requirements elicitation and planning of a knowledge portal: case study of a property management...

Knowledge and Process ManagementVolume 19 Number 1 pp 39–51 (2012)Published online in Wiley Online Library(www.wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/kpm.1382

■ Case Study

Requirements Elicitation and Planning ofa Knowledge Portal: case Study of aProperty Management Division in aHousing Organization

Eric Tsui1* and Patrick S. W. Fong2

1Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, TheHongKong PolytechnicUniversity, Kowloon,HongKong2Department of Building and Real Estate, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, Kowloon, Hong Kong

*CorSysteHunE-ma

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Enterprise knowledge portals offer, among other characteristics, a centralized access point for information as wellas a wide range of tools and content for individual knowledge workers to personalize to suit their daily tasks.Such tasks often include the collection, aggregation, and analysis of data/information as well as collaborativework among workers to solve problems and make decisions. Leveraging on a quantitative–qualitative researchapproach including the use of a prior research instrument developed for the elicitation of requirements for collab-oration tools, this paper seeks to identify the primary and secondary functions of a knowledge portal for knowl-edge workers in the property management division of a housing organization in Hong Kong. Although portalsare often treated as a kind of stand-alone enterprise knowledge management systems, proper planning anddeployment of a portal with appropriate functionalities and a widely agreed content classification scheme canalso help to enhance the navigation and presentation of knowledge assets in a knowledge-leveraged organization.In particular, the introduction of a federated search engine can save considerable time in conducting (multiple)searches; selective Web 2.0 tools can help to foster collaborative work as well as help knowledge workers toreduce time spent on search but keep pace with nominated topics on a timely basis. Drawing on the existingliterature as well as the authors’ experience in working with many other organizations to deploy portals andrelevant tools in the Asia Pacific, the initial recommendations are further consolidated to form a two-phasedeployment with the aim of enhancing the probability of success for the knowledge journey in the housingorganization. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: knowledge portal, collaboration, requirements elicitation, web 2.0

INTRODUCTION

The current transformation of the industrialeconomy into the knowledge-based economy resultsin workers who are increasingly challenged withcognitive collaborative and cognitive analytical work(Autor et al., 2003), or knowledge work (Kogan andMiller, 2006) as it is commonly called. Knowledgework is generally nonlinear, highly unstructured,nonrepetitive, and hard to predict (Swensen, 2010).

respondence to: Eric Tsui, Department of Industrial andms Engineering, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University,g Hom, Kowloon, Hong Kong.il: [email protected]

yright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Collaborations among workers are often needed tojointly solve problems and make individual or groupdecisions (Malone, 2004; Lee et al., 2007). However,up to now, tools for supporting knowledge workhave been inadequate as they tend to be administra-tive, transaction processing systems supplementedby, more recently, document management andprocess management systems (Tsui, 2002). Althoughaccomplishment of knowledge work is not entirelydependent on the use of enterprise informationtechnology (IT) applications, appropriate systemsfor presenting data/information, orchestrating andmanaging processes, as well as fostering collabor-ation and stimulating idea generation add significantvalue to supporting knowledge work. In this regard,

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Information+Technology

http://www.thefreedictionary.com/Information+Technology

40 E. Tsui and P. S. W. Fong

years and sometimes decades of organizationdevelopment have left many organizations withmul-tiple (often redundant), disparate, and distributedsystems. Information needed for problem solvingand decision-making is often stored in various differ-ent systems or worse, much of this may not be in anelectronic form. Besides, for many organizations, astandard information classification scheme does notexist for the storage and retrieval of information(Hedden, 2010). Today’s knowledge workers oftenhave to log on to redundant, nonintegrated systemsto, among other tasks, identify and extract the neces-sary data and information. The results are timewasted in searching materials, required informationcannot be located, and work may be repeated; thus,productivity is compromised. Addressing preciselythese shortfalls and more, the “portal”, (Collins,2001; Collins, 2003; Jafari and Sheehan, 2003; Terraand Gordon, 2003; Sullivan, 2004) as a concept,emerged back in the late 1990s and was very wellreceived as evidenced by very strong adoption(White, 2003). The first type of portal to be developedwas commonly referred to as the “EnterpriseInformation Portals” (EIPs) (Shilakes and Tylman,1998; Firestone, 2003).

