IBM: It’s time to rethink portals

By Jessica Twentyman

A flurry of announcements from IBM during November 2004 about its strategy for its Workplace product sends a clear message to information managers: re-think how portal software is deployed as a matter of urgency.

“There is a fundamental shift underway as it relates to the front-end of computing. People need on-demand access to experts, processes and information to make better and more informed decisions in shorter periods of time,” says Ambuj Goyal, general manager of Workplace, portal and collaboration software at IBM.

With that in mind, IBM launched Workplace in 2003 to provide employees with a single interface to desktop productivity and collaboration tools, serving up data held in existing back-office systems to end-users, regardless of their access device.

There is nothing particularly new in that – over the past five years, companies looking to provide employees with a single interface offering access to multiple applications and information sources have invested heavily in portals. According to analysts at IT market research company Wintergreen Research, the market for enterprise portals was worth $278m in 2003 and is expected to grow to $1.2bn by 2009.

What has changed is that early portal project failures are forcing companies to reassess how they should be deployed. While internet-based consumer portals such as Yahoo! have flourished, employee portals that enable workers to access information and applications have struggled.

The reasons for that are clear, says Nate Root, an analyst at IT market research company Forrester Research: “Most portal projects get dumped entirely on IT’s lap and, as a result, suffer from misalignment with business needs, low adoption, and an unorganised overabundance of features,” he says. To avoid this chaotic end-state, he adds, large firms must make portals a priority for the whole business, not just IT, by organising a permanent, cross-functional governing task force.

One of the key goals for these kinds of steering committees, he says, must be to provide employees with a portal that is uniquely tailored to fit their individual roles and responsibilities.

IBM has announced plans for 17 ‘Workplace Solutions’ to help tailor Workplace to the needs of 30 individual job functions and employee roles. The first set of Workplace Solutions covers the retail, electronics, manufacturing, finance, telecoms, government, life sciences, health and automotive industries, and will be available by the end of the year.

But companies must recognise that a portal is only as good as the information and applications that it can access. IBM’s recently announced Workplace Services Express 2.0, for example, features team collaboration, document management, web forms, task lists and templates that can be customised to create composite services.

In addition, an ambitious partnering strategy is seeing software companies adapt their products to work with Workplace. So far, 125 independent software makers, including analytics specialist Hyperion Solutions and publishing software giant Adobe, have signed up.

The Workplace strategy is paying off for IBM and could pose a threat to other companies in the portal market, including Oracle, BEA Systems and Plumtree. In 2004, organisations bought Workplace for approximately 1.4 million employees. This has far-reaching consequences for the software industry, says Alan Pelz-Sharpe, an analyst at IT market research company Ovum: “The development of the workplace portal signals a shift from the traditional Windows-based, single desktop user interface to a platform-independent, browser-based collaborative interface, positioning the web browser as the gateway to a set of shared services and knowledge resources. As a result, portals are threatening to make today’s Windows-based metaphors look as obsolete as IBM’s 3270 terminal interface does today.”