Corporate Learning Portals

Portal Mania
@Home paid $7 billion for Excite, Yahoo's price/earnings ratio is 485, and AOL is capitalized at more than $100 billion. More than half of the Fortune 2000 say they have or will soon have Enterprise Information Portals. At least thirty start-ups are developing infrastructure to help mass-produce corporate portals. The Delphi Group and other researchers tell us we haven't seen anything yet. Portal Mania is sweeping the Internet Economy. So where are we with "learning portals?"

Just as a boom in pornographic videos fostered the explosive growth of the VCRs that training departments use to train their people, so the hypergrowth of the "portal industry" offers outsize benefits to corporate learning and knowledge management efforts.

To delve into the question of what the ideal learning portal will look like, we joined two hundred and fifty people for a two-day seminar entitled "Corporate Portals: The Next Generation of Desktop Computing" in June 1999 at the Fairmont Hotel in San Francisco.

On day one, The Delphi Group's president, Tom Koulopoulos, walked, make that ran, us through seven hours of portal purposes, models, and trends. The second day, vendors Plumtree, SageMaker, and Glyphica demonstrated their portal systems; a dozen other vendors3 gave tabletop demos; and Tom finished with a discussion of the future of corporate portals.

Whenever Tom brought up a new concept or opinion, we asked ourselves, "How could this benefit corporate learning?"

The Delphi Group defines corporate portal as a "single point of access for the pooling, interaction, and distribution of organizational knowledge." So let's start by assuming that learning portal is a single window into all corporate learning from a five-second hint to a one-hour course or even referral to an in-house expert. The ideal learning portal is a single interface to all media, all courseware, all learning resources, all mentors and coaches, inside or outside the corporate firewall - total platform independence.

Delphi Group characterizes portals along the dimensions of breadth of content and breadth of community. While the seminar focused almost entirely on the upper left quadrant, "corcasting" (ooof), the other quadrants can spark ideas for learning servers. Where would you place, say, canned celebrity seminars on generic topics, e.g. Mel Gibson on Reengineering or Dolly Parton on Crossing the Chasm..

Public portals, the Yahoos and Excites, have sprouted "personalized" versions, for example MyYahoo and MyExcite. Their personalization consists of changing the color scheme, receiving the local weather forecast, and checking off which data feeds one wants to see. A useful corporate portal must go far beyond these cosmetic changes. The ideal is to personalize every aspect of the portal - its organization, navigation, visualization, and interaction heuristics.

A tailored learning portal would present one interface to a visual learner, another to an auditory learner, and yet another to a kinesthetic learner. As a learner gained experience, frequently selected options would replace initial default choices. A marketer would see a different screen and different flows of data than an accountant. You get the idea - the more individualized the portal, the greater its impact.

Portals should be portable. While my interface may look entirely different than that of my neighbor, the door to my portal should look the same no matter where I'm coming in from. The subtitle of this seminar, "The Next Generation of Desktop Computing," perpetuates a dated metaphor of fixed location. I may interact with my learning portal while driving my car, taking the subway, or getting some rays at the beach.

Last week I attended the inaugural meeting of the San Francisco Chapter of the Knowledge Management Consortium International. The folks at that meeting put Knowledge Management at the center of the universe; a portal is merely one way to get at the results. At the Delphi Group seminar, the term "corporate portal" embraces not only the viewer but also virtually everything that appears on the screen. The tail wags the dog. When talking about Learning Portals, just be sure that you agree on what's the tail and what's the dog. Otherwise, you'll be in for a very confusing conversation.

Will the learning portal be a separate standalone application? I think not. For one thing, the digital revolution enables learning and work to converge. For another, one of the major benefits of the corporate portal is bringing all information into a single, consistent, easily used interface. The learning server will occupy a corner of the corporate portal real estate.

Benefits of a learning portal

• Accelerates learning, less holdup between learning and action, puts downtime to good use
• Leverages best practice knowledge enterprisewide
• Provide access to all learning opportunities and advice from one place
• Single-source of learning for all functions (esp. important for multi-project workers)
• Provides home base for communities of practice
• Integrates disparate functions, dissolves cognitive boundaries between different functions.
• Moves learning to the learner
• Facilitates "home schooling"
• Resides prominently or the learner's desktop
• Links learner directly to business

In the past, a training department could maintain a useful course catalogue on the corporate intranet with a clerk and a copy of Microsoft Front Page. Those days are gone. Providing learners with a self-service cafeteria of fine-grained learning objects requires "metaknowledge," i.e. information about all aspects of each discrete piece of learning. Learners - or the software agents of learners - can troll this metaknowledge to pinpoint the best learning options for the individual and context. Manipulating metaknowledge about thousands of learning objects automatically assumes a set of common descriptive terms, a "taxonomy." It's never too early to begin laying this foundation. (For more on learning standards, see Learnativity. That's where Autodesk's visionary Wayne Hodgins posts white papers and the latest scoop on the training standards scene.)

While most of the talk at the seminar focused on the needs of employees, corporate portals can build stronger relationships with all stakeholders. The same holds true for learning portals. The more the corporation helps customers learn to interact with it, the more loyal they become. Like customers who pump their own gas, "training" the customer enables them to do the work that employees once did. The same holds true for suppliers. Isn't it logical to facilitate suppliers' learning of the corporation's activities and attitudes, processes and policies, success stories and breadth of activity?

Recent news releases have touted the release of a "corporate portal in a box." Plug it in and off you go. What you get is about what you'd expect:. sub optimal. I talked with a dozen corporate portal vendors. None of them have a learning portal strategy. In fact, few have a portal product at all. Some offer little more than a custom links page. One does nothing but sift documents to prepare corporate yellow pages - which then must be checked by each individual before they can be used. Other vendors provide a fancy link-checker, a presentation manager for subscriptions, a spider that indexes all corporate documents and email into an enormous corporate Yahoo, several document trackers, various intranet front-ends, and what was once called EIS (executive information services). Several vendors pride themselves on jamming everything onto one crowded page. Better to be legible than to assume people won't/can't turn the page. (Here's a list of the vendors in giving demos at the seminar.)

Collaborative filtering - suggesting content that people like me found valuable - will certainly become ingrained in the selection of business intelligence and learning exercises. Sad to say, most of the corporate portal vendors implement a poor man's version, for instance comparing my search criteria to those of others (suggesting we might want to talk).

Vendors that exhibited: Autonomy, Corechange, Integrated Solutions Magazine, DataChannel, Glyphica, Hyperwave, Intelligent Enterprise, IntraNet Solutions, Intraspect Software, Knowledge Management Magazine, KnowledgeTrack, Orbital Software, Plumtree, Powerize, Radnet, Sagemaker, Semio, Sqribe, TopTier, Verge.