Shilakes and Tylman (1998) define EIPs as appli-cations that enable companies to unlock internallyand externally stored information and provide usersa single gateway with personalized informationneeded to make informed business decisions. Fromthis definition, there, we can identify four principalcharacteristics of an EIP:

• The ability to access/display internal andexternal data and information

• The provision of a single entry point to access allthe needed data, information, and applications

• The support of user customization to tailor thecontent, tools, and presentation style to suit indi-vidual needs

• The alignment of the aforementioned threecharacteristics with business decision-making

To the extent that an EIP has these characteristics,knowledge workers will be able to rely on an EIP astheir primary knowledge management system(KMS) to store, search, retrieve, and present dataand information for decision-making and problemsolving (Duffner, R. 2003). EIPs provide support toknowledge workers in accessing enterprise applica-tions (including process, document managementsystems, and collaboration tools). Furthermore, afull implementation of an EIP also allows each andevery knowledge worker to customize the sourcingof content, tools, and interface layout thereby trulydelivering a customizable KMS adapted to each in-dividual knowledge worker. Many researchers andorganizations have developed portal evaluation,development, and deployment frameworks (Macket al., 2001; Smith, 2004; Detlor, 2009). Althoughother definitions of portals exist (Collins, 2001;

Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Collins, 2003; Jafari and Sheehan, 2003; Terra andGordon, 2003; White, 2003; Sullivan, 2004), invari-ably, these definitions also emphasized a singleentry point as well as the collection of tools thatare integrated with portal.

Portals and their changing landscape

A comprehensive review of deployed portals(Tatnall, 2007) reveals that there are, at least. thefollowing common types of portals.

Internet/web portalsThese are portals that are publicly hosted, and anyuser can create an account and customize the portalfor individual use. Many of these portals are set upby e-commerce companies (see consumer/customerportal in the succeeding text) for buy/sell activities,but there are also several offered by Web companies(e.g., Yahoo, Google, and PageFlake) that areentirely for individual knowledge workers to config-ure for information management, peer collaboration,task lists, learning, and more (Zhou, 2003; Sampsonand Manouselis, 2005, Granic et al., 2011).

Personal portalsThere are several interpretations of what constitutes apersonal portal. Firstly, the portal that results from auser’s customization of an Internet/Web portal isone kind of personal portal. If an individual knowl-edge worker sets up and manages his or her ownportal (both infrastructure and content), this is thesecond type of personal portal. A third interpretationof personal portal refers to a collection of personaldevices powered by peer-to-peer computing operat-ing on a distributed set of resources, content, andtools (Pena-Lopez, 2007; Metz, 2008). Increasingly,by leveraging on Web 2.0 tools, personal portals arebeing established not just for information sharingand collaboration but personal and social learningpurposes with a group of trusted peers (Wright,2005; Peng et al., 2009; Bellas et al., 2004; Garner, 2010).

Enterprise/corporate portalsNearly two thirds of the world’s implementation ofportals belongs to this category. Enterprise/corpor-ate portals are internally focused and designed foremployees to use. As such, commonly providedfunctionalities for these portals include search,forms library, calendar, news/announcement, links,as well as access to various information or knowl-edge repositories, and more (Benbya et al., 2004).Tsui et al. (2007) have previously identified that thefive core application areas for enterprise portalsare content management, information and commu-nication, e-learning, business intelligence (BI), andcollaboration and the development of communities.(The case study organization covered in this paperadopts the BI category of portal.)

Know. Process Mgmt. 19, 39–51 (2012)DOI: 10.1002/kpm

Enterprise Knowledge Portal for a Housing Organization 41

On the basis of the authors’ and other researchers’observations (Dias, 2001; Van Brakel, 2003; Maierand Hadrich, 2007) with respect to industry trendsand monitoring the research publications, the firstera is the EIPs (1998–2002) and was followed by theenterprise knowledge portal (EKP) (2002–present)era. These two subcategories of portals mainly differ-entiate in the degree of personalization (EIPs aremuch closer to an intranet) and collaboration (EKPsoffer more advanced and flexible collaborative func-tions includingWeb 2.0 features. Please refer to a latersection of this paper for selective Web 2.0 featuresbeing recommended for the portal to be adopted bythe case study organization.)

Project portalsAs the name implies, this kind of portal (Goyal,2001) is designed to support all stages of a projectlifecycle right from location of expertise to projectplanning, execution, and reporting. Consideringthat many organizations are indeed project-basedinstitutions and projects typically generate a consid-erable of issues, some organizations have furtherexpanded their project portals (Sher et al., 2010) tosupport knowledge processes as well as incorporatethe harnessing and reuse of lessons learnt and afteraction reviews from previous projects.

Business intelligence portals (or dashboards)This type of portal serves to retrieve, aggregate, andpresent data and information for decision-makingand/or reporting purposes. Also commonlyreferred to as a dashboard, BI portals offer tools forthe user to carry out real time analysis on the dataas well as customize the format of a report. Further-more, BI portals present aggregated data that is inaccordance with the user’s role, seniority, and desig-nated security access privileges. Depending on thenature of the backend systems and the businessneeds, data feeds may be either real time, pooled, ora combination of the two (Papadopoullos, 2004;Onley, 2006).

