United Nations Launches A Global Portal

Global Compact, a United Nations corporate citizenship initiative, recently launched www.unglobalcompact.org using the mySAP Enterprise Portal. The new portal is designed to promote online learning, dialogue and collaboration among four U.N. agencies, national governments, organizations such as Amnesty International and approximately 700 participating global corporations including Pfizer, Nike, BMW, DaimlerChrysler, British Telecom and Unilever. (SAP of Walldorf, Germany, www.sap.com, a member of the Global Compact, donated the software.) Global Compact participants support nine principles in the areas of human rights, labor and the environment, and members need to collaborate on projects such as environmental cleanups and labor reform.

Before the portal was launched in late September, "We were drowning in e-mail," says Georg Kell, executive head of the Global Compact. His staff of six could not possibly reply to the massive volumes of e-mail. Today, documents such as case studies and project proposals are submitted in Microsoft Word format (in the language of choice, English) and are routed through a formal workflow within the portal. Some documents are reviewed by peers and academic institutions, including MIT, Notre Dame and the London School of Economics, before they're posted to the portal.

Where before, a three-page paper being discussed by 40 reviewers was a logistical nightmare of phone calls and e-mails, today participants accesses the portal using their own secure key and provide feedback in a logical process.

"We're avoiding bureaucracy," Kell says. "We couldn't achieve what we're doing without this portal unless we hired 5,000 people to do it."

The mySAP Enterprise Portal technology is expected to significantly reduce information search and retrieval time and automate previously time-consuming content management processes. The Global Compact portal is expected to attract thousands of visitors each month.

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