Case Studies: See Your Way Through IT What's Your Knowledge IQ? Thanks for the Memories Blanc Cheque Investments

See Your Way Through It A tried-and-true system to restore order to chaotic portal plans.   As published in Intelligent Enteprise magazine A fast-moving market offers up an opportunity that plays directly to this company's customer-facing Web site. It seems like a slam-dunk to collect additional requirements, extend the good work of the past, and quickly roll out a portal that supports new users and new functions. But that's not quite the way things worked out in this anonymous case study. Background: Our client, an international professional user association, headquartered in the Washington, D.C. area, is a twenty-two year old, non-profit organization with 140 employees who provide a variety of educational, market awareness and research library products and services to its 150,000 members in 32 countries. Income from membership fees, services, publications and trade events topped $18 million last year. While the bulk of its members are today in the U.S, international membership is substantial and it is this constituency that is seen as offering the Association an immediate growth opportunity. The client's Membership department contracts with its sister departments (Research, Publication, Marketing, and IT) to produce, market, and deliver member services and products. The Membership department is organized into two areas: Domestic and International. Based upon the success of the products and services it now delivers, our client has created a new division with the mission to provide an affiliated set of services to its largest corporate members. These corporate services will enhance, extend, and rebrand the client's research, education, professional development, and professional certification products and services for deployment as components of the member's corporate infrastructure services. Portal Initiative Business Context and Technology Framework: Our client has three operating web initiatives. One addresses the International market, one the domestic market, and one the client's internal market - its employees. The results to date are mixed. The domestic web is 17 months old and a wide range of search and information services available. However, to avoid erosion of advertising revenue in its paper-based publications, the domestic web site makes very few materials available online. One of the site's unique value-adds is connecting members to members in topic-focused chat rooms, moderated discussions, and Web Seminars. The International Membership web site opened nine months ago, largely motivated by the reduced expenses of production for its publications. Many of these are made available to members online, which eliminates postage and printing expenses. Web site use is high and feedback from members indicates that they value the ease of electronic delivery. On the other hand, this site lacks search capability and does not support the chat rooms and other collaborative services found on the domestic site. The association's Intranet offering is a very new initiative, with little more than a framework for accessing existing Web-ready information. Portal Requirements Gathering Efforts It is in the context of these experiences that our client decided to take a studied approach to its corporate portal. With the CEO promoting the project to the Board of Directors, a committee was appointed and, after appropriate study and planning, a budget of $1.2 million was approved. The committee consisted of the CEO, CIO, and CFO of the company, plus the Web Master, a Portal Project Manager, and a visionary from publication services who had prepared an informed and highly-respected position paper on portal usage during the planning efforts. It fell to the Portal Project Manager to lead the portal requirements assessment and project planning. One of the first recommendations he made was to interview current web site users to see what they had to say about the site. This turned up some interesting findings. Domestic site users and International site users commonly held that the sites seemed to be designed from the association's perspective rather than from the member's perspective. One of the site's unique value-adds is connecting members to members in topic-focused chat rooms, moderated discussions, and Web Seminars. Another piece of valuable feedback was that finding items on the sites was a nearly impossible task. The international site had no real search offering; it had a series of indexes and, within each, limited keyword searches were possible. While the domestic site had search capabilities, a search could not span multiple document collections. Rather, it had to be repeated in each repository. Members and other users unfamiliar with the organization, and with the history of its information collections, found it nearly impossible to get at the information they needed, even when they knew it existed somewhere. Failure Building Consensus For the internal use of the corporate portal, personalization based upon role was mentioned by almost everyone and had universal appeal. But there was the issue of how much personalization should be allowed to start with. Moreover, the portal was seen as a possible way to provide all the information needed by an employee to do their job and to present that information in a way that enabled those unfamiliar with job process details or the organization to readily grasp what was going on. But, was that a realistic vision? Further, the Association both generated and purchased syndicated content (research information as well as industry, market and legislative intelligence) for its members and its employees. How would those be dealt with? Over the years, our client had developed a series of Focus Groups as a mechanism for members with shared interests to communicate and collaborate. The New Technologies focus group