Government portalsThis refers to the type of portals that involvesgovernments (Gengatharen and Standing, 2003;Aitkenhead, 2005). Under this category, there are gov-ernment to employees portals (which are analogousto enterprise/corporate portals), government to citi-zens portals (which typically provide e-governmentservices and promote citizens engagement), govern-ment to business portals (which serve as platformsfor information exchange between governmentand various industry parties and associations), andgovernment to government portals (which aree-business portals specifically cater for respectivegovernment employees to use). Typical applica-tions of government to government portalsinclude trade information, policy formulations,bilateral relationships, and taxation matters.


Mobile/wireless portalsAs the name implies, these portals are typicallyscaled down version of a project or enterpriseportals to operate on handheld mobile devices. Theysupport mobile workers to perform work, often byserving as a lightweight front end for the uploadingand fetching of data for decision-making purpose.

Learning portalsLearning is a key part of all knowledge workers thesedays. Learning portals offer a full range of servicescovering course authoring, instructional design,collaboration and knowledge transferwith other lear-ners, web conferencing, grading, and e-portfolios.Learning portal can be established by academicinstitutions (Ling and Allison, 2002; Kotzinos et al.,2005), by a state (Jafari, 2003) as well as by corpora-tions in industry (Olszakm and Ziemba, 2008).

Process portalsThey provide tools for the creation, visualization,routing of activities/documents among workers aswell as the measurement, analysis, and reportingof process performance. These portals are especiallysuitable for organizations that have to deal with alarge amount of processes (or instantiations ofprocesses) that are executed in large volume. Obvi-ously, in these situations, being able to visualize,analyze, and identify the bottleneck of processefficiency as well as benchmarking process perfor-mance is of utmost importance, and typically,these portals provide precisely these functions, thescheduling and tracking of processes and more(Chaudry, 2004; Puschmann and Alt, 2004; Rozenfeldet al., 2009).

Customer/consumer portalsThe fine line between a consumer and a customer isthe first transaction/purchase. Both groups of userscan be tracked when they browse an e-commercesite that allows for personalization, for example,bookmarking favorite items and creating alerts.Customer/consumer portals track user’s webanalytics to ascertain browsing behavior, preferences,past interactions, and more. Such data is being usedfor customer segmentation with the ultimate goal ofrecommending cross and up-sell offers. Some organi-zations also offer customers to co-design the purchaseitem as well as track the delivery of the item duringshipment (Kramer, 2007; Bohe and Oviedo, 2008).

Partner portalsPartner portals are the “business” equivalent of thecustomer/consumer portals. Target users are alsostaff of partnering or allied organizations. Depend-ing on the designated purpose of these portals, theymay offer browsing and matching of productcatalogs, sharing of project descriptions, expertdirectories, common tools, and development



platforms and standards for the allied parties toutilize (McHale, 2000).

Industry portalsFocusing on one or more industry-specificprocesses, an industry portal provides, ideallyspeaking, all the necessary information, tools forevery stakeholder to fulfill the knowledge needs,and/or transactional activities involved in eachstep of the process. For example, case handlingin the healthcare industry and claims processingin the insurance industry are two examples ofcommon industry-specific processes. Typically,these processes involve multiple stakeholders (fromvarious organizations, often from different indus-tries), document, and possibly knowledge-intensiveactivities, sequential workwith routing of documentsas well as the need to comply with any applicableindustry regulations (Didley, 2004; Cader, 2007;Scarso and Bolisani, 2007).

Two more observations can be made on thelandscape of portals. First, although the afore-mentioned categorization distinctly differentiatesamong portals based on their intended purpose,functions, and user group(s), as time progresses, anorganization may extend its portal from one type toanother type, thereby qualifying to be called ahybrid type of portal. This is most evident in theexpansion from an enterprise portal (a kind ofBusiness to Employees (B2E) portal, the major groupof portal in terms of portals already deployed) tocover customers (i.e., a B2E+Business to Customers(B2C) portal) and/or suppliers (partners) (i.e., B2E+Business to Business (B2B) portal). For example, theComputer Sciences Corporation (CSC) portal (Binneyand Kjaer, 2003) expanded from a B2E to a B2E+B2Bportal by allowing its customers (selective staff fromclient organizations) to access best practice materialas well as participate in project workspaces. A secondobservation is on the evolution of social learning andits impact on learning portals. The traditionallearning portal, as described previously, is an insti-tutional system. It is established, operated, andgoverned by an organization, typically a universityor a company. However, the emergence of knowl-edge work, combined with the impact of Web 2.0tools, means that access to the Web is now highlyubiquitous and pervasive; subject matter expertsin almost any topics can be located/accessed, anduser-generated content is abundant. Together, thesehave fostered the development of personal learningenvironments and networks (Ebner and Taraghi,2010) (essentially a kind of personal portal), whichis a self-configurable web interface for authoring,receiving, and sharing of content with links to peers(including friends, teachers, experts, etc.) as colla-borators. Increasingly, personal learning environ-ments and networks are complementing traditionallearning portals as a newly emerged type of learner-centric web communities.


