denotes premium content | Feb 8 2012 
Feature
posted 15 Mar 2005 in Volume 1 Issue 8
A process-centric portal
Winner of the ‘Best intranet’ category at the 2004 Information Management Awards in
Historically,
To try and solve these problems we considered a number of options, eventually deciding to use the project as an opportunity to re-visit the actual business processes that the forms supported. At the same time, a separate review of the company’s data systems concluded that while they contained a vast wealth of valuable information, they were not easily accessible to middle and senior management. To exploit the company’s information assets more effectively and improve the experience for the end user, a new ‘presentation layer’ was required.
Cue the enterprise portal into which re-engineered business processes would be deployed. The portal would be both inward facing (an intranet) and outward facing (an extranet), creating a single communications hub through which employees and business partners can carry out transactions in a controlled, transparent and – crucially – paper-free environment.
After a review of competing products we selected a portal product from Plumtree, and re-engineering work started in earnest.
The primary objectives
We identified the several key objectives during the project initiation process in addition to the prime aim of improving operational efficiency and reducing business-process-cycle times. These included the need to:
- Increase outsourcing of data entry to those individuals or organisations closest to the source data, improving quality and timeliness, eliminating duplicate data entry and reducing transaction processing costs. This was particularly relevant given the company’s use of partners for many critical business functions;
- Improve transparency and control of business processes by providing a single access point for tracking each transaction;
- Provide a single place for both internal employees and external partners to share information with a single sign-on for all resources;
- Reduce costs through the elimination of paper-based forms, together with associated benefits such as reduced storage, no re-keying of data, better control and improved security;
- Enable business processes to be carried out remotely in the event of a disaster at any of the British Land Group’s sites or elsewhere, indeed from any location where there is access to the internet.
Validating the business case
During 2001, implementation of the Plumtree portal was carried out at the same time of the initial analysis into re-engineering the company’s business processes. To validate both the commercial and technical feasibility of the project, we initially chose a single process for implementation into the portal framework.
This was in fact a new process – environmental data capture – that had arisen as part of
The initial release of this process was developed over a period of four months and deployed to approximately 150 external partner employees at a number of the company’s managing agents. It was then used successfully to capture the underlying information needed for the organisation’s first shareholder corporate-responsibility report, which was issued alongside the company’s financial results for 2002.
This process has taken place every six months since and delivered a number of significant benefits.
Perhaps more importantly, the validation exercise was deemed a success and work continued on re-engineering other processes.
The
Since the first deployment of a business process, the
The portal is now accessed by all internal staff across all sites, as well as 450 external partner employees. It also features 16 of the estimated 31 main business processes that take place within the company. These include:
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Expenditure management processes, such as capital expenditure authorisation and tracking, purchase ordering and invoice matching;
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Specific processes for the setting of service-charge budgets for the general repair and maintenance of individual properties;
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The conducting and agreement of rent reviews;
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An enhanced version of the first environment data-capture process that now includes benchmarking, and has attracted funding for its innovation from the Carbon Trust;
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Acquisition processes for getting assets into the business;
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Disposal processes for selling assets out of the business;
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Tax approval and stamp duty land-tax processes for Inland Revenue compliance;
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A planning permission process for retaining (and assisting with the renewal, where relevant) of development permissions obtained from the government.
We have also introduced collaborative areas, allowing documents and other information (such as project milestones and threaded discussions) to be shared with external third parties in a secure, controlled fashion.
Project benefits
The key focus of the project has been the delivery of clear business benefits through the re-engineering process. The delivery of a portal, in which the new processes reside, has always been the secondary component.
Indeed, although the collaborative areas have been successfully used for a number of document based activities, such as assisting with the preparation of year-end accounts, there has been less focus on developing traditional intranet or content-based applications. This has been a deliberate choice since the return on process redevelopment is typically much greater than the return on applications for information sharing. This reflects the nature of
Consequently, the key benefits delivered stem from the re-engineering of processes and include:
(a) Improved business performance
By re-engineering the processes into the portal, significant improvements have been made in process efficiency. For example, the company’s new Expenditure Authority Request system has typically reduced the eight stage approval time down from several weeks to, in some cases, a few days. Since its launch, more than one billion pounds’ worth of expenditure has passed through the new system.
Similarly, the Stamp Duty Land Tax process has significantly reduced the amount of time it takes British Land’s external lawyers to produce the appropriate Inland Revenue compliant paperwork. By hand a typical form could take four to eight hours whereas the re-engineered process enables many forms to be completed in less than 30 minutes. This reduction is achieved by dynamically guiding users through a series of questions before producing copies of the official Inland Revenue form ready for direct submission with no further work. At the time of writing, 178 property transactions have been formally submitted to the Inland Revenue through the new system.
