of portals. Each organization must identify its unique value characteristics. Depending on industry, corporate culture, firm leadership and communication styles and much more, firms will choose to accept or reject portal technologies. However, for those firms rejecting portals, the y will be fighting against the trends toward wireless and work- from-anywhere combined with lower costs for IT synergy and the high level of value created with capturing corporate information.
35
CHAPTER 4 - WHAT ARE THE RAMIFICATIONS AND COMPLEXITIES OF HAVING A PORTAL? There are only two forces that unite men: fear and interest. -- Napoleon Bonaparte, French politician
Lee and Sarker in their article titled “Using a Positivist Case Research Methodology to Test Three Competing Theories-in-Use of Business Process Redesign” (2002) state: “We suggest for researchers and practitioners interested in areas such as BPR, ERP, and ecommerce implementation, all of which involve business process redesign, to adopt, from the beginning, an orientation that is not just technocentric or sociocentric, but gives equal consideration to the technical and social dimensions, and the interactions between the social and the technological.” Research reported in this thesis comes to a very similar conclusion. Thus this chapter focuses on the social and organizational aspects of implementing a portal. “If knowledge workers see themselves as using technology, then something is wrong. Think about the most effective knowledge sharing machines yet devised, the water cooler and the coffee machine. Nobody thinks of the coffee machine as technology” (Barth, 2002, p. 17). Joel Birnbaum (1997) writes that Alan Kay of Apple Computer once pointed out that “O nly people born before a technology is invented think of it as technology. Today’s schoolchildren don’t think of TVs and telephones as technology -- they can’t imagine life without them. Tomorrow’s children will feel the same way about computers, the networks connecting them, and the services they perform” (p. 40). Birnbaum, Hewlett-Packard’s former Senior Vice President for Research and Development and Director of HewlettPackard Laboratories in 1997, stated that “To become truly pervasive, information
36 technology….must transcend being merely manufacturable and commonplace.
It must
become intuitively accessible to ordinary people and deliver sufficient value to justify the large investment needed in the supporting infrastructure” (p. 41). This point of view applies, in this researcher’s opinion, to the portal technology as well. In addition, technologists need to look at providing end-users ‘tools’ that they need to perform their job rather than ‘technologies’. S. Barth, in a September 2002 article in KMWorld, communicates this by saying “Is it possible that one of the biggest problems with IT is simply the word we choose? We tend to use the “tools” and “technologies” interchangeably. But technology is a very general label. Tools are not just more specific, but very personal” (p. 17). Portals can become personal tools used by today’s knowledge workers.
Simple Software Survey For this research, a semi-structured interview of 10 administrative assistants (secretaries) in the case study law firm was performed. The goal of the interview was to find out how they worked day-to-day, if they used the current intranet, and if so, what parts of the intranet they used. The case study law firm currently uses GroupWise 5.5 for e-mail, collaboration, calendar, and document management and WordPerfect 9 and Word XP for word processing. The secretaries spend roughly 95% of their day in GroupWise and a word processing program. Overwhelmingly, the secretaries let this researcher know that they would like to know “all the resources and features available” and that they would then incorporate what was relevant to their desk.
Many similarities were found in their basic behaviors like the
processes they use to create new complex documents such as pleadings. However, despite all
37 their similarities, almost every secretary was quick to point out that every “desk” is different because of the personalities of the attorneys to whom they are assigned. This need to feel unique amidst the common functions of their jobs hints at the potential value for masspersonalization in a portal. Regarding knowledge workers, Stewart (1997) in Intellectual Capital discusses that: Karl Marx noted that the worker of his day [in the factory system], unlike the craftsman and the small farmer of previous generations, no longer owned the tools of his trade or the product of his labor. In Marx’s terms, he was ‘alienated’ and ‘estranged’ from his work. Marx was wrong about many things but not this…But in the age of intellectual capital, the most valuable parts of these jobs have become the most essentially human tasks: sensing, judging, creating, building relationships. Far from being alienated from the tools of his trade and the fruit of his labor, the knowledge worker carries them between his ears.” (p. 50-51) A 2001 research report by Bloor Research’s IT-analysis.com states that we need to be looking at ways for organizations to increase the flow and ease the communications between knowledge contributors. There are far too many sources of information: external, internal, e- mail and so forth, for a user to make sense of. Often you feel as if you could simply spend all day sorting the information and never actually doing anything. Enterprise Portals allow you to choose what comes to your desktop and everything else gets filtered out. Of course, making that choice may not be easy, so there are even portal products that will let you go on working the way that you have been and will automatically personalize the content of your portal on that basis. Moreover, once your preferences are established you can have even have tools that will suggest additional sources of information that you may not know about, based upon your working practices. Enterprise Portals do not just address an individual’s problems with information overload but also those of the enterprise itself. Many organizations, in an attempt to ensure improved communications within and across their workforce, have implemented intranets that enable more sophisticated knowledge sharing. Unfortunately, this has tended to spin out of control so that there are companies that have dozens of different intranets that
38 cross different sections of the corporate community. This fragments information and causes major administrative headaches. With an Enterprise Portal, on the other hand, all of these intranets are unified under a single umbrella. Indeed, the Enterprise Portal goes further because it also includes extranets and other Internet-based connections within a single infrastructure. This should improve visibility, increase control and reduce maintenance and administrative requirements. Themes that resonate with most business users are these: “people want to locate the content and people who can help them do their jobs with more continuity and quality. They want to learn from the collective experience of the organization as represented by its individuals and they want to capture those learning for future reuse” (IBM Software Group, 2002, p. s4). An illustration of these themes was gleaned from the article mentioned above and is summarized in a graphic representation shown in Figure 4-1.
Information Flow Influence by the IBM Software Group in “Making Portals Fit for E-Business”
Locate
Learn
Reuse
Capture
Figure 4-1 Information Flow
Psychology and People Many people in the technology field are enamored by software and hardware. When the focus is on the tools, technologists forget that the technology is all about the people. “You can’t understand an organization until you try to change it. We were learning an old
39 lesson: it’s the people, stupid!” (Curry, 2002, p. 128-129) With this old lesson relearned (again), this research turns to discover how people accept or reject portal technologies and other software. One item to keep in mind about a portal is that it is often not a missioncritical application for a company. Employees might be inconvenienced for a day or two if the portal or intranet is down and unavailable. However, if the ERP or MRP system is down for a couple of hours, production could be stopped or impaired. Figure 4-2 shows a range of downtime costs reported in a study done for the CIO Magazine (2001).
Figure 4-2 Downtime Cost Estimates
Because of the difference in the criticality of the application and type of business the organization engages in, the dynamics of users’ acceptance of downtime will be different and organizations will invest in systems that are appropriately aligned to the cost of downtime per hour.
40 Case Study Law Firm Introduction The surveys, insights for this research come from the law firm that employs this researcher as IS Team Lead and IS Manager. The case study law firm has 105 employees and three offices in Idaho. Currently forty-one of those employees are attorneys. Law firms primarily produce documents to aid their clients. The case study law firm does about 40% business transactional work. This type of work is comprised of contracts, negotiations, business agreements, securities filings and other paperwork needed to transact business. The remaining 60% of the firm is litigation. This is where the firm represents clients in defending law suits brought against them. The case study firm specializes in representing companies rather than individuals. Much of a litigation legal practice involves filing documents with a court. Examples of documents filed with a court include briefs and pleadings. Beyond document production, lawyers also charge their time by the hour. Depending on the size of the law firm, the type of law practiced and type of billing requirements of the clients, the accounting functions can be very complex. This law firm has a very sophisticated time and billing system to accommodate the needs of its corporate clients.
Culture Affects Decision-Making for Word Processing Tools During the research reported in this work, the law firm described above has decided to change their primary word processing program from WordPerfect 9 to Word XP. Even though the brief analysis that follows discusses word processing, this researcher found the process and questions discussed have direct relevance to this research on implementing portals. The choice of word processing application is an important decision for a law firm. In brief, the most difficult decisions included:
41 •
What productivity tools should be used for easy creation of letters, faxes, memos, agreements and pleadings?
•
How should Word be modified to work more effectively for the needs of a law firm?
•
What other software tools are needed to facilitate collaboration with clients and fixing corrupt Word documents?