Case study—the organization

The case study organization is a housing companyestablished in 1948 and incorporated by the HongKong Government Ordinance in 1951. The organi-zation’s objectives are to identify the housing needsof the community, develop housing options as wellas to provide ongoing property managementservices. In the last few decades, the organizationhas developed many housing schemes for the HongKong residents.The authors’ study focused on the property

management division (PMD) of the organization.PMD is a branch of the housing organization thatis responsible for managing the developed proper-ties. PMD’s principal activities include vetting oftenancy applications, tenancy, and propertymanagement and services. The core work carriedout in the PMD includes security, routine mainte-nance, and associated operations. PMD staff takespride in their work especially in providing up-to-datequality information to its users as well as balance theinterest of the owners and the tenants. PMD alsooperates a quality management system that has beencertified to meet ISO 9001:2000 and ISO 14001:2004international standards.Apart from needing to provide up-to-date infor-

mation, PMD also has many out-posted staff, andoverall consensus is that there needs to be strongercollaboration, partly supported by IT tools, amongout-posted and central office staff.The following project objectives were set for the

study:

(i) To identify the existing nature of collaborativework at PMD

(ii) To identify information access behavior ofPMD staff

(iii) To review the existing IT infrastructure andsystems for supporting collaborative work

(iv) On the basis of good practices and lessonslearnt from other projects, recommendation ofa blueprint for the deployment of collaborationtool(s) for PMD

In the housing development area, Teo et al. (2006)describe the use of various customer relationshipmanagement tools to help the collection andanalysis of customer data, to assist collaboration, andto enhance search of assets for staff in the SingaporeHousing and Development Board.In the construction, building, and property

management area, El-Gohary and El-Diraby (2010)describe the development of an industry-basedportal serving a consortium of companies on raisingthe awareness of innovative building technologiesand projects. Their portal provides rapid exchangeof knowledge as well as garners a community ofpractitioners for effective ongoing knowledgesharing. Challenges for handling the integration ofknowledge processes among various stakeholders,



disciplines, and projects in collaborative construc-tion are discussed by Pollalis and Walleisa (2003).Diraby and Wang (2005) describe the developmentof a portal for supporting urban highway construc-tion projects in a knowledge city.

METHODOLOGY

A combined quantitative and qualitative approachhas been adopted for this study (see Figure 1).A previously developed survey instrument toidentify the major functions for a collaboration tool(Tsui et al., 2007) has been adopted. Once theprimary and secondary functions are identified,follow-up discussions were held with the stake-holders in PMD to tabulate the result of thesurvey as well as clarify the observations andabnormalities.

In addition, a knowledge café was created involv-ing the intended users to obtain in depth andcontextual knowledge about past operationalexperience in their collaborative knowledge work.This is performed in the form of narratives. An inde-pendent review of the existing IT enterprise applica-tions was also conducted to ascertain the baseline ofthe existing systems and technical infrastructure forPMD. Special care has been paid when it comes toidentifying appropriate stakeholders to participatein the survey, discussions, and in the knowledgecafé. The immediate beneficiaries of the ultimatecollaboration tool(s) will invariably be thoseworkers who are expected to be heavy users of thesystem as well as those who constantly engage inknowledge-intensive activities. More specifically,targeted stakeholders were the following:

• Subject matter experts/champions. These peopleare specialists in specific topics. They oftenact in the capacity of offering advice to othercolleagues as well as assume ownership ofcertain core domain-specific documents.

• Content managers. These are knowledgeworkers who are responsible for uploading,

Figure 1 Research Methodology


publishing, locating, and retrieving knowl-edge assets in a repository, for example, formslibrary, and projects database. Presumably,this group of workers needs to be very clearabout where information is stored as theyoften bear the bulk of the work in classifyingand searching for material.

• Communications officers. These are workerswho help to compile and send out regularcommunications in the department, and theyhelp in the change management journey ofan organization.

• Research-oriented individuals. Research is a highvalue knowledge creation task. A researcherneeds to access to wide range of informationfrom diversified sources. He or she also needsto apply judgment and experience to absorband articulate published material as well aspresent findings/projections in a specified con-text. A researcher often needs to collaboratewith other workers, inside and outside of theorganization, to accomplish his or her duties.

• Staff who perform highly unstructured and/orknowledge-intensive tasks. Other staff that engagein unstructured (i.e., nonlinear and nonrepeti-tive) and knowledge-intensive (requiring manydecision-making) tasks, whether in an ad hocfashion or a regular basis, are also asked toparticipate in this study.

A balanced proportion of senior management,supervisors, and operational staff is maintainedthroughout the study.

