Information professionals are about as close to detectives as you can get. Ask a librarian a question and the “hunt” begins. We wanted to explore three areas in this issue, so we asked three information professionals if they would each pursue one. Then we just stood back and watched in awe. They not only explored the areas, they served up incredibly high quality answers.

Sue Feldman at Datasearch Labs joined with Judy Boggess, a technology transfer consultant at Cornell University, to turn Factiva’s Intranet Toolkit inside out. Their review not only explains what you can expect from Server Software 3.0, it equips you with evaluation criteria to use when considering any of these products. They are now turning their investigative eyes on Dialog’s Intranet Toolkit. Watch for their review next issue. 

Ellen Miller looked into what intranet developments are underway in the financial services district, an industry with which she is intimately familiar. She has delivered an in-depth account of strides taken by the Libraries at Lehman Brothers and Credit Suisse First Boston.

Finally, we asked Bonnie Burwell, author of last issue’s Intranet Toolkit overview, what else “IP” might refer to besides intranet professional, information professional or Internet protocol. “Information Portals!” she reported, and then presented us with the latest nuggets she picked up on these at the Internet World Canada 2000 conference. 

Forrester’s “Pumping Up Intranet Portals”¹ reports that corporate intranets will explode with internal content and external content feeds, and that access is key. Yet Tom Davenport, renowned for his pioneering work in knowledge management,  taught us years ago that if people wanted access to information, there would be lineups at corporate libraries! What is more important is people’s appetite for information. Intranet portals are useless if people aren’t hungry for what they are offering and if the portal doesn’t have an information architecture to organize the content. And this is where the most important IP comes into play—the information professional.
 

Information Portals:

• Definition: A common user interface for corporate data; a Yahoo! for the enterprise’s content, communication & applications.
• Buzzword: Portal is now used for everything that used to be GUI (graphical user interface).
• Objective: Centralize an organization’s information for ease of use. Portals try to help employees find the information they need to do their job. Productivity is definitely higher when employees can find everything in one place. But the sheer volume of information exacerbates the problem, as do the different formats of information—images, archives and documents, which are seldom found in the same place.
• Types: Enterprise, collaborative, personalized, inter/intranet–linking together the public Web site, intranet, and extranet for customers and partners.
• Trends: Sixty percent of Fortune 500 companies indicate they will manage their own enterprise portals by 2003.
• Benefits: Increased productivity, increased competitiveness, enhanced organizational focus by tying things together, an extended enterprise.
• Example of a portal as a business-to-business solution: An insurance company built a secure Web site for its business customers who need additional information (e.g., manuals, forms, policies); these customers now use this Web site/portal to run their businesses.
• Challenges: Conversions from various formats, keeping things current, training contributors to keep things current, keeping IT out of the content business, dealing with legacy databases (one speaker referred to this as putting lipstick on a pig!), and content management issues when it’s so easy to post and delete content.
• Software solutions for portal development: Process integration, application integration, and information access.
• Need to support multiple tools: Access/search, categorization, collaboration, personalization, application integration, and security management.
• General Opinion: No one vendor provides all the solutions and much consolidation will occur in the marketplace this year.
• Quandary: Since organizations can have multiple portals, they need to identify and implement an infrastructure that supports a “federation” of portals. So, if a vertical portal, or vortal, is a portal focussed on a particular topic, theme, or community, is a federation of portals a fortal? 
• Best portal exhibit: Portal Juice from Nextopia. Labels on their juice bottles said, “Juice up your portal now with our search engine technology.” Check it out!

Bonnie Burwell, Burwell Information Services, burwell@fox.nstn.ca, on location at IWC 2000, Toronto, ON, February 8, 2000.
 
 

Watch For...

KMWorld 2000
Knowledge Nets: Defining & Driving the e-Enterprise
September 13-15, 2000
Santa Clara, CA
www.infotoday.com/KMWorld2000/default.htm

Internet Librarian 2000
November 6-8, 2000
Monterey, CA
www.infotoday.com/il2000/default.htm
 

1. “Pumping Up Intranet Portals,” The Forrester Report, by Joshua Walker, Forrester Research, Inc., September 1999.
 

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