(b) Cost savings
Whilst it is unanimously agreed that the portal and re-engineered processes have significantly improved efficiency, it has proved more difficult to directly quantify cost savings.
This is primarily because, while the costs of implementing and operating the new processes are identifiable and measurable, it is has proved much more difficult to allocate a direct cost to operating the old paper-based processes. Similarly, it has proved difficult to put a direct valuation on some of the soft benefits such as improved flexibility and reduced rework due to poor form filling.
(c) Improved decision making and control of business activity
One clear area of gain has been the improvement in the accuracy of decision making and also the control of general business activity. Specifically:
- It is now possible to monitor and track transactions throughout their life – eliminating paper-chasing and enabling a much clearer understanding of the status of each process in relation to its successful completion;
- Direct input of information by our business partners (effectively ‘at source’) increases its accuracy, reliability and its timeliness;
- The portal also allows much of this information to be depicted graphically using ‘director dashboard’ type portlets that enable limited resources to be targeted where they are needed most;
- Information is also now captured where previously it has been hard to do so (for example, negotiation information for rent reviews) and over time this may help assist with decision making;
- Lastly, the instrumentation of processes has allowed the company to monitor the performance of our business partners more closely and help identify underperformance. Moving from one supplier to another is also made easier, as all the critical information used is now collected and held by
(d) Infrastructure gains
- Anytime, anywhere access that allows staff and business partners to relocate and continue working over the internet in the event of a disaster. To make sure this is feasible care is taken to ensure that all functions work almost identically. This also enables the company to meet any flexible or home working requirements.
- The portal significantly reduces the deployment cost of new applications. Once migrated to ‘live’, an application effectively becomes available to whoever has been granted access without the need for local installations. Similarly, updates can be released easily and consistently across the whole user base, in turn helping to drive down the cost of operating and managing the group’s desktop estate.
(e) Commercial opportunities
Lastly, the success of the portal and its business processes has attracted interest from a number of
Underlying technology
The portal makes use of a mix of several different technologies to deliver an overall aggregated end-user experience. Figure 3 (p26) summaries the main components, which include:
- The Plumtree portal for providing the main user interface and process monitoring. Each individual ‘portlet’ is developed in ASP.NET;
- An Oracle IAS web server for delivering data entry, with validation and processing based on the user drilling down through the main Plumtree portlets. These Java based ‘webforms’ are used for workflow and other business logic;
- An Oblix reverse proxy to ensure that only appropriate access is given to both internal and external users. Oblix was implemented as part of the re-engineering project and has been integrated with Active Directory to provide single sign-on functionality;
- A Pivia performance server to speed the delivery of the portal by compressing and intelligently caching data. Again, this was implemented as part of the project and in some cases has achieved a 700 per cent improvement in performance.
The project team
The size and shape of the project team has been organic throughout the life of the project. Use of consultants and contractors has been the norm, with overall programme management jointly provided by
In the initial stages of the project consultants from Ernst & Young provided analysis of existing business processes, but the in-house information systems team was later expanded through the use of contractors to carry out the re-engineering of those processes. Typically four to six analysts have been involved, each of whom has project management responsibility for specific business processes. The analysts draw on a pool of contract developers, which has averaged six ASP.NET and eight Oracle Webform developers, and carry out training for both internal employees and those at
The technical environment has been constructed under the supervision of the IS project manager, with assistance from the company’s IS technical manager, IS security manager and IS portal team leader, as well as members of the development team and external consultants. The team has worked closely with each of the main technology partners (Plumtree, Oracle, PWC (for Oblix) and Pivia) to ensure that the user interface and integration between the various products is seamless.
Lessons learnt
The project has been very successful in all its objectives, but some useful lessons have emerged in the process.
Achieving an early win
Although a business case for the original expenditure had been agreed it was the delivery of the first main application (Environment data capture) that ensured that the company could see demonstrable benefits of the approach. Indeed, once this early win had proved successful we found it much easier to secure sponsorship for the re-engineering of further processes.
Use of analysts
Historically, the information-systems function was structured around developers working directly with end-users to identify and deliver solutions to their needs. An early successful step with the re-engineering programme was to introduce a team of analysts to act as a buffer between the users and the developers. This had a number of benefits, partly in terms of allowing the developers to focus on producing software, but mainly by ensuring that there was a resource that could stand back and consider the full lifecycle of the business processes in a holistic manner. This was a key step in ensuring that processes were properly re-engineered and not just re-implemented on new technology.