FINDINGS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

We utilized a survey instrument (which consisted of42 questions) (Tsui et al., 2007) designed to identifythe primary and secondary purposes of a desiredcollaboration tool. Altogether, there were 232respondents to the survey, and the data collectedare further analyzed according to the differentdivisions that comprised PMD (Table 1), job types(Table 2), and staff working experiences (Table 3).The overall results provided by the survey arepresented in Table 4.Considering that the primary and secondary

functions identified by the survey tool to be themost important requirements for PMD staff wereBI and collaboration and the development of com-munities, respectively; the authors set out to gathermore in depth information about the needs, currentshortfalls, and desired information access behaviorexpressed by PMD staff. To this end, a knowledgecafé session in the form of narrative inquiry wascarried out with nine PMD staff and organized intwo groups. Narratives (Snowden, 2002; Connellet al., 2004; Zou and Lee, 2007; Callahan and Drake,2008) enable rich contextual background on the


Table 1 Identified first and second preferences for the collaboration tool based on respondents from divisions of PMD

By departments No. of participants 1st preference Score 2nd preference Score

MPS 37 Business intelligence 3.10 Collaboration and communities 2.93RHS 53 Business intelligence 3.19 Collaboration and communities 2.81PMAC 44 Business intelligence 2.81 E-learning 2.79Applications 5 Business intelligence 3.00 E-learning 2.69TPS/PMA 8 Business intelligence 2.94 E-learning 2.92HSC 1 E-learning 3.04 Collaboration and communities 2.92WTC 10 Collaboration and communities 2.94 Business intelligence 2.92PMM 74 Collaboration and communities 2.82 Business intelligence 2.77

PMD, property management division.

Table 2 Identified first and second preferences for the collaboration tool based on job types of respondents

By job types No. of participants 1st preference Score 2nd preference Score

Support 24 Business intelligence 2.97 Content management 2.75Officer 125 Business intelligence 2.99 Collaboration and communities 2.82Assistant manager 41 Business intelligence 2.86 Collaboration and communities 2.80Manager 35 Business intelligence 2.86 Collaboration and communities 2.83Senior manager 7 Collaboration and communities 3.24 Business intelligence 3.21

Table 3 Identified first and second preferences for the collaboration tool based on respondents’ years of working experience

By years of work No. of participants 1st preference Score 2nd preference Score

Less than 2 years 78 Business intelligence 2.80 Collaboration and communities 2.772–5 years 49 Business intelligence 2.97 Collaboration and communities 2.855–10 years 41 Business intelligence 2.99 Collaboration and communities 2.80Over 10 years 64 Business intelligence 3.10 Collaboration and communities 2.82

Table 4 Overall results after applying the two-tier survey tool for elicitation of collaboration requirements

Overall No. of participants 1st Score 2nd Score

All respondents 232 Business intelligence 2.95 Collaboration and communities 2.82


gathered information to be conveyed. The knowl-edge café began with the participants seated in acircle of chairs. Each group was led by a facilitatorwho began by explaining the purpose of knowledgecafés and the role of conversation in providing richand effective knowledge transfer. Open-ended ques-tions relating to access and the handling of data forreport compilationswere posed to solicit thoughts, pastincidents, and ideas on the topic from the participants.

All the input provided by the participants wastranscribed, and themes were identified. Some ofthe identified themes include data retrieval, dataaccuracy, data consolidation, data visualizationformat, alerts and subscriptions, ad hoc reporting,and competitive intelligence. A round up of thecollected themes (leaving out those that are sensi-tive to the organization) is shown in Table 5. Someof the major issues that surfaced during the sessioninclude the following:


• Lack of a proper data management and gov-ernance model. This compromised data integ-rity and lead to duplicated efforts as well astimeliness in compiling and consolidatingdata. Proper security access profiles can beestablished for enabling groups of staff toaccess certain reports depending on theirseniority, project involvement, need-to-know,and other factors

• Lack of user tools for the compilation of reports.Users often needed to rely on their own skills orthose of the IT staff to generate custom reports.This lead to nonuniformity in team perfor-mance and time lag in report generation

• Poor search engine and taxonomy support.Needed data and information might not befound despite being there. There was a lack ofconsensus among staff on where to store andretrieve specific knowledge assets. The fact that


Table 5 Themes identified from the narrative session with PMD stakeholders

Theme Problem

Group 1Interviewee 1 Data retrieval Cannot retrieve the stored files. Taxonomy is inconsistentInterviewee 2 Ad hoc reporting Checking for data accuracy urgently is a problem

Dashboard Time spent to reconcile raw data and analytical reportsData consolidation Inability to obtain data swiftly leads to difficulties in

data consolidationNewspaper archive (RSS and alerts) The newspaper is scanned and sorted only by date (with

title) without any analysis. No content or keywordscan be located by search engine

Corporate news Duplicated effort spent collecting and locating information(e.g., press release) in various portals (intranets)

