Portals are expected to raise their profile in the business arena,
but will they prove to be as useful a tool as the mobile phone or
email? asks Martin Butler
The upsurge of interest in portals as a tool for creating business
advantage has been as great and as rapid as just about any other
'new' idea to come from IT vendors in the past few years. If early
acceptance is any guideline of future success, then the portal is
bound to have a long and successful shelf life.
There is no doubt that the portal market has reached a point where
certain vendors - those who are not just leaping onto the latest
bandwagon - can provide part of a technology and informational
infrastructure to an organisation that will create real competitive
advantage.
The basic need for all businesses is to simplify this technology
and information infrastructure. Where this is not possible, this is
no simple matter because both infrastructure elements have to be
made as transparent as possible to the end user.
CULTURE SHIFT
Before any of this can happen, there has
to be a true understanding throughout the organisation, led from
the highest level, about the importance of structured and
personalised information delivery. This will mean a major culture
shift in the majority of businesses, as the core processes that are
used to drive the business will need to be integrated with both
internal and external informational elements.
Processes that have typically been driven by data delivery will
need to be re-engineered to use and deliver information.
Organisations will not be able to use information as a competitive
advantage unless that information is accessible to the business
applications. This is the true strength of the portal; it is not
just an application or information delivery mechanism, but a
solution to integration in its purest form.
Portals need to be externalised; although the early push has been
in the business-to-employee (B2E) space, where their effectiveness
can be best measured, a most effective solution has been to allow
external controlled access. This gives the requirement for a
massively scalable distributed architecture that is flexible enough
to scale both up and down.
As the portal becomes an ingrained part of the way that everyone
operates, the implemented architecture has to be fault tolerant to
an extremely high degree. The portal will be the email or the
mobile phone of the future in business usage terms. Just as the
ability to conduct business is impacted negatively if either of the
former should fail for any length of time, so it is with the
portal.
The portal should be considered as a deep-seated foundation for the
business, just as email is today. Again, this understanding and the
depth of implementation have to be driven from the highest levels
of the organisation throughout the company structure.
The implementation of a portal solution that operates at these
levels has to be viewed as a strategic - and therefore long term -
investment. The return on investment measurements used to gauge the
effectiveness of the solution have also to be viewed from the same
standpoint. As the portal is rolled out across an organisation it
will continue to add value to the business - as any good solution
should.
This means that a portal deployment has to be seen as an ongoing
exercise in business development not an out-of-the box solution.
This will create problems as the presentation layer of the portal
can be delivered at a departmental level relatively easily, but the
underlying layers of the portal model have to touch all of the
infrastructure to be effective, and therefore need to be
organisationally enabled.
COMPETITIVE ADVANTAGE
This fact has led to longer than
expected implementation times and some negative feedback as to the
worth of the solution. To a large extent, this is the pain that
goes with being an early adopter, and has been the case with other
solutions in the past. The reward for that pain is the gaining of
competitive advantage.
An obvious way of reducing the pain to a more acceptable level is
by careful consideration of which solution to implement. As any
market grows, so the number of hangers-on and fringe players
increases. This is becoming blatantly obvious in the portal space,
as solution providers define portals in their own way to fit into
what they currently have to offer.
With this large number of diverse definitions in the market place,
it is essential that the requirement is clearly understood and
translated into a delivery plan that the solution provider has to
be able to meet. As the true portal implementation will reach deep
down into the technology base, getting it wrong is not only not an
option, in terms of wasted resource, but is also potentially deeply
damaging to future business development.