The analysts also enabled improved engagement with the user base, as they were seen to be closer to the business than developers and hence could provide greater support to the specification process and reduce the demands on already very busy user departments.
Re-orientation of the information systems department
Prior to the portal-based processes, all the existing technology systems were internally based and supported on a weekday basis from 9am to 5.30pm. Technology continuity plans were based on recovery times between two days for critical systems, to one week for a full systems’ recovery.
About six months after the successful launch of the first portal-based processes, it became apparent that external user numbers would soon start to outnumber internal users and that many of our business partners had occasion to work later hours or over the weekend. Reductions in system availability, performance or support quality would no longer just be an internal inconvenience – focus on customer service needed to move to the next level.
Consequently, the approach to IS operations needed to change. Support hours were standardised, with technology changes restricted to a fixed weekly window. A new dedicated business partner Helpline was put in place. The portal itself was used to make more applications self-service so that, for example, support questions or issues could be submitted online.
More radically we decided that, to truly support the anytime-anywhere principle of the project, the existing server locations, management and support arrangements were not robust enough to support 24-7 online business processes. As a result, we are now in the process of migrating the group’s server infrastructure to an externally managed dual-data centre, tier one facility.
Performance
While the functionality of the first re-engineered business processes were very well received, there were some initial concerns about performance, with some pages taking up to twenty seconds to load. This created some resistance among the user base to moving to the new processes. Since it was intended that the portal become the main application platform for the group, this was clearly unacceptable and a performance work stream was put in place to address the issue.
As part of this exercise we made a wide number of improvements, including identifying bottlenecks and re-coding the relevant portlets. In addition, three ‘portal-performance accelerators’ were each evaluated, with Pivia ultimately chosen for compression, caching and timing.
Collectively, the Pivia implementation and the other changes involved have addressed this issue, and pages now take between one and three seconds to render. However, the initial impression that had been created with users lingered and made the next set of process deployments more difficult than should have been necessary. On reflection, an earlier focus on performance would have been preferable.
Architectural complexity
By its very nature the portal is an aggregator of other systems and consequently the underlying portal architecture can be very complex. In turn, this requires specific integration skills and careful on-going management.
In some cases, the technologies involved are also still maturing and effort is needed to ensure that comprehensive testing is carried out to highlight any potential technology issues early on. To help with this, three separate portal clusters (development, test and live) are used with carefully controlled change processes for the implementation of both operating system updates and new software components.
Determining the degree of application integration is also challenging, since very few applications ship with any pre-built portal components and hence a decision has to be made in each case as to which approach should be used:
· “light” integration – this relies on ‘re-hosting’ an existing application page within the portal framework, but has challenges in terms of security, including authentication;
· “deep” integration – this involves directly querying an application’s database (or through an application programming interface) and then redisplaying it using an internally developed portlet. While this offers a much better user experience, it takes a greater degree of development effort and may involve a future support overhead if the underlying application is upgraded at any point.
The choice of approach depends partly on the criticality of the application and also partly on the support available from the vendor. Over time we hope that maturing standards such as web-services remote portlet (WSRP) – and its Java equivalent (J2E 168) – will allow for greater interoperability with less effort.
Looking forward
At the time of writing we have re-engineered about half the company’s core operational processes. Our focus for 2005 is to complete the remaining processes, many of which are smaller than those re-engineered to date, and which will benefit from code and ‘concept’ re-use from the work we have completed so far.
We are also starting to see second round functionality enhancement requests being requested, building on the fundamental process workflows already implemented for each operational cycle. The attention is increasingly on using the information, rather than just collecting it, to enable better management of the processes and leveraging of the business knowledge that is being created. For example, rather than focus individually on the status of each rent review, senior managers are looking at rent reviews in aggregate and the overall impact they have on the business.
Our portal deployment has been quite different to the usual intranet implementation. We have focused not on standard information sharing, although collaborative areas have been provided, but have instead used the portal as the framework into which to deploy our re-engineered business processes and applications. This innovative approach has delivered on all our objectives and given
About the company
The British Land Company PLC (British Land) is the largest real-estate company in the UK with over twelve billion pounds worth of property assets under management. The company focuses on property investment, as well as the development of sites and new buildings.
British Land has a headcount of around 700 employees split across three main sites. Most staff are employed at the Meadowhall Shopping Centre and at Broadgate, the company’s four-million-sq-ft office estate in the City of London. It utilises a large number of external business partners, including lawyers and managing agents, to carry out transactions, lettings and maintenance on the company’s properties.
Peter Earl is group head of IT, The British Land Company PLC, and director, The British Land Corporation Limited.