Interviewee 3 Counting the number of events Tedious effort on counting number of events heldPresentation/visualize the data/charts User needs to build his or her own excel files to presentAccess right for amending the “date” forgenerating the business result

Cannot amend the incorrect entry of “date”. Need toseek other officers to amend

Interviewee 4 EDMS (electronic document managementsystem)

Need to customize the user interface for easier access

Group 2Interviewee 1 Policy for ad hoc reporting Need to establish a policy for extracting data from past

reportsInterviewee 2 Lead time for generating reports “Peace bell incident”. The lead time for generating report

after going through the administrative process exists.Ample lead time between effective date and pay dateis important

Generate budget manually To generate individual reports for planning the budgetin next fiscal year. Some reports need to generatemanually, and this is time consuming

Competitive intelligence reports ofrents/car parks/arrears

Need to manually dig out the competitive intelligencereports. For novices, this step involves lots of financialdata (e.g., arrears)

Interviewee 3 Competitive intelligence reports ofrents/car parks/arrears

Nobody tells the staff the source/level of thecompetitive intelligence data

Update news/court case search andarchive

Need to update the court case (newspaper), upload to theportal, and circulate to colleagues. Only arranged bydates and categories. No real time update search fromthe internet/other methods need to be used

Interviewee 4 Instantaneous update on the system’s data Fill in a form to update the data but not on the system. Staffworry about the accuracy of data update by the officerand the extra workload imposed to the officers

Interviewee 5 Lack of automatic generation of monthlyreport for senior management’s policymaking/reviewing, forecasting andStrengths, Weaknesses, Opportunitiesand Threats (SWOT) analysis

After interviewing with the elders, officers need to fillin a form manually. Then, the senior managementrequests the officers to analyze and report to them forforecasting/policy making. Because the managementwants to change the allocation standard on the flatsize, living condition of the elders, officers need toretrieve and consolidate many data in a large site (e.g.,no of people in the waiting queue). They generate thedetailed monthly report, but it is performed manuallythat is difficult to check and feel uncertain about theaccuracy on the report when dealing with thousandsof households. Officers, expect the system, cangenerate the descriptive statistics automatically. Asthis is a monthly task, the officers have to repeat themanual checking with the raw data and the reports.This is very tedious

Duplicate themes are omitted.PMD, property management division; RSS, rich site summary.


there was no coding of metadata made, search-ing and retrieval of knowledge assets becomesmore difficult. Multiple navigational paths(e.g., by data, subject, project, and client) wereneeded to be provided to facilitate access todata/information


• Underutilization of Web 2.0 tools. For example,alerts, subscription, and rich site summary(RSS) could be set up so that update and custo-mized information are delivered to each user in-stead of knowledge workers spending timelooking up new information regularly. These



tools can be deployed to pull corporate informa-tion, relevant industry news, competitiveintelligence (e.g., prevailing rental rates), andother information to PMD staff thereby savingthem much time spent on manual searching.

A review of the existing IT infrastructure and sys-tems supporting the PMD staff further revealed thatalthough there is a “PMD portal”, it is more of anintranet than a true portal (as defined earlier).PMD staff constantly access their intranet for infor-mation. However, the intranet is largely a one-waycommunication tool that provides no support foruser-submission of new content. PMD also has anelectronic document management system (EDMS)that facilitates the scanning and routing of docu-ments for processing and approval purposes withinthe department. However, no coding of metadata isbeing conducted, and hence, all search engines relyon full-text searches. Although they use severalsearch engines (e.g., in EDMS and in portal), theseengines are considered to be ineffective because ofthe lack of agreement with respect to a standardvocabulary among staff. There is no collaborationor any Web 2.0 tool available in the PMD in spiteof the fact that many PMD business processesrequire input and decision to be made by variousstaff members in sequences of structured activities.

Discussions with PMD staff further revealed that,at present, there are staff dedicated to locating, read-ing, documenting, and sharing external news, regu-latory and government information, and housingand property management news relevant to PMD’soperations on a daily basis. Although the gatheringand processing of this information by humansensure accuracy and relevancy, it is felt to be costlyand tedious. In addition, there is a considerablelatency between the first availability of the informa-tion to users being notified of such information.Furthermore, with limited human resources andescalating information overload (e.g., the surge ofsocial media in particular), it is not possible to moni-tor and customize the gathered information to suitindividual knowledge workers in the PMD.

After much discussion and in consultation withPMD stakeholders, the following knowledge man-agement (KM) tools/systems were recommendedfor PMD to consider:

• BI portal/dashboard. With all the data collection,aggregation, and analysis to support regular for-mal and ad hoc reports (e.g., financial, major im-provement works, shop portfolios, arrearslisting, rental listing, and term contracts) pro-vided by many PMD staff, a BI portal/dashboardis expected to deliver significant productivitygains and improvements with respect to collabor-ation and collaborative opportunities. Further-more, such a portal also provides the tools forthe user to facilitate the organizing of data, trendsand reports, and their presentation in a visually


expressive way. Various levels/groups of datacan also be presented depending on, amongothers, user’s access right, seniority, and personalpreferences.