Productivity tools for document creation, as mentioned, above range from templates on the simple side to full-blown programs that pull names from addresses and build everything for the documents except the body text. Small law firms generally require a high level of self- sufficiency and due to cost have implemented simple Word templates for creating letters and other documents. As law firms get larger, they generally add support staff that reduce the secretaries’ need for complete self-sufficiency. Thus the role of a legal secretary changes depending on firm size. In a 1-5 attorney office, a secretary might serve as an office manager and do everything for the operation of that office including technical support, HR, vendor relations, client support and document production. In a 25 attorney office, the office will generally be big enough to have a business manager, a human resources manager, and an accountant for accounts payable and accounts receivable. At about 30 attorneys, there is generally enough demand for someone dedicated to computer technical support. When a firm reaches 40 attorneys, there are generally multiple people in accounting and in computer support. The ratios change depending on the type of law that is practiced in the law firm. If a law firm with 35 attorneys typically creates business docume nts for transactions, they will have one or two people providing technical support. In a law firm of 40 attorneys that engages in complex litigation (suing or being sued), there are generally four
42 to five people providing technical support. For example, the law firm that is the subject of this research, uncovered over 40,000 documents to be reviewed in one litigation. Generally, the larger the firm, the more services that are provided to the secretaries. The services provided by the organization (copying, faxing, technical support, accounting, HR) cultivate and attract a different type of person than is attracted to a small office where they might be functioning in an office manager capacity. The culture of providing a high level of service to the lawyers and staff in the law firm cited in this study, created a need for an elaborate document assembly program that can quickly and efficiently create consistent documents. We also wish to point out that law firms use Microsoft Word differently than a traditio nal corporation. Lega l documents other than letters are typically long (50-70 pages) and include table of contents, automatic numbering and extensive outlines. In addition, there are generally 2-5 people who want or need to have input on a document. Depending on the complexity of the document, the contributors are listed below in order of frequency and what they typically contribute to the document. •
Administrative Assistant (secretary) - Creates the framework of a document including addresses, headers, and signatures. The secretary may also search in the document management system for documents that are similar to what the attorney will be doing. If similar documents are found, the secretary will give those documents to the attorney so they can identify valuable components and reuse them. This reuse process has greatly lowered the cost to clients for document production.
43 •
Attorney - puts text into the body of the document through copy/paste, typing or dictating.
•
Legal Assistant (paralegal) - At any time, depending on the complexity of the document or case, a paralegal might be called in to work on content, research or reviewing other documents. They do the “grunt work” on many documents and summarize for the attorneys.
For example, one paralegal reviewed several
thousand e- mail messages to identify the ones that were relevant for the document being created so they could be incorporated into the document. •
Word processing or Administrative Assistant - Type from dictated tapes into the document or otherwise prepare document for a first draft.
•
Another Attorney - either an older mentor or another attorney who gives a second opinion
•
Client - receives the document via fax or e- mail for review. If sent via e-mail, the law firm first sends the document in Adobe Acrobat PDF format so modifications are difficult. During the Administrative Assistant survey, three secretaries stated that 50% of the time the client will demand the document in Word format so they can modify text in the document.
•
Administrative Assistant - incorporates changes
•
Attorney - final draft. This researcher was told by one Administrative Assistant that “before computers we would only have one draft and one final. Now we have up to eight drafts of a document before the final version.” A follow-up question was asked as to the relative improvement of document quality as a result of the additional drafts and she stated that in her opinion, “the documents are no
44 better than before computers but we can create them faster because of the technology”.
Even though the string of events identified above relates to a word processing document rather than a portal, it clearly illustrates the interactions between small groups of people even for document production, and for this researcher, it uncovers areas where centralized information resources can be used to improve the document creation process. One area of value uncovered was identifying and sharing tricks to do tasks faster or more efficiently. Pressure is increasing from the law firm’s clients to create documents faster while maintaining a high quality. As is the case for word processing, in the context of a portal, the focus of the portal must first concern the primary goals of that organization. The case study law firm found that it had to align word productivity tools (simple templates or fancy document assembly) with its culture (high level of service to staff and attorneys). The case study law firm found that because it had provided, over many years, a high level of service and support to its staff and attorneys, it had attracted staff and attorneys who not only liked and depended on that level of service but who also made effective use of those services to shape the way they work and to shape the types of legal services provided to their clients. The Administrative Assistant survey, for example, found several of the secretaries admitting that this law firm provides technical support to clients in many situations.
45 Software Acceptance Phases Just as teams go through Tuckman’s Small Group Development Theory stages (Catalyst, p. 1) of Forming, Storming, Norming and Performing, users of software go through phases. One set of proposed phases for Linux acceptance includes Ignorance, Denial, Fear and Acceptance (Leibovitch, 1998).
A small unscientific sampling conducted by this
researcher uncovered the following stages of portal usage: •
Confusion
•
Avoidance
•
Compelled to use
•
Explore/Acceptance
During the exploration and acceptance phase, the user learned the portal’s logic, used the portal actively, saw the value and relevance and then personalized the portal. Every job requires a different skill set and in the case study law firm, most jobs require employees of the firm to process information to hopefully create knowledge that can then be used to accomplish a task. The next section will go into greater depth as to the types and characteristics of information that must be considered for our portal research.
Information vs. Knowledge At ICIS 2001 in New Orleans (McKeen, 2001), during the discussions about knowledge management conducted by a panel entitled “Knowledge Management: Challenging Assumptions ” it emerged that we do not actually capture knowledge, we capture information. One of the panelists, M. Zack, stated the following in his introduction:
46 KM [Knowledge Management] has little to do with technology...people and knowledge are basically inseparable...what we are filling up our knowledge repositories with is basically information not knowledge...the major breakthroughs in KM will not be tool-based but people-based...if we focus on tools, we will fail to grasp the vast potential of organizations where knowledge is the key resource. Knowledge is what occurs when someone takes information into their brain adds it to what they already know and hopefully ends up with something greater than the parts. What we are able to capture and present in our Intranets, Portals and Knowledge Bases is information not knowledge (McKeen, Henderson, Holsapple & Zack, 2001). This researcher found such comments and the comments of others at the conference to be highly influential concerning how information is captured, stored and retrieved. The reason that this is important is that the way we architect and organize our portals will be directly related to whether we believe that we are capturing knowledge or information.
Information Classifications Information and knowledge have little meaning to an organization if they cannot be found when needed and if they cannot be used when necessary. The following classifications outline ways of categorizing, identifying and treating knowledge:
Taxonomy A frequently used academic term, “taxonomy” is a categorization element whereby information provides a context including organization-specific categories. Taxonomies are dictated by organization and industry. They are a critical component of capturing data as they give portal users the knowledge of how to enter and retrieve information. In our case study law firm, a taxonomy defined by the industry is a pleading. This is a document that is filed before a court that performs a particular function in a court of law. All documents of this type are known as pleadings.
47 Semantics Semantics is “the branch of linguistic science which deals with the meanings of words and especially with development and change in these meanings” (Cayne, 1998, p. 906). Throughout an organization and in a portal, the semantics or meaning of words must stay consistent.
If this is the case, employees will know how to enter and retrieve
information.
Ontology Dictionary.com defines “ontology” as “an explicit formal specification of how to represent the objects, concepts, and other entities that are assumed to exist in some area of interest and the relationships that hold among them” (dictionary.com, 2002). In an article for American Association for Artificial Intelligence entitled “Knowledge Portals Ontologies at Work”, Staab and Maedche (2001) discuss the use of ontologies “as a conceptual backbone for providing, accessing, and structuring information in a comprehensive approach for building and maintaining knowledge portals” (p. 63). They found in their research that “knowledge portals typically are maintained manually” (p. 63) and ontologies give the structure necessary for storing information in a portal. They are the rules and logic unique to each organization and industry that is employed to find internal information. “What one rather needs is a set of methods and tools that can account for the diversity of information sources of potential interest for presentation at the knowledge portal” (p. 69).
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge Robert J. McQueen from the University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand explored the role played by collaborative technology in tacit knowledge creation in his
48 research paper entitled Can Collaborative Technology Support Tacit Knowledge Creation in Individuals? “According to Polanyi (Polanyi, 1983), knowledge is comprised of tacit and explicit forms. Explicit knowledge can be characterized by contextual ‘what to do in this situation’ distilled rules or process descriptions, in a form such as a document or book, that can be used by others to guide their actions, even though they may lack the necessary experience, understanding or insight about the situation” (p. 142). Nonaka and Takeuchi (1995) suggest the following: …we classify human knowledge into two kinds. One is explicit knowledge, which can be articulated in formal language including grammatical statements, mathematical expressions, specifications, manuals, and so forth. This kind of knowledge thus can be transmitted across individuals formally and easily. …A more important kind of knowledge is tacit knowledge, which is hard to articulate with formal language. It is personal knowledge embedded in individual experience and involved intangible factors such as personal belief, perspective, and the value system. (pp. viii) McQueen found that “Opportunities exist to use Information Technology (and in particular, collaborative support technologies) for the support of tacit knowledge building in individuals” (p. 142). Additionally, he presented two ways that collaborative technologies such as portals can support tacit knowledge creation. •
Information streams from collaborative communities and agents which automatically present items intended to stimulate awareness. These streams are tailored to an individual’s interests, but contain a variety of information and perspectives. Some non-technology ways of achieving information streams include trade magazine circulations lists, and article clipping and content services. Some collaborative technology based ways of generating information streams might include direct distribution electronic publishing, being a passive participant in meetings supported by groupware where unexpected information or anecdotes may be revealed, and subscribing to email based news and contents services.
