Services
Knowledge Portal Project
Using a Web-enabled portal, the Northeastern University Information Services division (IS) created a 'living library' to support and maintain a hardware/software environment serving 30,000 students, 8,000 faculty members, administrative departments and visitors. The portal allows reuse of tacit and explicit knowledge, constant updating, collaborative use of resources and value-added leverage of existing people and information. The portal allows us to direct projects to people with the most appropriate experience and expertise.
Challenge
As a non-profit educational institution, this project was based on a need to do more and better work with a static or declining annual budget of $28 million and a nearly unchanged staffing level. The IS division wanted easy access to a vast body of knowledge including project plans, functional requirements, technical specifications, product white papers, training materials and customer feedback survey data. The portal links the IS team to any number of related information sharing and communication services such as Domino TeamRooms and Discussion databases, Quickplaces, electronic mail, instant messaging, Remedy (our problem resolution/trouble ticket tracking system), staff alerts and news items. The portal also captures staff biographical data and expertise levels, allowing individuals to exploit tacit knowledge by quickly identifying "local experts."
A significant challenge was doing this across more than 80 buildings and satellite campuses throughout Boston and its suburbs. These facilities share a state-of-the-art fiber network backbone, and an array of technology platforms and products. Communicating and coordinating details of projects with on-campus and off-campus providers is vital. And clearly understanding the status, issues, providers, best practices and lessons learned can be done more easily because of the portal. Finally, the IS division had to implement this solution without disrupting daily operations of administrative, business systems and all common campus services. That infrastructure includes:
- Internet access for thousands of employees, students and visitors.
- E-mail using Lotus Notes.
- Desktop automation tools.
- Group collaboration tools including Domino TeamRooms, Quickplaces, Domino Discussion databases, SameTime and Notes Calendaring/Scheduling.
Solution
Because the 2002-03 academic year is the first budget cycle for the operational portal, there are no bottom-line results to report. However, the delivery of Knowledge Portal objectives on-time and on-budget already qualifies it as a financial success. We are creating cost savings now and guarding against escalation in the future by learning from past mistakes and current best practices. We are also reusing knowledge, code or documentation from projects. Our headcount in the department is down slightly, yet productivity is higher than ever thanks to distributing the workload across the entire IS community. WebTrends is measuring our site activity and, in future, will let us restructure the site and knowledge tools for optimum results.
We have already implemented:
- a single, integrated, Web-based platform that serves as an "electronic desktop" for IS personnel, bringing together in one location all of the documents, information, services and tools needed to do their work.
- easy access to general IS information such as news, announcements, events, job postings and staff profiles.
- easy access to policies, procedures, meeting minutes, presentations, reports and project-related documents.
- personalization options for using the portal.
- the ability to collaborate and participate in threaded online discussions, teamrooms and Quickplaces.
- 'publish and subscribe' functionality and other automated workflow capabilities.
- Web access to Remedy (problem tracking system) ticket information.
- Web automation of IS business processes and forms.
- the ability to easily search for and retrieve specific content; standard choices in Web site navigation.
Client Reaction
We were pleased that Earley & Associates introduced us to the Australian product, Aptrix, since it met our needs for Domino-based content management at a reasonable price. Seth Earley and his team understood our requirements and worked hard to achieve them at a reasonable cost.