Local companies spending large amounts of money creating data and building warehouses to analyse this data are seeing the advantages in opening up all this information to employees by using an information portal.
A portal creates a single, unified view of the organisation and can enhance the productivity of knowledge workers by providing a personalised single point of access to the information and tools they need to do their job.
"The information challenge faced by many organisations today no longer involves a lack of data, but the opposite," explains Bill Hoggarth, MD of SAS Institute SA. "Not only is there plenty of data available, but also a multitude of methods of collection. These include transaction-oriented systems that generate reports daily, data warehouses and analytic tools to slice and dice the data, ERP tools and even wireless devices and the Internet which all collect information."
Hoggarth maintains that the reality of this situation is that companies now face the burden of data overload and the challenge of turning large quantities of data into meaningful information.
"To transform data into valuable information and give your business a competitive-edge, it is necessary to deliver the right data to the right people at the right time. The trick is to find a way to provide a unified view of the organisation and its wide variety of content, while concurrently ensuring control over who sees what. This can be a complex and time-consuming task.
"A portal provides a centrally managed, secure, n-tier platform. It allows the aggregation of a wide variety of content into a highly tuneable virtual workplace for knowledge workers to perform more efficiently and make effective business decisions."
However, cautions Hoggarth, a portal is only as good as the information that it delivers. "It is critical to guarantee the quality of information by performing analytics on the data."
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