Deriving Value From Your Portal

I attended a presentation given recently by Flip Filipowski, the CEO of divine, a large IT services company, where he essentially affirmed my long-standing contention that, if you could create time, then you could create value. We certainly cannot make the days longer, but by rendering processes and tasks more efficient, we can create time for enhancing the execution of those processes and tasks and for addressing other issues that time has not permitted you to address.

This is a basic and simple premise and it has been the foundation of technological development since the invention of the wheel. However, as we adapt technologies to the work we do, we often give this notion a short shrift. Nowhere is this more in evidence that in our adaptation of portal technology over the last 5 years.

Many very powerful portal solutions have evolved over the past few years, sporting a vast array of features, functions, gadgets, wizards and all sorts of ‘thingies’. With all of these powerful tools to choose from, the question I’m left with is why am I repeatedly hearing statements like, “We spent a ton of money on a portal implementation in the past couple of years and no one uses it.” After all, doesn’t everyone want his or her lives made easier?

A Plan for Success: The Portal Strategy

The answer to why portals fail is simple but the solution is not. Portals typically fail because insufficient thought has been given to what the goals were for implementing a portal in the first place, thus rendering them irrelevant to the user community. Resolving that issue requires drilling into your entire organization, or at least the entire potential community of users, to gain an understanding of who they are, what they do, how they do it, and what they need to do it better.

They may need access to procedural detail, process specifications, performance data or other forms of documentation or intellectual property that would be of value in enhancing their performance. The needs will vary from group to group within the community, but that’s fine because a portal isn’t a single entity, but rather a series of interdependent entities. So in essence, everyone should wind up getting what is right for addressing his or her specific needs.

Once you capture and categorize the needs of your user community, you can move on to the format of and process for delivering this valuable information. If it sounds to you like this will require significant coordination and cooperation between the IT group and the user community, you’re right. This is a real paradigm shift for many companies, but it is actually critical for effectively implementing any solution across the enterprise. If you’re not on the same page, you’ll never get there.

Now you are ready to consider designing, building and/or implementing your portal. Just be aware that no matter how thorough you were in gathering intelligence about your user community and their needs, you didn’t get it all. No, no one was holding back. They just didn’t know all that they will know once they have had a chance to experience the portal’s value first hand. Here are two key elements to success: 1) Implement your portal incrementally so you can learn from your mistakes in a controlled environment and leverage your success (plan your early ‘wins’ carefully), and 2) Embrace change - the portal is a living and evolving entity.

Benefits of a Portal

Like the blind men and the elephant, the portal will appear somewhat different to each constituency and thus offer different benefits. Advantages to be derived will include:

• A more cost effective means by which to deliver web-enabled applications, ranging from one-off apps, weather reports and sports scores to knowledge management, business intelligence, human resources, and financial and operational solutions.
• Lower network and storage costs as emailing of large files becomes unnecessary.
• Service level improvement as employees, clients and suppliers can use secure intranets and extranets to service many of their own information needs.
• Consistency and efficiency in training initiatives for distributed organizations.
• Increased productivity as employees can gather the information they need from disparate sources quickly and easily.
• Project collaboration facilitated by web-enabled portal technology can result in lower travel costs, accelerated time-to-market and optimal utilization of your intellectual capital resulting in better quality products and services.

A cliché comes to mind, “If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.” Nowhere is this truer than in the selection of your course for a portal implementation. Define your needs, establish a process addressing those needs and then automate that process. You will find that you can create time and the value will be significant.