denotes premium content | Feb 8 2012 
Feature
posted 21 Feb 2005 in Volume 1 Issue 7
The portal promise
The benefits of enterprise portals have been well publicised. But looking beyond the market hype, what does the future hold for a technology that often flatters to deceive? By Martin Fustes.
Imagine you run a small high-street retail business. The shop has a large stock. Some time ago that level of stock became too great to keep entirely on the premises so a storage facility was rented a mile or so away in which to store the bulk of it.
The shop predominantly relies on passing trade for its custom and the window display has proven to be a key factor in attracting customers into the store. However, the sheer variety and volume of stock, kept both on the premises and in storage, means the existing window display is no longer the most practicable solution for displaying stock.
The answer: time for a bigger, better window? Well, maybe. But what about the stock stored a mile away? And what exactly should be displayed in the window and what should be left in storage? A bigger window will not be much help if the stock it advertises is inconveniently locked up somewhere else.
In many regards, the above scenario reflects both the promise and the problem of an enterprise portal. Today’s enterprise portals purport to offer a more effective window on business resources than, say, the traditional desktop or even the corporate intranet, but as a window, a portal is next to useless if those business resources are not in the right place and in the right format.
Implementing an enterprise portal has become a top priority for organisations looking to develop an effective knowledge-management programme. This should come as little surprise, particularly given that the modern-day portal can be personalised for specific job functions and business processes. Portals promise not only to help companies considerably improve and enhance workforce performance, but also to link that performance to business value by integrating, in a single and personalised interface, all the tools, assets and applications employees need to do their jobs more effectively.
In recent years, the portal marketplace has shifted from being an emerging technology to a mainstream solution. As Paul Barton, portals product manager at Capgemini, says: “Clients now have a far greater expectation from a portal than just providing easy access to existing applications or services.” Barton adds that enterprise portals are becoming key components not only in accessing enterprise services, but also in supporting new, more collaborative ways of working.
An intranet, by its nature, is essentially an internal facing system, whereas its users are looking to collaborate not only with colleagues, but also with customers, partners, suppliers and shareholders outside of the corporation. “The ability to access both transaction and information assets within a consolidated view cannot be readily achieved from an internal system like an intranet,” says Barton.
Traditionally, a portal is viewed as being a personalised presentation layer to a set of back-end applications and content. “That is certainly how the market understands it,” says John Kunze, CEO of Plumtree, the first entrant into the corporate portal marketplace. “However, we have now moved from a proposition of individual productivity to one of group productivity. 2005 will probably be remembered as the year in which portals became understood as a platform for building composite applications.”
A composite application consists of functionality drawn from several different sources within a service-oriented architecture (SOA). The components may be individual web services, selected functions from within other applications, or entire systems – often legacy systems – whose outputs have been packaged as web services. “In a portal, those components come together in a single place and enable individuals to work together through business processes online,” says Kunze. In other words, the portal becomes the hosting mechanism for those applications.
Many businesses today have lofty ambitions when it comes to implementing enterprise portals. More often than not, however, those ambitions have been fuelled by the marketing hype of vendors and analysts. It is critical to understand that portals only provide access to content, they are not responsible for the creation of that content. Deploying a portal by itself actually provides little business value, which is why many portal projects, despite the hype and investment, have failed. “It is actually quite difficult to sell a portal, because a portal per se doesn’t actually do very much,” says Harris-Jones. “What it does do is help consolidate and integrate, but it is quite difficult to build a strong business case around this. That is why an awful lot of the independent portal vendors have either gone bust or been acquired.”
This is one of the reasons why analysts, vendors and users all agree that it is absolutely vital that there is a strong, compelling proposition for implementing an enterprise portal from the outset. It is not enough to implement a portal just because it may appear financially attractive. “Often you can strike very good deals for buying portal software – particularly if you are already a customer of someone like IBM, Oracle or Microsoft. But I have never seen a really good case for building a portal. I have seen good cases for integration, but this can be achieved with enterprise-application-integration (EAI) software,” says Harris-Jones.
Large vendors can offer portal software as a financially compelling value-add to their existing customers and use it as way to attract new ones. In many regards, the portal acts as a perfect Trojan horse for a large vendor keen to push its other software and applications into a business. Indeed, large non-specialist vendors such as Microsoft and SAP now populate the portal marketplace almost entirely. Plumtree is the only remaining pure-play portal company left standing.