•
Stimulation through discussion. Traditional short courses are often more valued for exposing participants to new ideas and viewpoints than for generating new skills. Non-technology based stimulation techniques
49 include intra-organization site visits, conferences, trade fairs, and cross industry meetings. Collaborative technology systems supporting stimulation through discussion include email lists, forums and discussion groups which often extend outside the organization boundaries. Virtual social environments which nurture dialog and testing of formulations of developing tacit knowledge are already supported by collaborative technology. (p. 144) Traditional information systems focus on explicit knowledge that can be easily captured and transferred through information technology. Within tacit knowledge, Raven (1997) discusses two types. The first type is entrenched knowledge. This is knowledge that is very difficult to articulate and share. The second type, articulatable knowledge can easily be made explicit, and is therefore easy to share. Explicit knowledge, in contrast, is articulatable knowledge that has been articulated, abstracted from the environment in which it was used…Two people who want to share entrenched knowledge have to enter a mentor-student type of relationship with ‘intelligent-cooperation’ (Polanyi, 1967, p.5) in which not only the knowledge, but also the context in which the knowledge is situated is recreated and understood by the student Types of Data In Corporate Portals, Collins (2001) discusses corporate data that can be exposed through a portal. The type of information your employees need to access might be structured (e.g., data marts, data warehouses), unstructured (e.g., e- mail messages, wordprocessing documents), transactional (e.g., creating a customer order, enrolling in the 401(k) program), or collaborative (e.g., scheduling a meeting, commenting on the department budget). The corporate portal is built on existing content repositories, applications, and data marts that users can immediately access without having to know the actual location of the data or which application is used to read or update the data (p. 7). Collins (2001) finds that through exposing data in a portal, companies can stop complaints of organizations that wish “If only we knew what we knew” (p. 11). Different
50 data types (i.e., structured and unstructured data) require different methods for searching, presenting and sharing.
Information Structure Summary The definitions for data and information given in the text above may offer technology users resources they need to successfully complete their job when also including others in their work. Herein is one of the key differentiators to usage of technology in small business as opposed to large businesses. A small business does not often depend on many employees collaborating to perform a single task. Large companies however require common ways of organizing and describing so that multiple people can work together effectively. Ontologies and taxonomies give organizations the structure and consistency necessary to combat the problems illustrated in a Pharmaceutical Today article that finds “despite the enormous volumes of data, the problem is not too much data but rather a lack of tools with which to turn these data into knowledge” (Whelan, 2001, p. 6).
Technology Acceptance Model In this research and at ICIS 2001, this researcher found numerous references to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and numerous extensions of TAM that took into account factors such as social influence (Fenech, 1998). In TAM a prospective user's overall attitude toward using a given system, such as the World Wide Web, is shown as a function of the belief constructs in the TAM: Perceived Usefulness (the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system would enhance his or her job performance) and Perceived Ease of Use (the degree to which a person believes that using a particular system
51 would be free of effort) (Fenech, 1998). This “widely used model says that perceived usefulness and ease of use determine if an individual will use a new technology” (Garcia, 2000). Technology acceptance model is shown in Figure 4-3.
Technology Acceptance Model (Fenech, 1998) Figure 4-3 Technology Acceptance Model
Garcia (2000) states that Davis found in his research that employers should focus on social influence strategies, and directly attend to the cognitive influences (Garcia, 2000). Davis also notes that “over time, mandatory, compliance-based approaches are less effective over time” (Garcia, 2000). One such TAM extension was discussed at the 32nd Hawaii International Conference on Systems Sciences in 1999 by Yogesh Malhotra of Brint.com and Dennis F. Galletta of the University of Pittsburgh.
Employees to Focus On Drucker told us that the “productivity of knowledge work…will predictably become the economic challenge of the knowledge society” (1994) and the case study law firm profile discussed earlier shows that a law firm relies on knowledge workers. Thus, the productivity of knowledge workers is an important aspect contributing to the future success of this specific organization. In this section we discuss the ramifications for some employees of the firm.
52 In his book Intellectual Capital, author Thomas A. Stewart discusses identifying skills types within an organization so that tools, technology, investment, leveraging, education and compensation can be focused on those people that bring the greatest return to the organization. Stewart (1997) identified the following skills: Commodity skills: abilities that are not specific to any particular business, are readily obtained, and are more or less equally valuable to any number of businesses. Typing and a cheerful telephone manner are commodity skills; so are some highly technical abilities, such as air-conditioner maintenance or benefits administration. Leveraged skills: knowledge that, while not specific to a particular company, is more valuable to it than to others. Most big companies need programmers, but Andersen Consulting, IBM Consulting, and EDS can leverage the skill because they sell it to many different customers, whereas programmers for, say, Bank of America or General Motors can add value only to their employers. Similarly, a law firm can get more value from an attorney than a corporation can, which is why partners at the firm your company uses probably earn more than the in- house counsel who hires them. Leveraged skills tend to be industry-specific, but not company specific. Proprietary skills: the company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business. Proprietary knowledge, as it deepens, becomes a selling point: McKinsey is the strategy consulting firm, the University of Chicago has the economics department, Ritz-Carlton is the expert in hotel management. Some proprietary skills become codified in patents, copyrights, and other intellectual property, but much more comes from the concentration of expertise and experience that answers the questions, “What have we got that they ain’t got?” (p. 89-90) Stewart (1997) goes on to suggest that employees can be placed into four quadrants as shown below (Figure 4-3 and 4-4). The first graphic based on Stewart (1997, p. 90) shows characteristics of each quadrant and the second graphic, also influenced by Stewart (1997, p. 91), shows recommendations for management on what to do to inc rease the value gained from each quadrant.
53 DIFFICULT TO REPLACE, LOW VALUE DIFFICULT TO R EPLACE, H IGH VALUE ADDED - Skilled factory workers and ADDED - The people whose talent and experienced secretaries experience create the products and services that are the reason customers come to it and not to a competitor. This is the asset. The other three quadrants are labor costs. These are the stars. EASY TO R EPLACE, LOW VALUE EASY TO REPLACE, HIGH VALUE ADDED ADDED - Unskilled and semi-skilled Tasks valuable to customers but skills are labor easily replaced. Table 4-1 Skill Quadrants
INFORMATE - Change their work to add more value, so that it starts to benefit customers AUTOMATE - Replace with machines, tools or software where possible
CAPITALIZE - Invest and take care of people in this quadrant - Find ways to turn generic knowledge into something your company is uniquely able to exploit DIFFERENTIATE
OR OUTSOURCE
- For example contract EDS to perform information technology services Table 4-2 Skill Quadrant Recommendations
Stewart (1997) goes on to say that “the greater the human-capital intensity of a business -- that is, the greater its percentage of high- value-added work performed by hard-toreplace people -- the more it can charge for its services and the less vulnerable it is to competitors, because it will be even more difficult for rivals to match those skills than it is for the first company to replace them. Smart organizations, then, spend and invest as little as possible in work that customers do not value and whose workers’ skills are easy to replace, automating what they can” (p. 91).
54 Ramifications Summary Thus we come to the conclusion that the technology options, ramifications and culture must be both reviewed and taken into account when selecting technologies. Lee and Sarker (2002) discussed giving equal consideration to the technical and social dimensions and TAM (Garcia, 2000) informs that perceived usefulness and ease of use determine if an individual will use a new technology.
Individual employees, as discussed above, have
different reasons for technology acceptance and when they see the relevance to their jobs, the chance for the success of that technology is greater. Therefore, we conclude that organizations that implement portal technologies will find the greatest return when they focus on adding value or capitalizing on the Stewart’s “Difficult to Replace, High Value Added” employees.
55
CHAPTER 5 - PICKING A PORTAL AND GETTING BUY-IN In business you get what you want by giving other people what they want. --Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945), U.S. businesswoman
The key difference between a consumer portal like my.yahoo.com and a corporate portal is that the corporate portal is optimized for capturing, managing and using structured and unstructured corporate data in a meaningful and efficient way. Typically, this data is found
in
disparate
databases
across
the
enterprise.
