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World Bank leans on Web for collaboration

By John Fontana
Network World, 08/21/00

When an organization coordinates activities in 180 countries in an effort to foster economic growth and reduce world poverty, it learns a thing or two about the importance of collaboration.

The World Bank is just that organization, and during the past 56 years it has perfected its craft. The Bank is eyeing the Internet as a tool for gathering the best minds in the corporate world to help stimulate its nonprofit work.

This month, the Bank will launch a portal designed to capture and publish the intellectual capital the Bank generates through its Staff Exchange Program. To speed the project's deployment, the Bank is handing over the hosting of the portal's infrastructure and applications to a third party.

The Staff Exchange Program began four years ago as an effort to attract people from the private sector to two-year assignments to work for the Bank. The Bank also sends its employees to the participating corporations for immersion training.

"The goal is to get private sector thinking into the Bank," says Pauline Ramprasad, manager of the program. "You get a transfer of skills and a challenge to the way you think." The transfer of knowledge helps the Bank and its five member institutions better solve development and poverty problems worldwide.

Until now, however, the Bank has had no way to capture and catalog the ideas generated within the program, which has 100 corporate members. Now the intent is to create an ever-evolving Web-based library of documents that can be used as a reference tool by program participants and educate the public about the Bank.

For the foundation of the project, the Bank is using Microsoft's Exchange 2000, which has yet to ship, and outsourcing the portal, called My Staff Exchange Program, to service provider Data Return. The Bank spent eight weeks getting the portal developed and deployed, including working with systems integrator Xepedior.

To get the portal into operation, the Bank contracted with Data Return. The hosting service in Dallas runs an early- release code of Exchange 2000, which is touted as a platform for building collaborative applications.

"The Web storage system is key for Staff Exchange in that it allows file storage and full text search," says Mark Warren, a vice president at Data Return. Another key is that Exchange 2000's Web Store can be accessed using HTTP, meaning users can get to documents using only a Web browser. Also important are index and search features that let the Bank maintain its internal rules for cataloging documents by subject such as "Transport" or "Water."

Ramprasad says it's too early to rate the hosted infrastructure but that her judgment will be based on reliability and responsiveness.

"They are the same issues as if it were our own IT staff," she says. The World Bank, which has more than 200 IT staff, plans to bring the portal in-house once Exchange 2000 ships in early fall.

In building the portal it was key to keep in mind future growth, Ramprasad says. She picked Exchange 2000 over Lotus' Raven collaboration server because she felt Exchange was more flexible and would be less expensive to customize in the long run.

The portal will let users create documents, exchange data and post information for public review. Each program member gets a personal site on the portal where that person can store documents in public or private folders to control access.

One goal is to add discussion, chats and instant messaging, all supported by Exchange.

Ramprasad would not discuss project costs, but she says the important issue is that program participants were blown away by the prototype. "People's eyes popped out when they saw they could interact with the Bank in such a way," she says.

"We have a global community and we are moving that physical community into a virtual one," Ramprasad says.