• Project workspaces. At present, there is no centra-lized place for PMD staff to work on projects.Information/documents are scattered on per-sonal and shared drives as well as transmittedvia email attachments. This makes informationdifficult to locate as well as making it hard toversion-manage. A project workspace can helpto provide, among other things, document tem-plates, project plans, reports, as well as providean opportunity to codify and share lessons learntfrom previous projects. Together, these capabil-ities will help PMD to enhance collaboration, savetime by reusing existing assets, as well as accessto learning gained from past projects.

• Blogs and wikis. Blogs provide PMD staff theopportunity to share personal and/or project-related information frequently. Such kind ofbottom–up knowledge sharing has proved to bebeneficial in enhancing organization’s corporatecommunications. Wikis provide collaborativeediting of document(s) among authorized users.The use of wikis will help to reduce the time lagin waiting (sequentially) for document review aswell as help to reduce the efforts in reconcilingdifferent versions of the same document. Bothblogs and wikis belong to the Web 2.0 categoryof tools and are commonly provided in EKPs.Figure 2 shows a wiki populated with contentfrom the case study organization.

• Communities. Knowledge communities help tolink together a group of people with commonpassion and interest. Through the staged activ-ities and communications, tacit knowledge isshared and, over time, members gain a betterunderstanding of the individual and group ex-pertise of the community. Knowledge communi-ties, which often been manifested in the form ofcommunities of practice, communities of interest,know-how networks, learning communities, andmore, function as helping groups, knowledgestewardship, harnessing of good practices, andideas generation (i.e., innovation). Communitiesare appropriate for PMD as, up to now, most ofthe staff are operational and project-focused;cross-project or cross-division sharing can bemuch enhanced through the establishment andgovernance of a community model. Besides, on-line forums (or discussion boards), a commontool for online sharing among community mem-bers, are readily available as portlets withinEKPs. (However, discussion boards alone, ormore general IT tools, cannot, by themselvesalone, lead to a vibrant and sustainablecommunity.)

• EDMS and coding of metadata. PMD already oper-ates an EDMS, and for the sake of truly relying


Figure 2 A WIKI set up by the case study organization


on a portal as a single gateway or entry point toother applications, access to the EDMS shouldbe via a portlet as a component of the recom-mended portal. Doing so would involve more indepth study of the chosen portal framework andthe associated integration issues. Coding ofmetadata for PMD knowledge assets, however,is perceived to be of good value as once encoded,such metadata can assist the calibration of thesearch engines (e.g., EDMS, intranet, and portal),the provision of metadata search and navigation.

• Alerts and subscriptions. These refer to enablingmechanisms for information to be automaticallydelivered to users, as opposed to requiring usersto behave in a reactive way to carry out searchesfor needed information. Subscriptions refer to alist of topics that the user can, with priorapproval, declare interest on and thereby havinga system to monitor any change or new informa-tion (e.g., announcements, documents, and pages).Alerts refer to the automatic notification of new/changed information generated by a system for auser. Alerts and subscription services are now com-monly offered in knowledge repositories, EDMS,and enterprise portals. These services are expectedsave users time by not needing to constantly checkfor the availability of updated/new information.

• Federated search engine. To search information in acomprehensive way, the existing practice in PMDis to repeat the search on the internet, intranet,EDMS, e-mail, shared and personal drives, andso on. These repetitive search sessions represent


duplicated efforts and should be eliminated.Federated search, an advanced type of searchengine, allows such searches to be conducted inonly one instance. When properly configured, thefederated search engine will populate the searchacross all the preassigned search spaces (in theinternet, within the firewall, personal storagedevices, network drives, etc.), collect the results,reduce the duplicated links, ignore the dead links,and combine the presentation of the results, withrespective sources for each hit, in a unified format.Figure 3 shows the experimental result of afederated search engine in action.

• RSS feeds. Considering PMD has to assign staff tomanually monitor the media’s coverage of theorganization as well as keep up to date withother relevant information, regulatory guidelines,seminars, and training, it is recommended forPMD staff to subscribe to appropriate RSS feedsfrom approved sources. Similar to the use ofalerts and subscriptions mentioned previously,RSS will help to automatically pull informationto individual knowledge workers in PMD. RSSis primarily designed to monitor new informa-tion published on web pages, whereas alertsand subscriptions are more designed to trackdocuments in a repository. RSS feeds belong tothe Web 2.0 category of tools. Figure 4 shows asample of information delivered by the selectedfeeds.

