Leading by Example

How can IT preach the importance of departmental portals when it doesn't have one of its own?

Would you go to an auto mechanic whose car is always broken, or to an architect whose house looks like a cardboard box? Well, isn’t it the same thing when your IT organization wants to build one or several information portals for different departments, yet has not built a portal of its own?

Indeed, if the IT organization lacks credibility in this matter, there is a real danger of various departments procuring information portal implementation services directly from outside, and these portals will likely not integrate with one another. Before you know it, you will be in a similar situation as you were with the organization’s transactional systems, before the ERP came along. But there is much more to having an internal IT information portal than merely convincing your users that you can build more portals in the enterprise.

Today, IT information lets you provide the discipline that is necessary in managing your organization’s increasingly valuable assets: its applications and technology infrastructure. Yet, IT information also facilitates the creativity and flexibility that are necessary to provide solutions not only in IT, but also in other parts of the organization — be they operations, research and development, finance, or human resources. In this column, I will discuss elements that could form a taxonomy for an IT information portal and offer some suggestions on how to build the portal. Keep in mind that because information portal products are evolving rapidly and no single product on the market fits the bill for the all portal requirements, you will likely need to integrate several back-end systems to achieve your desired result.

Current Landscape

I’ll now note some of my observations of current IT organizations, as they drive the logic behind the portal schematics.

First, proliferation of IT within the organization has created many segments of IT users who have different needs. One size does not fit all, and you must be able to differentiate segments of users in providing IT services. You probably have a lot of information on IT services on the enterprise intranet, but it is neither easily accessible, nor current. And, because different individuals or groups assemble the information, it is inconsistent. Users still prefer to call their peers or somebody they know in IT organizations if they need help. These informal links are expensive and often provide misleading information.

Second, even though it is now a cliché, it is worth repeating: Everything you do in an IT organization is interdependent with something else in the organization. Technologies have become complex and “systems and technology integration” perhaps comes closest to describing what IT organizations do today. These interdependencies have substantially affected IT organizational structures. People lead tasks that invariably span organizational boundaries. Organizational units and management hierarchies matter less and less. Instead, you now have focal points or “centers of excellence” for each issue or task. These centers of excellence consist of one or more people in the organization (not necessarily within the same formal organizational unit) that provide information with intrinsic value to the enterprise. Unfortunately, while these people in the center of excellence disseminate information to others, they lack access to the information relevant to do their own jobs.

Electronic virtual space offers an opportunity to address many of the constraints you face in the organization. But what needs to go in the virtual space?

Segment users. As I mentioned before, you must segment users to address their specific needs. You could base this segmentation on users’ functional roles as well as their IT skills proficiency. You classify user segments primarily from the IT services perspective. As the lowest common denominator, you have end users who consume IT services, but are not interested in other IT aspects. They would like IT services and support available to them whenever and wherever they need it, without even explicitly asking for it.

Beyond the end-user category, you can classify other user segments based on functional roles. For example, you typically have administrative, budgeting, and program management services groups in your organization that are interested in aspects of the IT services beyond the end user, such as the cost of IT services.

The IT information portal is not just for the end users or the administrative groups — it is as much for the people within the IT organization or the people in IT support. Other user segmentations besides functional roles are also meaningful. Users in the regional offices, telecommuting users, and travelers have different IT support needs. The IT information portal helps you identify, focus on, and satisfy the needs of these users as well.

Structure an IT taxonomy for end users. At the lowest common denominator of end user, the IT information portal needs to be highly structured. Without proper structure, you would not be able to provide ubiquitous IT services in timely manner. The information structure is multidimensional in nature. As the primary dimension, you have different IT products and services. Other dimensions that intersect the product and services dimension are the support issues, such as the request for IT services, account administration, help desk and frequently asked questions support, training and documentation, hot news, and so on. Users should be able to navigate any dimension to get the information they are looking for. Thus, a user looking for training for the ERP system should be able to reach to the same point in the information portal, whether navigating the training dimension or the ERP product information dimension.

As I mentioned before, IT organizations now have centers of excellence. These centers of excellence directly map to the dimensions I mentioned previously. Thus, the training center is responsible for the training dimension. The training dimension includes training logistics as well as training for particular IT products, while the ERP product group shares the responsibility for providing training contents. With the multidimensional mapping or taxonomy for IT products and services, you can logically integrate clustered activities. For example, if a user needs an ERP account, it is also likely that they need ERP training and other support.