The
Gartner
Group
(http://www.gartner.com) found that considering the target audience during this process is critical. Figure 5-1 (based on Gartner’s report titled “Communicating Total Cost of Ownership to a Nontechnical Audience”) shows how to define the audience and its level of influence.
Figure 5-1 Business Units and Level of Influence on IT Spending
56 Portal Architectures Portals have been divided here into discrete divisions of simple (small) or large (complex) to clearly show that there are options for small organizations that do not involve a large amount of money.
Simple Portals - Small Business or Departmental These portal products are relatively easy to deploy and are often free, included with an operating system or low cost (less than $8,000 for 100 users). Examples of this include IBuySpy (a free Microsoft .Net portal at http://www.asp.net/), Novell’s Novell Portal Services (included with NetWare 6 at http://www.novell.com/products/portal/), Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server ($8,000 for 100 users) at http://www.microsoft.com/sharepoint/). Microsoft has a version of SharePoint called SharePoint Team Services that is included free with Microsoft FrontPage 2002. FrontPage 2002 can be purchased by itself, $169 list price for a new full version, or in the developer edition of Microsoft Office XP. SharePoint Team Services requires Windows 2000 Server to run it on.
Large Portals - Sophisticated Architecture Often Teamed With ERP For anything larger than a relatively small and non- mission critical implementation, most companies will choose a sophisticated portal product rather than one of the simple portal products identified above. To compare large and often complex portals with the simple portals above, research alluded that many typical large portal projects budget over $350,000 in the first year alone with some portal projects costing several million dollars. Portal software producers approach their portal development with background and experience in a particular market segment or to solve a particular business problem. By
57 focusing on a particular segment of the business software market, the software vendor has a stronger offering in that particular area. One example of this is Documentum. This is a company that has a background in document management. According to their website, http://www.documentum.com/about_us/fact.html, they were one of the first to introduce an enterprise-scale document management system around 1990. As a result of this history, the Documentum products focus on the document and content management side of a portal. As noted earlier, businesses selecting a portal should look to meeting the core purpose of the portal first. After that core need is met, then one should look for portal products that can be used to meet some of the organization’s other needs. Figure 5-1 from page 28 of Collins’ Corporate Portals (2001), has been reproduced here as Figure 5-2 and it illustrates current corporate portal market segments. The focus is on portal vendors.
Figure 5-2 Corporate Portal Market Segments
58 Collins (2001) goes into much great detail discussing market segmentation and selection of a portal. Such analysis falls beyond the scope of this thesis. Nevertheless, this researcher recommends consulting Collins’ work during the planning stages of any portal project. We now turn to the implementation of a portal in the firm that is the subject of this research. At the law firm, for the course of this research, a generic portal was selected that did not tie into the accounting system. The generic portal selected was Novell Portal Services and it is discussed in detail in chapter 7. The basic reason for the generic portal selected is this: the accounting system vendor sold a portal product that was cost prohibitive to the law firm.
To generate automatic reports from the accounting system, this researcher and a
member of the accounting staff designed an access database that would generate dynamic web pages filled with URL links to a Crystal Reports server. The Crystal Reports server produced the reports that the law firm employees needed from the accounting system. End users were required to log into this dynamic reporting system. Through the law firm’s generic portal, they were automatically logged on to the dynamic accounting report system. This saved a login for the end user and is an example of how a generic portal product can be used as a gateway to simplify access to other organizational resources. A partial list of current portal vendors has been included in this research to identify vendors associated with this category of software. Many entries shown in Table 5-1 are based on recommendations of Collins (2001). Nevertheless, this is a fast- moving market and vendors can constantly be added to or removed from this category.
59 Partial List of Portal Vendors Vendor
Website
Application Vendors with Portal Tools Computer Associates www.ca.com IBM www.ibm.com Oracle www.oracle.com PeopleSoft www.peoplesoft.com SAP www.sap.com Sun www.sun.com Vendors with Decision Support or Knowledge Management History Brio www.brio.com Hummingbird www.hummingbird.com MicroStrategy www.microstrategy.com Sterling Software www.sterling.com Viador www.viador.com Portal Start-Up Vendors 2Bridge www.2bridge.com Broadvision www.broadvision.com Corechange www.corechange.com CoVia www.covia.com DataChannel www.datachannel.com Epicentric www.epicentric.com Hyperwave www.hyperwave.com InfoImage www.infoimage.com Intraspect www.intraspect.com Knowledge Track www.knowledgetrack.com Plumtree www.plumtree.com Sagemaker www.sagemaker.com Component Products Autonomy www.autonomy.com Excalibur www.excalib.com InfoSeek www.software.infoseek.com Semio www.semio.com Verity www.verity.com Viador www.viador.com Miscellaneous Digital Dashboard & SharePoint www.microsoft.com IONA www.iona.com Novell www.novell.com Radnet www.radnet.com Sybase www.sybase.com TIBCO www.tibco.com TopTier www.toptier.com Unitas www.unitas.com Verano www.verano.com Table 5-1 Partial List of Portal Vendors
60 A Portal Should Include Collins (2001) includes the following features and benefits for regardless of portal adopted solution: •
A single point-of-access from a web browser to applications, business content, and services. You should, however, verify which web browsers, and version numbers are supported by portal software applications. When multiple web browsers and versions are not supported, they are not always supported with the same functionality or feature set.
•
A personalized, role-based user interface that’s customizable to individua l needs.
•
Simple maintenance that requires no additional client software or hardware. Be aware, however, that in many cases, there are minimum bandwidths and modem speeds that employees or users will need to connect to the web server to use the corporate portal solution.
•
Access to enterprise applications and data sources using a development application programming interface (API).
•
A single sign-on into the portal solution to access all the applications and data sources available in the portal desktop
•
Integrated communication and collaboration features with existing enterprise applications, systems, and hosted services.
•
Bundled search engine or integration capabilities with third-party products to provide search features and functions.
•
Bundled web-based business intelligence tools or integration capabilities with third-party business intelligence applications. (p. 36)
Collins (2001) concludes her recommendations with the following statement. “Each of these portal software applications implements or supports portal features differently. The best process to select the appropriate portal software vendor is to determine the objectives and requirements of your enterprise or corporate portal solution and evaluate which product most appropriately matches your needs” (p. 36). We also need to remember that “pre-
61 packaged software is simpler to implement, but some companies get stuck trying to fit the structure to the software, not vice-versa” (Ng, 2002). This issue is also important when implementing portals.
62
CHAPTER 6 - PORTAL IMPLEMENTATION – GENERIC APPROACH The dictionary is the only place where success comes before work. -- Arthur Brisbane, American journalist (1864-1910)
Some quotes discovered during this research and important to ponder in the context of portal implementation were these: •
“Implementing a knowledge management solution that maintains the existing status quo for data storage and business rules and processes is critical to sustaining the integrity of the information presented in the corporate portal.” (Collins, p. 8, 2001)
•
How has exposing more legacy information changed how organizations organize their information and service offerings around needs of community members? (Katz, p. 4, 2002)
•
Web technologies have allowed users to “overcome much of the ‘unfriendliness’ inherent in most legacy systems.” (Katz, p. 7, 2002)
•
“The appearance of the corporate portal must communicate effectively to each employee in your organization.” (Collins, p. 90, 2001)
Handling change and new technology implementations is a subject that requires care within an organization and is important as discussed by Curry (2002) because “people learn and change incrementally, and so do organizations” (p. 133) and “knowing people and their organizational cultures is a necessary condition for transformative change” (p. 133). Moreover, for proper long-term planning of a portal, it is important, as with any technology, to consider generations of implementations. Collins (2001) outlines three recommended generations of portal implementations. These (adapted from Collins, p. 53) are shown in Table 6-1.
63 First Generation
Build and present the core content Identify and develop self-service applications (i.e., access to discrete enterprise data) Second Extend the solution to all intranet activities Generation Develop the corporate portal (i.e., aggregation of self-service applications) Third Generation Create a personalized environment with focus on: • Comfort and familiarity (i.e., user personalization) •
Understanding and knowledge (i.e., navigation and personalization)
•
System intelligence (i.e., behavior assistance personalization) Table 6-1 Three Generations of a Corporate Portal
The generations above are important to ponder in the context of a portal because when an organization goes to select a portal, they need to keep in mind their third generation goals. The third generation goals may change the initial portal selected. Many organizations have an existing Intranet that will be replaced by a more flexible portal. It could be that by adding a portal to an existing Intranet, the organization may be stepping into stage two above in their first portal offering.
