Workspace portals: Another tool to boost productivity

Putu G. Wibawa, Senior Manager, Accenture

Nowadays, business leaders pay more attention to the performance of their workforce. This is a result of regulatory factors such as free trade, or new technology and increasing customer sophistication, which forces an organization to respond to changing demands for products or services and to provide exceptional customer service.

Because of these driving factors, leading organizations compete for a skilled workforce, and are considering adapting to e-learning, knowledge management and a collaborative working environment, as they believe these are important for an improvement in the workforce's performance.

Workspace portals will be the next important tools for companies to significantly increase the performance of their workforce. Portals provide the workforce with one single point from which to access the critical information and data needed to perform their tasks and responsibilities in a more effective manner.

So, what is a workspace portal? It is also known as a business to employee (B2E) portal. The portal integrates, within a single interface, all the enterprise data and applications, personal productivity tools, documented knowledge, as well as access to experts and collaboration tools. Its also provides employee services online to its employees, such as vacation requests, counseling and other human resource transactions, which ultimately enable employees to communicate, collaborate and share knowledge and experiences with each other.

In short, a workspace portal consists of "employee relationship management (ERM)", which provides employee self- services; a "knowledge portal", which provides the knowledge content and collaborative functions; and an "enterprise solution portal", which provides access to critical data such as transactions.

What are the benefits? There are several business reasons to implement a workspace portal: to empower the workforce to be able to make better decisions, to encourage knowledge-sharing and information-sharing and to provide human resources services in a more efficient and effective manner. By providing easy access to critical information employees can make better and quicker decisions and provide a higher level of service to customers. Employees can achieve levels of proficiency in their job more quickly and they need only access the information or skills they require at the time they are actually required (ie. real time).

As an illustration, imagine that you are a working as a customer service representative at a bank and you have a desktop computer with access to the workspace portal. A customer comes to you and complains about transaction problems, and you have neither the experience nor training to handle the problem. So, instead of passing the problem to your supervisor, you access the knowledge portal and search for similar problem resolutions. By accessing the enterprise solution portal, you can obtain the transaction information of the customer and resolve the problem. After you have resolved the problem you can share the solution by placing it in the knowledge portal.

Organizations that employ the knowledge worker concept, and believe in knowledge-capture and sharing, which empower their workforce to make effective decisions, will experience the benefit of having workspace portals.

Workspace portals will become a critical component of the next generation of enterprise systems, even in Indonesia. Furthermore, large organizations that are well-oriented toward technology and infrastructure are more likely to be the first to make the necessary adaptations.