Enter the Enterprise Knowledge Portal
About one year ago (on March 20) I introduced the concept "Enterprise Knowledge Portal" (in "Enterprise Information Portals and Enterprise Knowledge Portals," [1]) to the IT world by defining it and distinguishing it from the Enterprise Information Portal (EIP). The term had been used earlier (on March 5) by Hummingbird Communications, in a press release [2] announcing their impending acquisition of the PC DOCS group, and in an article in DataPro Industry News by Karen Shegda and Allan Tiedrich [3] entitled "Knowledge Management = Access + Collaboration + Retrieval + Analysis." But they declined to define or characterize the EKP except to say that it would integrate structured and unstructured content, and provide a single point of access to all relevant enterprise information. On March 25, IDC published its "Sourcebook for Knowledge Superconductivity" [4]. In this report Gerry Murray, then IDC's Director of Knowledge Management Technologies (currently, IntegrationWare's vice president of Business Strategy and Development) distinguishes four types of corporate portals, including EKPs and offers some definitions (which I have discussed previously in ("Defining Enterprise Information Portals," [5]).
The introduction of the EKP concept was followed by remarkably little activity on EKPs. Google searches on "Enterprise Information Portal" (1015 hits), "Enterprise Information Portals" (943 hits), "Enterprise Knowledge Portal" (56 hits) and "Enterprise Knowledge Portals," (66 hits) tell the story of EKP vs. EIP during 1999 and the first two months of 2000. Other than urls reflecting writings by Gerry Murray or myself, and third party links to what we've done, there are few evidences of EKP activity on the Web, and only six vendors that bill themselves as having EKP products. Hummingbird promised an EKP in March 1999, but by.2 this March had released an EIP instead. During its first year, the EKP space gave every evidence of being swallowed up by its EIP parent.
Enter DM Review and Jeff Grammer
In view of the apparent slow growth of interest in EKPs, the appearance of Jeff Garmmer's article ("The Enterprise Knowledge Portal," in the March 2000 issue of DM Review [6] was a pleasant and welcome surprise. Grammer is co-founder and Chief Technical Officer of IntegrationWare, one of the few selfidentified EKP vendors. He brings to his writing on EKPs an appreciation that they are closely connected to formal Knowledge Management (KM) efforts in the enterprise, and that they both enable KM and are dependent on it for success in implementing them. While I appreciate and agree with many aspects of Grammer's analysis of the EKP and certainly agree strongly with him on the KM connection, I believe his analysis is both less than comprehensive and ignores many of the critical distinguishing characteristics of the EKP. I will develop my own point of view on EKP's through an extensive commentary on Grammer's analysis.