consisted of over 250 members from all over the globe. None had travel budgets. As a result, they relied upon email and virtual meetings to move their projects along. This group was very vocal in their support for the portal initiative and had many ideas about how the portal should work. Their input on the services needed for their virtual meetings formed the base definition of the portal's collaboration requirements, but some felt the requirements were too grandiose. Short, quick interviews were held with representatives from the organization's operational areas. As the interview information was collected, it became clear there were many opportunities to apply portal technology in the business. The hard issue was prioritizing the opportunities; it seemed no one had any real idea of where to start, except the CEO, who wanted his Corporate Program to be the portal's first focus. There were not only differences in opinion about the portal and what it should do, but significant differences in culture across the organization -- particularly regarding information sharing and management practices. Some teams would have no trouble publishing materials to the portal for use by other departments. Other teams would require significant training and initial support if they were to invest the time to share their information and knowledge. Advisory Support Brought In One day, the project manager visited the Member Information Center, which provides research, resources, and support to members. While talking with staff about their activities and whether they might have any interest in the portal, he learned the Center had last year embarked on a knowledge management initiative. In the course of this, they identified the Information Center's users and described their roles and created "bodies of knowledge" for each role. This was certainly an interesting overview of their corporate information resources, but what exactly to do with it, the project manager wasn't sure. Everyone on the Portal Committee was sure that the portal needed to provide a richer set of search services than they now had. And to do that, the information needed to be organized and categorized differently. And, there were so many applications for the portal that the current strictly-manual method of entering and categorizing information would never keep up. The domestic and foreign parts of the organization had different web infrastructure, sites and support teams, and the portal needed to allow the company to manage site content easily. To add to the IT resource overload, there was a server upgrade, a project to replace many of the desktop PCs, expanding the infrastructure to the new floor, and finally the need to leverage recent investments in membership data management. The group was frustrated by conflicting goals and stymied on what to do next. It was at this point that two of the Information Center's resource librarians returned from a seminar on enterprise portals by Delphi Group. From them, the group learned of a structured methodology for designing and developing portals, and could see how the architecture and tools from that methodology would work for their project. To get the support needed, they contracted with Delphi Group. Team Building and Requirements Redux / Portal Design and Development Methodology The first activity Delphi Group undertook was a web-based survey designed to unearth current information resource practices and portal requirements. The sixty-question survey was administered to the entire organization through their corporate email system and took about 20 minutes for each person to complete. Members of the portal committee were pleased to discover that the survey's presentation of the many issues created a level of dialogue and common understanding that had been missing. After the web survey findings were analyzed, it became clear that many of the differences in opinion about the portal stemmed from differences in teams' perspectives, responsibilities and activities. Once this alignment was evident, collaboration among those involved in the portal initiative improved. Based upon the responses to the web survey, groups of respondents were contacted to arrange personal interviews. Over 35 personal interviews were held with small groups from nine different parts of the organization. The volunteer participants in each group discussion were known to each other but were otherwise anonymous and all findings and recommendations were presented anonymously. These face-to-face interviews typically took 60 to 90 minutes and focused on issues the original survey analysis identified. For instance, the apparent conflict of interest between the domestic and international web sites was brought to resolution through a clear understanding of the timeframes for rolling out services. By focusing initially on extending the domestic collaboration services to the international site, the domestic management found it had the time to work with publications to develop a strategy for migrating incrementally to online delivery, something everyone was comfortable occurring over time. The CEO's conviction that the Corporate Program should be the kick-off project got a major reality check when it became clear that it had far less impact on the organization than other options and, further, it relied upon some sophisticated infrastructure that was not likely to be available in the first phase of the portal rollout. These were messages the group could not effectively deliver to the CEO absent hard findings. The survey and interviews surfaced a lot of other useful information and significantly focused the requirements gathering. Also of help was Delphi Group's portal architecture model as a way to organize both the requirements research and the requirements documentation. Using Delphi Group's tools and procedures based on the nine-component model, the committee evaluated the requirements of the