Implementation Tips In looking for tips on how to make a portal more palatable to those who will have to use it, this researcher consulted numerous research articles written by academics. Most of the research in technology acceptance pointed back to the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) which was discussed at length in chapter 4.
TAM suggests that rather than
mandating usage, employers could implement more effective social influence strategies, such as increasing the credibility of internal sources or designing communication campaigns that increase the prestige associated with system use” (Garcia, 2000, p. 3). Employees don’t like
64 to be forced into particular behaviors through mandates. Instead, employers will have greater acceptance of technology through the social prestige of technology usage and credibility of the technology. In addition to the social and credibility factors discussed above, according to Garcia (2002, p 2) employees are more positive toward a new technology if they think that it is directly useful to their job and performs the tasks well. The technology must benefit them in their job and it must also be relevant. Systems are not used if they are not considered relevant and if job benefits cannot be directly tied to the new system. The research also shows that “demonstrations of the effectiveness of the new system, when compared to current practices, would provide important leverage for increasing user acceptance” (p. 3). In the July 15, 2002 CIO Magazine, author S. Kaplan published an article discussing a step-by-step approach to improving the chances that KM systems actually get used (2002). Questions that the author encourages us to ask include: •
Are there pressing needs for better knowledge sharing and use in areas that are important to your organization?
•
Can you find a group of people willing to explore new ways of working to address pressing knowledge needs?
•
Can this group or another source provide limited seed funding to pilot new tools that enable new ways of working?
•
Can you map out a pilot model that will scale to the entire organization? (p. 77)
In the opinion of this researcher, these questions map directly to concerns related to portals.
65 Company Culture The social aspects of technology acceptance discussed above fit nicely with an industry article entitled Culture of Collaboration where the author shares that the biggest problem with collaboration is not techno logical, but a “cultural and organizational one” (Kirsner, 2001). The cultural aspects of collaboration are important in this research because of the online and centralized characteristics of the portal. Portal users must want to contribute information to the portal so that the portal is valuable. The desire to share information does not come easily or naturally to most users and it must be an encouraged part of the organizational culture.
The organization must encourage people to work together and
"collaboration software just won't work if you don't have a corporation that encourages people to work together" (Kirsner, 2001). According to Kirsner (2001, p. 2+) these suggestions, as summarized in Table 6-2, should be taken to get employees to adopt collaborative tools and use them in an effective way.
Table 6-2 Suggestions for Successful Tool Adoption Start small
Collaborative technologies shouldn't be dropped on employees like an anvil from above. "At a big company like Ford, you run the risk of being the flavor of the day if you introduce it all at once," says Kelly Vela, a program leader at Ford's Leadership for the New Economy program, which uses a collaborative tool called eRoom to train managers. Employees go through the program in groups of about 30, and once they are comfortable using eRoom, they bring it back to their "home" departments.
66 Find a champion
"You need a visionary—someone who sees what this tool can do for the company and is willing to stick his neck out and try it," says Salmon at RealityWave. The tool's champion will identify other willing users and build an initial team to test the technology in a real business situation. The champion can be an individual or a small select group. That's what happened at Shell International Exploration & Production, says Arjan van Unnik, a founding member of Shell's New Ways of Working group. The initial teams that used software from SiteScape, a Maynard, Mass.-based collaborative software vendor, were groups of several dozen people spread around the world who benefited from being able to work together freely over time and geography. Pick a real "You can't just start [using a collaborative tool] and see where it problem goes," says Jeffrey Beir, president and CEO of eRoom Technology, a Cambridge, Mass., software company. "You need grounding in an important business objective that needs to get done." Tackle a new product being developed or a big proposal being written, and get the team working on it to test the collaborative software. Fill the space The online collaborative environment won't be very enticing if it starts out empty. No one wants to be the first to post a message, add an event to the group's calendar or deposit a working document. Tim Butler, SiteScape's president and founder, recommends having a team member who serves as a kind of gardener, planting some important information in the online environment before the team gets started and keeping it pruned as time goes on. The gardener needs to make sure that team members are posting all relevant information to the forum rather than simply e-mailing it to one another. He also ought to seek out "exclusives"— information that can't be found anywhere else—for posting. It's also crucial for employees to find the freshest information online rather than via interoffice memos or another channel. Prod employees After a few initial interactions with the collaborative system, it's to participate not unusual for employees to drift away. One antidote is to give team members an update on what's happening in the online forum. At Shell, everyone who uses the system gets a periodic e- mail synopsis of the questions being asked and the issues being addressed online, with a URL link to the items being discussed.
67 Promote the benefits
Celebrate the experts
Don't be safe
Let the users rule
Measure the effect
It's natural for employees to resist change. Proponents of collaboration in big companies need to talk about the problemsolving power of working together. "There's still resistance, but we talk about the benefits at meetings and in newsletters," says Chip Yonkee, manager of e-business at Siemens Energy and Automation in Alpharetta, Ga. "The old way was that you'd spend two hours looking for a file on a server somewhere. The new way is that you can find that information easily online and solve your problems more quickly with help from your colleagues." It may be counterproductive to reward employees for participating in collaborative efforts. "If you offer a bottle of whiskey for every 10th answer to a question, then the value of the community goes down, because the loudest participants are the ones who want free whiskey," says van Unnik at Shell. Psychologist Calmas says that the best incentives for fostering collaboration are "verbal praise, the thrill of making a contribution, working in a productive group and having your ideas appreciated." Rather than punish employees who don't participate in the collaborative environment, celebrate the contributions of those who do. Allow controversial debates to brew in collaborative areas— otherwise people will avoid having any substantial conversations there. "The stuff that gets people most engaged is the controversial stuff," says Yonkee at Siemens. "If you put one of these [collaborative] tools in place you have to trust your employees to take the system and mold it to the style and culture of their department," says Dave Griffin, director of corporate technology at SiteScape. "They may not be using it the way you intended them to, but you have to let it play out a little bit. You can't work it all out in advance." Collaborative tools will be adopted more widely within a company and their use will become more routine if employees and executives understand how much time and money they save—and the savings can be dramatic. For example, at some companies, collaborative technologies have reduced the length and number of meetings. At Shell, van Unnik figures online collaboration saved the company at least $237 million in 2000. "We only counted clear examples of where we'd earned money or reduced cost by increasing [oil] production or solving problems that are impacting production.
Kirsner’s suggestions above were written to improve successful implementation of tools that enable collaboration or working together and not specifically on portals. However,
68 the challenges faced by organizations looking to deploy a portal are very similar to those challenges faced by the introduction of collaborative tools.
Ten Portal Pitfalls - Meta Group C. Roth (2002) of the Meta Group (http://www.metagroup.com), a leading research and consulting firm focusing on information technology and business transformation strategies, published a paper entitled Top 10 Portal Pitfalls -- and how to avoid them. This timely research paper lays out specific pitfalls found in a review of first-generation portal attempts.
The Meta Group, in turn, outlined six steps of its portal planning process
identifying pitfalls as they relate to each step. Step 1: Sponsors hip and ownership •
Pitfall 1: Obtaining minimal ROI from portals--caused by failure to obtain executive sponsorship. If there is no one at a high enough level to drive process re-engineering, the portal can only automate existing processes.
•
Pitfall 2: Instantiating redundant portal efforts--caused by a lack of clear ownership. How to avoid: Obtain executive-level sponsorship and determine clear project ownership. Executive sponsorship is critical in the early stages of planning to support process changes (e.g., increased openness, removal of bureaucratic layers), provide funding, designate a single employee portal effort, and provide measures of success that can be used as input into the feature selection process. Designating a portal owner (often in a project management office or central IT function) provides a common point for portal coordination efforts.
Step 2: Drivers and benefits •
Pitfall 3: Creating a portal that workers like, but executives (the people who provide funding) see no value in--caused by failure to align to business objectives. While the portal may ease some daily hassles, it does not address any of the critical issues with which the company is struggling.
69 •
Pitfall 4: Having a portal project eliminated in last- minute budget cuts-caused by the inability to prove, articulate, or even estimate the value of the portal vs. the significant monetary and human resources needed to implement it.
•
Pitfall 5: Having disagreement among groups regarding portal success. Without clear goals, determining whether a portal is a "success" after implementation is impossible. How to avoid: Determine business drivers and expected benefits before implementation. Tying portal projects to business drivers is the best way to align a horizontal portal with business goals and objectives. Determining benefits (including calculating ROI) helps justify the portal project and sets up measurements that must be put in place. The ROI process should yield a set of key performance indicators and a baseline that enables monitoring of portal impact.