The IT information portal will have a substantial value add if you can implement IT user personalization within the information portal. This goal requires that you track user IT preferences and other information in the user profile. Users could explicitly provide this information through surveys or from tracking user behavior in IT service usage. The profile would also contain the IT assets information that you allocate to the user, such as the desktop or account information in various applications or user IT skills inventory. This information allows you to customize IT services to individual needs. For example, you can use the type of calls the user makes to the help desk to suggest a type of training, or trigger an alert to the users if any services are modified or enhanced that would affect them.

Don’t forget integration with the enterprise information portal (EIP). An IT information portal is not an island, but must integrate with EIP services and user personalization within the larger enterprise context. The benefits you can derive from such integration surpass the costs of integration. For example, one of the most difficult challenge enterprises face is getting a new employee to become productive quickly. This goal requires that all functional services, including IT, come together to provide the appropriate tools, services, and training to the employee. You can achieve this goal much more easily through portals in which a new employee enrollment can cascade across multiple portal services to trigger the appropriate set of events, such as creating email and other application accounts and authorizations. Similarly, if a user is traveling overseas, you could use the travel itinerary records to provide the user with the necessary amenities including electrical adapters, customized email, notebook, and country and corporate information pertinent to the travel that the employee could download automatically.

User personalization information is part of the user profile while user categorization is an attribute of all IT information contents. You match the two dynamically at the time of the user or system-initiated search query; the dynamic nature of this process allows you utmost flexibility in the information portal to provide right information to the right people at the right time.

Addressing the IT Support Segment’s Needs

I’ll now shift my focus from the needs of end users to those of IT support people. The IT organization has intermediate products and services such as IT and network infrastructure that you use within the IT organization to build the final end-user products and services. Like the IT end products and services, intermediate products also have multidimensional support structure requirements. Their taxonomy design is therefore similar to that of end-user products.

The IT support group’s primary function, however, is systems’ integration and management. Integrated problem tracking, configuration change management, performance and availability monitoring, service-level reporting processes anchored on consolidated IT asset information, support structure, and workflow components are the keys to efficient IT operations environments. This consolidated information system would also enable end user self-service features for IT services, one sure way to improve service delivery with reduced costs.

Beyond ensuring smooth operations of the baseline IT environment, you also need an information system for ongoing IT projects. Many IT projects get delayed or fail because of the lack of timely information. You also should build data cubes for IT support costs as well as workload that would allow you to observe historical trends as well as industry benchmarks. The dimensions for the data cubes cover basic costs elements such as hardware, software, staffing and contracting, and workload elements such as ERP transaction and email volumes. The data cubes will aid in issues such as capacity planning or software license management.

Capturing IT Creativity and Innovation

Thus far, I have described the information portal based on a structured taxonomy for delivering IT operational services to end users and IT support groups. You also need to put a knowledge management practice in place for IT knowledge in the organization. Group or organizational learning is a key aspect in deploying and leveraging new technologies for business use. Note that the IT groups or communities are not circumscribed by the organizational boundaries. Like supply-chain management, IT knowledge management goes beyond the enterprise. IT vendors and associations form communities of practice in information technologies. You should seek active vendor participation in your IT KM environment to provide links to vendors’ knowledge resources.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, the IT information portal is not a project with a definite start and end date. As a matter of fact, you will perhaps be surprised to find more than one localized IT portal in your organization. Your immediate task is then to inventory and integrate existing information floating around on the intranet. This helps in demonstrating the value of the exercise and securing management commitments. In parallel, however, you must map out the taxonomy for your portal. You can subsequently do deeper integration using a portal tool.

The information portal will not be sustainable if it adds bureaucratic processes in information collection. You therefore need to integrate the portal into existing IT processes in such a way that the information for the portal is the automatic byproduct of the existing process. At the same time, you must acknowledge that electronic virtual space will alter the way you are organized in the physical space. As you make more information available on the portal, gaps in your existing processes and organizations become more apparent and pressure to reorganize and reengineer your processes will increase.

To conclude, the IT information portal (or any other enterprise portal) integrates available information. In that process, it increases the overall value of the information to the organization. This is a typical characteristic of any network. As you join new (information) nodes to the network, the value of the network increases with new connectivity to already existing nodes. Regardless of how much you spend on IT assets in the organization, these assets are becoming strategic resources for organizations. You must therefore find ways to leverage maximum value from them.