identified opportunities. For each of the nine elements of the architecture, a set of structured worksheets was used to break out the sub-functions of the element and to capture and record both the specific requirements and their relative importance or value. There was considerable discussion about the detail recorded on these worksheets, leading to a high level of confidence in the requirements. Requirements Consensus This process (small group meetings, facilitated initially by Delphi Group and later by Information Center resource staff) provided a clear set of requirements and mapped those to the opportunities they would enable. What everyone could readily see was a list of project options and the functions they required, ranked by estimated benefit. With the requirements well-documented, the issue really became "How many items on the list will we undertake?" At this point, the Portal Committee took the lead and expanded the requirements documents to include an as-is and to-be cost analysis. These, in conjunction with an ROI spreadsheet, were reviewed with departmental staff. This "business case" approach validated the general consensus on ranking the items, with some minor changes, and brought to the forefront several realistic options for proceeding -- and several options that should be avoided. Perhaps most importantly, it presented an estimate of the benefits to help scope the project with respect to its budget. By now, the Portal Committee was on a roll. They requested a meeting with the technology subcommittee of the Board of Directors and presented the initial vision of services, project budget and business case. The subcommittee was impressed and encouraged going ahead with bids on the project. With the requirements documented in terms of the Delphi Group nine-component model, the client turned to Delphi Group to identify a short list of vendors whose products mapped well to the requirements. This list turned out to have five companies. One was dropped because it lacked an international presence; another declined consideration, leaving three vendors still in the mix and needing detailed evaluation. Solution Characterization Our client wanted to roll out its collaboration services quickly, and that was one of the highest ranking issues: expanding services and extending them to the international markets. One vendor offered, through a VAR, a set of language translation services that turned out to be a differentiator, since the organization was already constrained in translation resources. Another high-priority requirement was personalization, but the functions and flexibility required quite basic. The portal design and development methodology provided structure, tools, and time-compressing templates and best practices that helped the client develop a clear vision and the confidence to allocate and manage its resources quickly toward that goal. Integration was a big issue. Because the existing IT staff were already overloaded, the more the portal vendor and product could do to manage integration the better. The domestic and foreign parts of the organization had different web infrastructure, sites and support teams, and the portal needed to allow the company to manage site content easily. Publishing and distribution requirements for the site were also prominent. The company had an array of tools it wanted to continue to use, but it also needed some additional functions to ensure trusted content. And, because it maintained resource collections with lots of links, automated link management was critical. Categorization and search were the portal functions that most prominently touch our client's members and it was concluded that additional research was needed here to more clearly identify requirements. No members had been involved in the initial surveys and interviews, an oversight that was corrected. With that feedback in hand, the Information Center staff extended and refined their "bodies of knowledge" and a commonly-endorsed starting point for the base corporate taxonomy was identified. With these core functions targeted, and a broad set of secondary services or issues also on the table, a careful, detailed review of the three candidate products was completed. The review was supported by the IT department and consisted of product research, several meetings with vendors to review functionality and test drive products, and discussions with reference account customers. There were not wide differences in performance on the critical areas and all three were found more than adequate to the immediate requirements of the organization. One product excelled in its publishing and distribution functions, but its support organization was not top ranking. In the end, the deciding factor was the reference account and how closely their experienced mapped to the client. The experience of that customer gave the client the confidence to pick that vendor and product and to get started. Retrospection Our client is only 60 days into the development project and is experimenting with user interfaces and search features, and is in the midst of integration testing prior to a limited rollout. Negotiations with providers of online information are nearly complete, and revised agreements reflect the foreign distribution and more delivery models our client is now planning to support. It may have taken a bit of time to get its focus, but the client succeeded in building consensus on its enterprise portal project from the ground up. The portal design and development methodology provided structure, tools, and time-compressing templates and best practices that helped the client develop a clear vision and the confidence to allocate and manage its resources quickly toward that goal. It didn't hurt that the project had strong top-down support and a business case that made financial buy-in for LOB and Senior Management easy.

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