Step 3: Features inventory •
Pitfall 6: Creating a portal that meets the needs of only a few constituencies. Without taking the full range of users into account, portal owners generally concentrate on the areas they know best and pick features that address that limited constituency. How to avoid: Include representatives from all areas during requirements gathering. A best practice for portal design is to determine the constituencies of the portal (e.g., marketing manager's view, transportation supplier's view, gold- level customer view) and the processes those roles are involved in. From there, features needed to complete the processes can be established.
Step 4: Infrastructure impact assessment •
Pitfall 7: Providing insufficient infrastructure to support a portal. At an enterprisewide level, portals should depend on existing infrastructure such as directories and single sign-on, authentication, search, transaction processing, or collaboration. If these are not present, even a feature-rich portal will fail. This is the second most common pitfall for portal projects. How to avoid: Conduct an infrastructure impact assessment. This should be performed after features have been inventoried, but before selecting a portal product. The assessment should cover all infrastructure services that the portal will depend on but not provide itself: authentication and single sign-on, directory access, content/document management, workflow, enterprise application integration, collaboration, and search.
70 Step 5: Product selection •
Pitfall 8: Selecting the wrong portal product. Failure to anticipate current and future enterprisewide needs can result in a product that only meets the need of one constituency, a product that is outgrown in a year, or a product from a vendor that is no longer viable. How to avoid: Perform a full product evaluation. The portal product evaluation should begin by creating a shortlist of vendors through market segmentation, and eliminating vendors that do not meet core architectural criteria. Once the shortlist has been selected, the portal evaluator should generate the list of factors that each vendor will be rated against. Best-practice evaluations include business, technical, architectural, and due diligence ratings categories.
Step 6: Internal marketing and feedback •
Pitfall 9: Implementing a great portal framework that no one uses. Even if a portal has a full set of functionality, without buy- in from the user communities it will not get leveraged and will eventually wither. This is the most common portal pitfall.
•
Pitfall 10: Having a portal that starts out strong, but disappears in a year when the novelty wears off. Lack of fresh content and inability to access applications useful on a daily basis doom a portal to being just another toy in the closet. How to avoid: Market the portal internally and maintain strong feedback loops. A portal should be heavily marketed to internal groups and partners. Other groups that may be planning sophisticated Web sites or competing portal efforts must be aware of the upcoming consolidation. The marketing efforts should be aimed at soliciting input while "freezing out" potential internal competition. The value of the portal will be tied to its visibility among its constituencies as a hub for information, data, collaboration, and application access. A systematic portal measurement process is essential for a continuous feedback loop aimed at improving overall quality of experience for sponsors, users, and business partners.
The six implementation steps and pitfalls identified with each can be seen in most every organization-wide software project. Organizations that embark upon a portal project have a greater chance of success if they follow the implementation steps, and plan for the associated pitfa lls and follow the avoidance recommendations above.
71 Portals are especially sensitive to the pitfalls above because the value to the organization of a portal is sometimes difficult to measure.
The next section discusses
methods of assessing the value of a portal.
Calculating ROI Return On Investment (ROI) issues are very important when discussing information technology in any context. R. Scheier (2001), in ComputerWorld in special issue on ROI, listed three critical business questions that must be answered before embarking on an IT project. These are: 1. What is the real cash flow impact of the IT project? 2. What is the real dollar impact if the IT project is successful? 3. Who specifically is committed to delivering the increase in revenue, increase in margins or other benefits? (p. 20) ROI is difficult to assess for infrastructure projects. Johnson (2001) in her interview with Peter Sole of The Research Board, Inc. (http://www.researchboard.com/ ), a CIO research service group reported that Sole stated “trying to estimate the likely return [of major infrastructure efforts] is very difficult. It’s like investing funds in new ventures; it’s speculative. It’s the judgment around the assumptions that matters” (p. 26). When trying to establish ROI specifically for portals, “the ROI for an enterprise portal relates directly to the size of the data reservoir and the value of the data it contains” (Pelz-Sharpe, Harris-Jones & Ashenden, 2001, p. 12). In Table 6-3 outlines of the cost benefits of a portal, as outlined by Plumtree, a portal vendor, are summarized (Plumtree, 2002).
72 Table 6-3 Plumtree’s Cost Benefits of a Portal More cost-effective, powerful Web infrastructure Lower network, storage costs Lower intranet, extranet administration costs Lower internationalization and localization costs Lower training costs
Lower communication costs
Improve customer service
Lower regulatory compliance costs Increase productivity
Improve collaboration, lower travel costs
Improve project-based teamwork
Web-enable applications and deliver e-business services cost-effectively. Reduce e- mail distribution of large files by allowing employees to share documents via a portal, lowering storage and network costs. Allow employees to contribute in a self-service way to an organized, secure intranet or extranet, reducing administration costs. Allow users to choose from different languages for their personalized user interface. Give people a simple interface to the most useful services from different applications, limiting training on complex CRM, ERP and data warehousing clients to the specialists who use these tools all day. Empower employees, partners and customers to get what they need from your organization via the portal, rather than by calling someone at a help desk, in human resources or at a call center, improving service at lower cost. Drive more revenues by offering customers a portal into your business, differentiating your products with a premium electronic resource available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Deliver information to the disabled more efficiently, lowering cost of regulatory compliance. Change the way people work. Improve productivity by giving everyone you do business with one place to go to get all of the electronic resources available from your organization, minimizing time spent searching or training on complex applications. Use the portal as a platform for employees and partners to work together more efficiently without having to meet face-to- face every month or every quarter, reducing travel costs. Use the portal as a collaboration forum for employees to work on projects more closely, driving projects to completion faster.
73 Understanding where the cost savings of a portal come is a major part of identifying the potential return on the investment in a portal. The value in a portal is more often a soft benefit (i.e., it is easier to do my job) than a quantifiable cost reduction.
Capturing
information and sharing it often do not have an immediate return and portals share ROI characteristics of knowledge management initiatives. We note that information sharing portals and knowledge management systems have much in common. This researcher found that the key factors discussed by C. Bixler, when analyzing strategy for successful knowledge management (KM) implementations at Keane Federal Systems, an information technology services firm, apply to portals implementation as well. Even though the process discussed by Bixler focuses on KM, we posit that the key factors are generic enough to apply to information-sharing portals. Bixler’s (2001) Plan-Build-Manage key factors are: •
Approach. Establishes a clear definition of all required KM elements and overall system approach and integration. It is designed to consider the complete KM/KMS life cycle in terms of quantifiable (thus measurable) business results.
•
Alignment. Focuses on aligning KM to the organization’s culture, mission, goals and business strategies.
•
Process. Develops formal KM processes, methods and technologies to create a universal, standardized KM system throughout the enterprise.
•
Culture . Assists in the development of an enterprisewide KM culture (knowledge sharing) through training and change techniques that instill the appropriate values to the employees and the potential for enterprise and client success.
•
Measurement. Addresses the necessary elements that measure the benefits of KM. Establishes business goals that can be measured in terms of both tangible (cost, schedule, performance) and intangible. Measures the changes in terms of the overall enterprise and its individual employees.
74 The focus of KM Plan-Build-Manage is establishing “value on investment” (p. 18). The measurement section above for KM highlights that the ROI must tie to business goals that can be measured fo r both tangible and intangible aspects. The focus above of “value on investment” keeps those entering a portal project on a path that aligns business needs with available technology. Other ROI and general portal implementation comments come from CIO Magazine. These points to think about came from IT consulting company Logical Design Solutions of Morristown, N.J. (http://www.lds.com/) regarding the development of portal technologies (CIO, 2001): •
Adoption: It's simple: Small user base equals small savings.
•
Availability: 24/7 uptime and secure Internet access will maximize your investment.
•
Usability: Few things will drive customers and employees away faster than a poor interface.
•
Operating Costs: Keep in mind that portals require maintenance and additional support personnel after the initial investment.
•
Content Publishing and Distribution: Print only as a last resort and avoid "print friendly" formats that will only push your costs to the local level.
•
Automation: Put self-service transactions in the hands of the user and employ call centers and other support staff to case management only.
•
Operational Efficiencies: Think workflow. Decrease cycle time; reduce backsliding into less efficient habits.
•
Data Access: Use the portal as a thin, cheap, secure front end to legacy data.
•
Collaboration: Reduce production and travel costs; increase efficiencies and corporate knowledge capital.
75 •
"Soft ROI" Opportunities: Although difficult to quantify, gains in employee productivity, retention and communication are very real. (p. 28)
The points above are important, because they encourage organizations looking at portal implementations to think about the many ways that the portal will affect their way of doing business and capturing information.
Beyond the generic portal implementation
recommendations of this chapter, the next chapter explores issues specific to one implementation.
