Harvard Business School Opens Portal for Business Community; HBS Working Knowledge Offers Business Information and Research

Business Wire, Jan 19, 2000

Business Editors

BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 19, 2000

HBS Working Knowledge, a Web site designed to meet the information needs of Harvard Business School alumni, is now available to the general business community at http://hbsworkingknowledge.hbs.edu. The site brings together timely business information and research from the intellectual capital of Harvard Business School, Harvard Business School Publishing and other highly regarded sources.

Visitors to the site can browse more than a dozen management topics featuring timely articles and essays on diverse management topics, interviews with HBS professors and industry leaders, book recommendations and Web site reviews. Recent featured articles include: "The Future of the Venture Capital Cycle", "Supply Chain Management-Hong Kong Style", "Infomediaries: Managing Customer Information in the Electronic Marketplace", and, "What's Your Strategy for Managing Knowledge?". Weekly updates ensure that content remains fresh.

"In today's world, information has to be available on a just-in-time basis," said Dean Kim B. Clark. "HBS Working Knowledge accomplishes that. The broad range of business information it offers unites the intellectual capital of the School and the perspectives of top business thinkers and practitioners to provide a comprehensive management resource. The advantages of a tool like this for creating lifelong learning opportunities are extraordinary."

Development of HBS Working Knowledge began over 15 months ago in response to alumni requests for a digest of new research and publications from HBS. More than 300 alumni and MBA students tested, evaluated and provided feedback on the site prototype. "Our alumni clearly told us they wanted current, relevant sources of contemporary business information and research delivered to them over the Web. In listening to them, we developed a site which extracts and packages business information and research generated within HBS, its publishing company, and other outside sources," said Tom Michalak, Project Leader and Executive Director of the HBS Baker Library. Detailed technical implementation and content development began last June. A recent successful alumni launch, combined with positive feedback received from alumni, suggested that HBS Working Knowledge should be made available to the general business community.

The name of the site is derived from an HBS newsletter, Working Knowledge, first published in 1997, which showcases research conducted at the School. HBS Working Knowledge consolidates information from this publication, along with a wealth of material produced and published by HBS and other respected information sources. "We made the print version of Working Knowledge freely available to the business community and we are making the electronic version available as well," said Michalak.

The site has a daily audio on management topics and future plans include more use of video. "Information is more immediate and accessible than ever before, and we are constantly thinking up new ways to package and deliver it," said Michalak. "The speed of change in our work lives is altering the way learning takes place and increasing the importance of continued learning. HBS Working Knowledge will play an important part in meeting that need."

The technology behind HBS Working Knowledge is as leading edge as the materials it presents. The content is published using a content management and Web publishing system built in-house by the School's IT group and HBS Working Knowledge. Staff members from the portal and Harvard Business School's Baker Library (the largest business library in the world) are continuously adding to a vast inventory of content in the HBS Working Knowledge system, which is an extension of the School's enterprise-wide database. Searching and browsing this database, portal editors can select content from the system for publication to the site.

The system was programmed entirely in Java and adheres firmly to the School's open-architecture technology standards, making use of several open-source code libraries. The system draws content from the database formatted as XML and renders it to the Web site using custom template files and XSL style sheets. Other features of the system include page caching for performance, site search capability, and a modular architecture that allows content from the HBS Working Knowledge content inventory to be published to other Web sites around the School.