• Mashups. PMD is part of a housing organization;hence, they have a need to deal with many


Figure 3 Sample result screen of a Federated Search


geographical data (e.g., property location,address of tenants, and occupancy/vacancy ratein a district). At present, all such information isstored, analyzed, and reported via manipulationswith databases consisting of structured datacolumns. Mashups, another category of Web 2.0tools, allow two or more datasets (not necessarily

Figure 4 Sample information


geospatial data but often involves one or more ofthese) to the combined (i.e., superimposed), andthe result of the overlay is presented in a multidi-mensional layout that generally communicates astronger visual impact to the user. For example,one can produce a mashup of a geographicalinformation map of Hong Kong with rental prices

delivered by RSS feeds


Figure 5 2 Stage deployment plan for the case study organization


or tenancy occupancy rates. In this way, thereader can instantly gain an understanding ofthe rental prices in various districts or the levelof occupancy in rented flats offered by theorganization throughout Hong Kong.

With nine recommended tools/systems and PMDbeing part of an organization with no prior experi-ence on KM, the previous discussion is clearly toomuch for PMD to take on in one rollout. Absorbingthe reported lessons learnt (Hazra, 2001; Benbyaet al., 2004) and the authors’ experience (Tsui, 2011)on the deployment of KMSs and portals and applyingcareful examination of each of the aforementionedtools/systems and their respective developmentreveal that some of the aforementioned tools shouldbe embedded inside the portal deployment, andsome tools (e.g., development of a taxonomy andintroducing communities) need to progress in stages,and more business inputs are invariably needed toensure success. As a result, a two-stage rollout of theaforementioned tools/system has been planned forPMD and is encapsulated in Figure 5. Blue compo-nents in the figure are designated for second phaseof deployment. Reasons for their deferred introduc-tion are provided in the succeeding text.

The recommended deployment roadmap (seeFigure 5) has been presented and agreed by thePMD stakeholders. A few points are worthy ofdiscussion here. Firstly, the figure does not includethe typical/mandatory features one would expect tobe provided in the BI portal/dashboard (e.g., dataanalysis and visualization tools, report generationfunctions, contact information, calendar, formslibrary, and links). The recommended deployment isto separate the rollout of the various tools/functionsin two phases. As portal applications increasinglyprovide features such as alerts and subscriptions,project workspaces, blogs, wikis, and RSS feeds, thesetools can be targeted in the first phase of the rollout. Afederated search engine is generally an add-on (orreplacement) component to the standard searchengine provided in a portal, and having this searchcapability is expected to reduce search times with


immediate benefits; therefore, this engine is alsorecommended to be included in the first phase of therollout. Although an online forum is a standard fea-ture for a portal, it is better that it be rolled out in thesecond phase. Online forums are merely one supporttool in a knowledge community, and the organizationfirst needs to enhance its knowledge sharing culture aswell as develop a governance model for communities.It is not advisable to launch online forums withouthaving a thorough plan for the purpose and deploy-ment of communities as well as a governance model.The development of a taxonomy is an ongoing

journey, and business input is needed during the de-velopment process. Besides, although taxonomiesneed to be developed to cover the knowledge assetsstored inside the portal, other taxonomies (whichcover assets that are not stored in the portal, e.g.,intranet, EDMS) may also need to be developed.Hence, for taxonomy creation and maintenance, itis recommended to start with the assets storedinside the portal and then gradually extend the tax-onomy or taxonomies to cater for assets elsewherein the organization. As mentioned earlier, PMDalready operates an EDMS, and it is a core oper-ational system. Integrating the EDMS into the portalso that it can be accessed centrally along with otherapplications will need in depth study, planning, andimplementation. Hence, its integration is alsorecommended to be in phase 2. The recommendedtools and systems are highly aligned to PMD’sknowledge work, and it is expected that when theyare fully deployed, PMD will gain considerablebenefits in terms of work productivity, enhancedcollaboration, especially around document-centricactivities, reuse of existing assets, and improvedagility in dealing with data extraction, analysis,and compilation of ad hoc reports.

CONCLUSION

This paper introduces the framework of a portalwith a proposed taxonomy of the various types of



common portals. By applying a combined quantita-tive and qualitative approach with a case studyorganization, various collaboration requirements,data analysis, and information access behaviorshave been identified. Recommendations have beenmade with respect to the adoption of KM tools/system, which includes a BI portal/dashboard,project workspaces, taxonomy and metadata, alertsand subscriptions, federated search engine, as wellas Web 2.0 tools such as RSS feeds, blogs, wikis,and mashups. Finally, the suggested tools/systemhave been allocated to a two-phase deploymentplan taking into consideration of the nature of thecomponent, the dependency among them, and thepeople aspect of the KM journey in the organization.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank The Hong Kong Poly-technic University for funding this project under accountcode G-YE53, Calvin Yu who had worked as a researchassistant during part of this project, and Farzad Sabetzadehwho has offered assistance in formatting this paper.

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