76
CHAPTER 7 - PORTAL IMPLEMENTATION - SPECIFICS FOR A SMALL BUSINESS Success is a ladder that cannot be climbed with your hands in your pockets. --American proverb
Characteristics of a Small Business For the scope of this research and the case study law firm, this researcher elected to focus on the needs of small businesses. The definition of a ‘small business’ varies depending on the organization that is making the definition and the type of industry in which the organization is involved. For this research, the definition of small business originates from the US Federal Government’s Small Business Administration web site and it states that “the Office of Advocacy often defines a small firm as a firm with fewer than 500 employees” (Small Business Administration, 2002). The law firm discussed in this work employs 105 employees. Other characteristics of a ‘small business’ include: •
Employees typically wear multiple hats and are generally not domain experts but are effective enough to “get the job done.” For example at the case study law firm, the IS Team Lead serves as a network administrator, department manager, technology strategist and wide-area network manager.
As a result of the
numerous jobs he is responsible for, he is not expert at any one of them. •
A common mantra of “not perfect, but good enough” exists in order to get tasks completed. Jobs are not always done to perfection.
77 •
Semi- routine and non-routine tasks seldom have defined processes.
•
Decisions are generally made quickly and without all the information necessary.
•
Little or no software development in- house.
•
Collaboration is infrequent and most often involves fewer than six parties and is therefore not overly complex.
•
Low barriers exist for communication due to easy access to all levels of the organization because of size as well as frequently a maximum of three to four hierarchy levels
Small businesses are often overlooked as potential portal users because there is not a large user base over which to spread the cost. Also, small businesses do not generally have the communication challenges that large organizatio ns face. However, many of the information capture and storage benefits of a portal are just as valuable for a small business. Information intensive small businesses realize the benefits faster and with a smaller population than a small business that is not information intensive. This researcher has been in a number of situations in which an employee of a small business leaves and everything he/she knew including relationships with clients is lost. The information capture initiatives of a portal can help an organization to reduce its loss when an employee leaves the company. The knowledge worker aspect of the employees in the case study law firm highlight a need to examine more fully the professional services firm and the next section outlines some of the characteristics of this category of business.
78 Characteristics of a Professional Services Firm Because a professional services firm differs from a retail or manufacturing organization, the variations add up to a different project selection method and ROI calculation than for other organizations. •
No manufacturing or selling of a specific product. Instead, a knowledge worker (attorney in this illustration) uses experience and resources to perform a service.
•
Deliverables are generally unique for each matter. In the law firm example, every case brought before the attorney is different.
•
Organization is defined by billable time. Nearly all revenue in a law firm is generated through billing time by the hour. Some professional services firms operate in a flat- fee billing arrangement where they charge a flat fee for particular tasks, but hourly billing is still captured to establish profit/loss.
•
Billable productivity is affected by emotions, working environment, peers and motivations of the knowledge worker. I have seen professional service firms in which, if that organization is having a good year and it is ahead of financial goals, the people who bill time slack off. There is a natural human tendency to not work as hard if the pressure to meet goals is not always being applied. I have also seen professional services productivity and profitability increase when one firm that was located in two buildings consolidated into one office building. The close proximity to peers increased productivity, communication and reduced overhead.
•
Feel good – work good. Billable professional services depend on the emotional health, physical health and positive attitude of the person billing and performing the service.
79 •
Difficult to assess ROI.
Typical ROI calculations measure the increase in
production or decrease in transaction cost. In a professional services firm, these metrics are difficult to establish and often, the return on a particular technology is instead measured on how the billable professionals ‘feel’. •
Ownership model affects technology expenditures to only the most necessary. In a law firm, every dollar spent on technology takes a dollar out of the partners’ pockets. In this environment, each expenditure is critiqued and analyzed and often expensive or long-term projects that could enhance productivity of support staff are denied because they are not immediate or relevant to the decision makers.
Implementation At the case study law firm, this researcher deployed the Novell Portal Services (NPS) portal. It uses the following model for building the user experience.
80
Figure 7-1 Portal User Experience
Novell Portal Services Architecture Novell Portal Services is an Enterprise Information Portal that is bundled with Novell’s NetWare 6. It is a servlet application that runs on Apache Tomcat. It uses Novell’s eDirectory version 8.6.1 and above as the directory of resources and groups as well as for LDAP authentication.
The Novell NetWare 6 server is currently running Apache Web
Server version 1.3.20, Apache Tomcat version 3.3 and Sun’s Java SDK 1.3. NPS can run on Novell’s eDirectory on Red Hat Linux 7.0, Sun Solaris version 8, Windows 2000 or NetWare 6. NPS requires the correct versions of Apache Web Server, Tomcat Servlet and Java, and then it will run on any of the network operating systems listed above. Other web servers’ configurations that will work include IIS .50 and iPlanet 6.0 and other web application servers (servlet engines) including JRUN, iPlanet 6.0 and WebLogic.
81 The architecture of NPS is that it is written in Java, XML, XSLT, HTML. The entire portal exists in a subdirectory off of the tomcat\webapps directory.
Gadget Re visited In the context of this chapter, we return to the concept of a gadget. A gadget is an application that executes within the portal and "owns" part or all of a portal page. The gadget provides both the data and the layout necessary to render its piece of the page. Typically, a gadget will return both an XML data stream and the URL of an XSLT stylesheet that will transform the data into HTML for display. Many gadgets will also receive, and respond to, input from the user when he submits a form, selects a link, or performs some other action directed at that particular gadget. Most gadgets will also interface with one or more external data sources such as applications, databases and web sites. Figure 7-2 illustrates the relationship of a gadget to the rest of Novell Portal Services (Novell Portal Services Developer Kit Documentation).
Figure 7-2 Gadget Components
Once the portal objects are gathered, they are packaged into files with an .npg (novell portal gadget) extension. These packages reduce complexity and the risk of losing a needed
82 class or jar file. To create a gadget that the portal can use, Novell’s ‘packager” creates the .npg file and then that file can be imported into the portal to make it available to the portal administrator.
Personalization The portal uses ‘skins’ to personalize the site. They are defined by the site administrator and either allowed or not. Portals allow the site administrators to have control over how the site looks and whether the user has the rights to change or personalize his/her portal. This personalization could include adding gadgets that he/she has rights to as well as repositioning said gadgets on the page. In addition, the administrator could allow the portal user to change the skin. The skins are composed of images, XSL and XML. An example of an NPS skin is Figure 7-3 below.
Figure 7-3 Novell Portal Services Skin Example
Gadgets and personalization are important to the successful acceptance of a portal because they give each user a relevant experience. The Technology Acceptance Model
83 (Garcia, 2000) illustrates that users desire to see the personal and professional relevance of a portal. This relevance is achieved through gadgets that are role and user specific to meet the individual needs of each employee.
The personalization allows a single portal to meet
several constituency needs. In this research, the case stud y law firm elected to use one ‘skin’ for internal users and a different ‘skin’ for external users (i.e., clients). Understanding the specific business and those things that make it unique is critical to defining and creating a successful portal. Industry type, employee skills, relationships with clients and partners, information needs and organization size all work together to create opportunities for a portal.
84
CHAPTER 8 - CONCLUSIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS The Internet means that the rules of competition ha ve changed, and this gives small companies a chance to leverage what they do best-react quickly and develop close relationships with customers-and go up against the biggest of their competitors. --Bill Gates (Smith, 2000)
A portal is a method for leveraging technology in organizations where it is the frontend interface that end-users like. It fosters productivity by giving a centralized place to go for corporate information, making the accessing of complex back-end systems transparent and simplifying the access to back-end storehouses of data. Portals give us a graphical and configurable front-end to a mess of complex data that exists “out there”. We are only limited by the explicit knowledge available, routes to that knowledge and our imaginations. Portal implementation in the firm under study in this work may allow better research by attorneys through exposing research methods and sources to younger practioners. It may also significantly reduce the number of times a task is completely redone. The employees of the organization will seek out faster ways to do their jobs to meet increasing client demands. This researcher has seen situations where legal secretaries within the case study law firm adapt to new tools that allow them to perform their jobs faster and with less frustration. The adaptation occurred when computers were randomly crashing during the creating of a fax cover sheet document and the legal secretaries simply began searching for and reusing old fax cover sheets to get the job done with a minimum of frustration.
85 The adaptation example above, for this researcher, highlights the flexibility necessary in this knowledge economy. The next section discusses that this trend toward faster business transactions will continue.