The responsibility for implementing an enterprise portal often resides with the IT department, but a successful project should extend beyond this department.
While determining whether an organisation needs a portal may seem relatively straightforward, a successful implementation requires careful planning and an implicit understanding of the overall business strategy and communication goals. “There is still an issue around people trying to build a portal with no clear goal, rather than having a very clear business objective, such as consolidating access to information, for example,” says Harris-Jones. Barton, who also indicates that business change must be covered as part of the portal implementation programme, echoes this view.
A successful portal should act as a compelling window display for judiciously selected knowledge and content. At an enterprise-wide level, that means integrating the portal with existing infrastructure such as authentication and single sign-on, directory access, content and document management, workflow, EAI, collaboration and search tools.
In 2003, when Centrica, the owner of British Gas, was looking for a tool for its agents to facilitate communication, it decided to implement an enterprise-wide portal. As Hetti Barkworth-Nanton, programme director for global intranet at Centrica, says, “The real driver for the portal was the ability to connect our different businesses and enable more extensive knowledge sharing across the group.”
Centrica’s portal provides staff with access to an integrated billing and customer-relationship-management system, which offers access to product and services information, sales tools and internal communications. The portal is divided into 45 communities that map the various departments and that make up each of the company’s brands.
Rather than making the decision to manage information centrally, at the outset, Barkworth-Nanton and her team decided that content and information ownership should reside with the existing business owners. “You have to have ownership at a local level,” she says. But central governance is also important not only to ensure the integrity of the platform is maintained, but also for reasons of economy, as Barkworth-Nanton explains: “When someone requests a new portlet, for example, similar functionality may well already exist that can be easily tweaked to suit the purpose.”
One of the critical requirements of Centrica’s portal project was that it was not to make redundant the infrastructure investments it had already made in British Gas. Although the importance of aligning your portal with existing infrastructure can be a constraint on the technology choices that can be made, it is important that the infrastructure requirements are not underestimated. “We had to do a significant amount of upgrading of our network infrastructure to support the portal,” says Barkworth-Nanton. “Unless you have integrated your portal with your existing infrastructure, the level of integration that you want to achieve will become very costly.”
Organisations should look to see where the business opportunities are rather than seeing a portal as an extension of their existing technology stack, advises Barton. “Where investment has been made in IT there are opportunities to exploit this to make a far richer experience for the end user,” he says.
From the outset, therefore, there needs to be not only an appropriate plan for implementation, but also a sound methodology and appropriate budget. “There should also be a project plan that continues to deliver enhanced value on a regular schedule beyond the implementation phase,” says Kunze. “After all, a project of this nature is never completed; it is always evolving and improving.”
One of the most important first steps for Centrica was engaging with the business. Barkworth-Nanton and her team ran several workshops in order to understand what would make a difference to users around the business. “Having users involved and engaged from design through to testing and implementation is absolutely critical,” says Barkworth-Nanton. “All too often, users are not involved early enough and then frequently do not maintain engagement after the portal project has been implemented.”
Users need to be educated in an environment that supports the culture of the organisation. Forcing staff to use a portal is not the right way to gain user adoption; end users need to be able to see benefits. “Because a portal should be an interface on to all the information a user needs, it is vital to have an understanding of what the user wants and needs. If a user is not very enthusiastic, you are in trouble,” says Harris-Jones.
Organisations are understandably looking to gain real payback from their investment in portal technology. “Just providing a neat front-end to an existing application is not really good enough when looking for business value,” warns Barton. “Users need to be able to see tangible benefits from investing in portal technology, otherwise they will consider other options that are available.”
The main challenge in implementing a portal project is to have a clear decision-making process. “Ensure there are clear roles and responsibilities defined for IT, as well as clear governance for management, partners and suppliers,” says Barton.
A well planned portal project that fulfils specific business needs undoubtedly holds the promise to transform a business, as Barkworth-Nanton attests. “A year and a half ago we did not have an enterprise-wide intranet or a portal,” she says. “Online was just not the way we did things. Now, our portal is part of our culture and part of our dialogue.”
