Equilon is among the growing number of firms launching corporate portals to help employees gather, manage, share, and utilize information that in the past had been stored in disparate databases throughout the company. These knowledge management portals not only bring the information to the employees' fingertips through a corporate intranet site, or in some cases the Internet, but also help them interact with it, mine the data, and share information between one application and another. The portal personalizes users' desktops, organizes what their company knows, and presents it so they can absorb and use what's there. Users can then add what they know into the environment to take advantage of the full knowledge-sharing capability, he says. Both firms say there is a growing trend toward achieving knowledge management solutions through a portal interface.
Portals are valuable technology that can assist with the business process.
The idea is not just to gather information, but to present it so employees can interact with it and contribute back so others can learn from it, too. Software vendors began offering portal tools two years ago. However, there are no true leaders in this diversified space. Lotus Development Corp. and Microsoft Corp. in October 2000 picked up the pace by announcing new knowledge management portal tools. Lotus' K-station will work with collaborative tools such as Sametime, QuickPlace, and Domino to give users a single point of access to information.