The “KNOW” Economy The “KNOW” economy is important for small firms as that discussed in this work. This is especially evident in the professional services firm spotlighted throughout this research. Peter Sole, director of the CIO research company, The Research Board, discussed in ComputerWorld (Johnson, 2001) the impact that the “New Economy” or new ways of doing business are impacting CIOs. Some people talk about the New Economy, and others talk about the “Now” Economy. I think it’s really the “Know” Economy. By that I don’t just mean instant gratification, but rather the commercial difference between knowing now and knowing later. It’s about removing the uncertainty. Most importantly, you want to remove the time lag, which costs you money. In the Know Economy, you want to know what’s going on and you want to be able to react on the spot, ideally in real time. It’s no accident that the currency markets and equity markets operate in real time, where fractions of a second matter. They are setting the standard for business generally. A portal can serve as the single window to critical, timely and relevant information to different actors within an organization and its partners, suppliers and customers. But as with any technology, there are problems to consider.
Downsides of Technology Dependence Throughout this research, the cultural and organizational impacts have been discussed. Those impacts must be weighed before embarking upon an empowering tool such as a portal. Technology at times is a two-edged sword that must be carefully wielded.
86 Referencing the downside to efficiency and reducing the friction to doing business, Peter Sole in his ComputerWorld interview discussed that “as we take the slack out, we will be more dependent on the system and the quality of the information in it” (Johnson, 2001, p. 28). Many times we are trading frustrations and delays caused by people with a fragile dependence on complex technology and expensive and hard-to- find computer experts. As a technologist, this researcher believes that the benefits of technologies outweigh the risks in most situations, but organizations embarking upon business-dependent technologies need to realize the impact of their choices. At the case study law firm, the enthusiasm for the portal has been disappointing. Perhaps this is only natural since change is difficult, no matter what the context. This researcher was questioned a number of times about why time was being spent on this ‘unimportant’ tool. The business owners did not see the value in the relevance, self-service and capture of tacit and explicit knowledge. There are social and organizational dynamics that need to be considered during the selection of technologies such as this when they require a lot of effort to maintain. In a large organization, the development and data capture costs of information into a portal can be spread over a large number of users. In addition, the large size of the organization may generate a much greater volume of data to be consumed by the organization. This combination of more users and a lot more data makes the decision about implementing portals much easier.
87 Role of Technology The late 1990s and the euphoria that came with it created an environment where technologists began to wrongly believe that they were more important than the rest of the organization. The truth is, that in a company, it is the producers who are king. In a law firm, that king is the attorney. Information Services (IS) is a necessary and valuable resource that exists to support the organization in its primary goal and, as long as we technologists remember that fact, we can continue to deliver high quality and high value results. It is when we lose track of what our purpose is that we waste time and money on initiatives which do not bring a high enough level of value to the organization. Through organizational mentoring, the development of soft IS skills to encourage include creativity, tenacity, listening skills, and an understanding of the proper role for IS. The IS groups within our companies can deliver technology every day that meets the current and future corporate needs. These skills point toward what this researcher sees as the future of Information Services, which is a partnership between the technologist and the business side of the organization. David Wessel discusses in a September 12, 2002 Wall Street Journal that “the biggest benefits from information technology, it is increasingly apparent, often go to those who use it cleverly rather than to those who make it” (2002). This trend spotlighted by Wessel emphasizes the future of technology in business.
Conclusion So, the question becomes, at what size and type of organization is the value sizable enough to warrant the expense of a portal as a presentation layer to data, information, reports
88 and applications? This is a question that can only be answered by individual organizations. The variables that factor into this question are unique to each organization. Portals are not for every organization. That has become clear to this researcher and is an essential outcome of this work.
Culture, organization size and complexity, type of
industry, organizational goals, types of employees, quantity and type of transactional data being captured and the organizational importance of capturing tacit and explicit knowledge all play significant roles in identifying the value that can be achieved by implementing a portal.
Future Research The next step in this line of research would be to track several companies through all phases of a portal implementation. Areas of focus could include ROI, implementation best practices, and the social and organizational aspects of capturing and presenting information.
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GLOSSARY Applet
Application Server ASP Categorization Engine Commodity skills
Content Management Corporate Information Factory Crawler Data Mart
Data Warehouse
DTD EAI
Explicit knowledge
Filter
Gadget, Webpart, Portlet, Nugget
A program that runs from within another application. Unlike an application, applets cannot be executed directly from the operating system. Typically J2EE compliant and provide the underlying development and run-time infrastructure for the portal. Application Service Provider - A vendor that hosts and supports applications over the Internet. Used for sorting documents into the folders of taxonomy. Abilities that are not specific to any particular business, are readily obtained, and are more or less equally valuable to any number of businesses. The storing and presenting of content or documents working to solve publishing, storage and workflow challenges of large web sites. The physical embodiment of the notion of an information ecosystem. An automated process that reads, indexes and classifies documents at a pre-determined interval. Customized and summarized data from the data warehouse tailored to support the specific analytical requirements of a given business unit. A subject-oriented, integrated, time-variant (temporal), and nonvolatile collection of summary and detailed data used to support the strategic decision- making process for the enterprise. Document Type Definition - A way to define the structure and layout of XML documents Enterprise Application Integration - The umbrella term for all software and services meant to integrate enterprise applications with one another. Knowledge which can be articulated in formal language including grammatical statements, mathematical expressions, specifications, manuals, and so forth. This kind of knowledge can be transmitted across individuals formally and easily. Generally available in taxonomy to restrict the documents that are admitted into a particular folder, or that are returned as part of a search. The "building block" of a portal. It is a user- interface for presenting data and functionality from multiple applications on a single web page.
96 HTML
HTTP
I/O Index Information Ecosystem Intrapreneurship
LDAP Leveraged skills Metadata Metadata repository Operational Data Store Portal
Proprietary skills SDK Servlet
SOAP Structured data
HyperText Markup Language - A tag based language that defines the structure and layout of a Web document by using a variety of tags and attributes HyperText Transfer Protocol - The underlying protocol used by the World Wide Web. HTTP defines how messages are formatted and transmitted, and what actions Web servers and browsers should take in response to various commands. Input / Output A collection of information that allows for fast query and retrieval. A paradigm of capturing and storing data in context to support certain business areas. (p. 18) where a team becomes a business within a business – grows its “business” with internal customers through continuous expansion of products and services relative to its own effectiveness and the perception of value provided by its constituency A set of open standards for accessing information directories. Knowledge that, while not specific to a particular company, is more valuable to it than to others. Data about data Contains metadata about the content within the portal and about the structure of that content. A subject-oriented, integrated, current-valued, volatile collection of detailed data used to support the up-to-the-second collective tactical decision-making process for the enterprise. A portal is a collection of technologies (i.e., HTML, XML, web services, LDAP directory, databases) that function together as a presentation tool to securely expose corporate data, add to it information on the Internet and customize and simplify access to that information. A portal grants access for organizational employees, clients and business partners to information for which they are allowed access and it hides information which has not been approved. It gives this customized access through a secure login to a directory and from that directory, the rights and privileges that are granted access to portal applications and data. The company-specific talents around which an organization builds a business. Software Development Kit - A programming package that enables a programmer to develop applications for a specific platform. A persistent applet or computer program that runs within an HTTP web server and takes specific requests away from the web server, processes them and then hands them back to the web server in HTML format for it to render Simple Object Access Protocol - An XML based standard for making function calls across the Internet to another application. information found in databases and legacy systems.
97 Tacit knowledge TAM
Taxonomy UDDI
Unstructured data User Profile Virtual Card WAN
Web Server
Web Service WSDL WSUI XML XPath XSD XSL XSL Formatting Objects XSLT
Intuition, ideas, unanalyzed experiences, skills and habits (often lost when knowledge workers leave the enterprise). Technology Acceptance Model - A model that analyzes technology acceptance due to perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use. A classification scheme to organize a collection of information. Universal Data Description Interface - A specification for finding web services and a public registry where Web Services can publish information about themselves. data held in text documents, e- mails, HTML pages. A profile on a portal for each user that defines customizations for that user. A description of a single document or piece of content within the portal. Wide Area Network - A network that extends to multiple sites, cities or countries often over a telephone network via frame-relay or over the Internet Works in conjunction with the application server to provide the run-time environment for client requests and serving HTML pages. A program that accepts and responds to requests over the Internet. Web Services Description Language - Allows a Web Service to describe what actions it supports. Web Services User Interface - A specification for standardizing the display of Web Services to end-users. A tag based language that is a way to store data and describe the data’s context at the same time A language for defining parts of an XML document. XML Schema Definition - A way to define the structure and layout of XML documents XML Style Language - A specification for separating style from content when creating HTML or XML pages. A vocabulary for formatting XML documents. XML Style Language Transformation - A language for transforming XML documents.
