IT managers are gearing up to spend significant amounts of money on portal solutions. Butler Group predicts that the enterprise portal market will see dramatic growth to reach $4 billion by 2005.
However, IT has historically had a poor track-record in achieving a positive ROI from the adoption of new technologies - and there are good reasons to suggest that enterprise portals will be no different.
By their very nature, portals impact on a broad section of the organization both in terms of the number of users that will be involved and the wide-ranging information they will need to access. This means that enterprise portals require active sponsorship from the very top of the organization, which is often difficult to achieve.
Moreover, an enterprise portal is often an enabler for other business change, such as enhanced customer service or improved operational effectiveness, rather than delivering benefit as a stand-alone initiative. This means that the benefits are both difficult to quantify and hard to achieve because they require other aspects of the business to change if the benefits are to be realised.
Given these challenges, wouldn't it be easier to just go with the status quo and save the investment?
Unfortunately not, because whilst portals may be difficult to successfully implement, the content they deliver increasingly provides a major competitive advantage. Unstructured content accounts for over 80% of data in a typical business. Used well it enables people to make more effective business decisions, to share ideas across the organisation and to reuse knowledge that has already been created.
Given the proliferation of content in web sites, (one major accountancy firm had over 200 internal web sites), and the growth in email which is now estimated to occupy between 10-20% of employees' time, the need to properly manage this important asset can only become more important and challenging.
Moreover, well-managed content enables organizations to collaborate more closely with key clients, suppliers and partners, by ensuring they are provided with the information they need and that it is always accurate and up to date. In a recent PA survey of 100 major firms, over 95% predicted they will be collaborating more in the future and mainly for strategic rather than tactical benefits. There are already many tangible examples where closer collaboration is benefiting firms, for example:
- Clifford Chance, a leading law firm, has improve its efficiency and deepened client relationships in six months, by providing secure Internet-enabled collaborative working areas for their clients to have real time access to documents and information.
- BP has identified savings of $30 million and made 100% return on its investment by sharing supplier purchasing information across the organization.
But these benefits can only be achieved if organizations can manage and deliver relevant content to their clients, suppliers and partners in a timely and effective way. Enterprise portals hold the key to making that possible.
So what should a firms approach be? Our advice to organizations is to tackle five key issues:
- Build strong business governance around the use of the information and not just the supply, so that you know the content you are managing is the content that people want. Most organizations have put in place some form of responsibility for managing the supply of content, but few have established effective mechanisms for ensuring the content that is being provided continues to meet the needs of different user groups. A major energy firm failed to address this issue and in just three months its new content management system was no longer providing the information that the users needed.
- Prioritise your efforts around those processes that you most want to improve. Enterprise portals should aim to address a pressing business issue. For example a major oil company wanted to reduce its operating costs. It used the portal to achieve a more centralized content management approach that delivered savings of $500,000 a year.
- Provide a user experience that builds the portal around what people do on a day-to-day basis and brings all the related information together on one screen. Often, portals are designed around the information that is available rather than considering what people actually do and the information they need in order to do it. This requires a good understanding of the activities people undertake and the ability to integrate information from multiple sources onto one screen, such as client information from a CRM system and delivery information from an ERP system.
One major accountancy firm mapped out the main activities of its staff using a process framework and then tailored different screens to deliver the information staff needed. The information was personalized to each employee's situation and certain aspects of the screen were customizable to suit their style of working.
- Take ownership of the portal to make it the single source of information. Many portals fail because they do not become established as the single source of content and people continue to use manual systems and local stores of information. A financial services firm realised this would be an issue so, once the portal was in place, they took away access to the local solutions - thereby forcing people to go to the single source. Done right, this becomes a virtuous circle as people rely on the information more, so the content becomes more accurate.
- Plan the program around the portal's maturity towards a defined end game. Enterprise portals are a major undertaking and touch every part of the organization - so treating them as a change program is an obvious approach. However, 'portal paradise' - seamlessly integrated applications and information built around the firm's process - cannot be reached in a single bound. A change program itself is not enough. Portals mature in defined phases from an individual having to know where all the information and applications are, to some of that information being available on a screen, through to having the information and applications integrated within the process.
These stages can be used prioritise the effort, so that a fast start and quick rewards can be achieved, whilst providing headroom to spend time integrating content and applications into the portal.
As mentioned earlier, portals not only provide a major source of competitive advantage when successfully deployed within an organization, they also enable a firm to collaborate with key clients, suppliers and partners.
The first step in successful collaboration is to decide which companies you are going to collaborate with and why. PA's research shows that the most important factor to get right in a collaborative relationship is the strategic vision. Moreover, collaboration initiatives are far more likely to be successful if the importance of the business relationship is significant for both parties based on economic factors such as profit and dependency.
Once you know that the relationship is right, there are four key strategic issues to address:
- Build new systems or develop interfaces to existing systems?
The extent to which you build a new system or provide direct access to existing systems is a fundamental decision for the IT architecture. The more tactical solution is to build a new system, as this has the benefit of being easier to set up and control information sharing. But this often duplicates the functionality of existing systems and introduces a new data store of copied information.
A more strategic approach is to build interfaces to existing systems. Because the portal has already established these interfaces and overcome many of the data management issues, it can easily be used as the platform to provide external parties with access to the same information. Nevertheless, in either case, new processes around information ownership, control and access need to be established once external parties are being provided with access to company data.
- Select products from vendors who will be around in a few years' time
The collaboration systems market-place is very fragmented, with hundreds of vendors offering products that are strong in one particular area but weak elsewhere. A period of consolidation is inevitable and it is not yet clear who will emerge as the dominant players and who will fall by the way-side. Organizations wishing to make a significant product investment need to be confident that the supplier has the right strategy and sufficient resources to survive this consolidation.
- Use web services with care
Emerging web services standards such as XML and SOAP enable seamless interoperability between applications, but there are few examples of companies successfully using them. There is a need for higher-level web services functionality or industry specific standards, and these are either proprietary or still being developed. Even if the standards are agreed, companies still need to have consistent terminology and meaning before data can be shared.
- Don't underestimate the changes to service support
Expectations of service performance and reliability are high for collaborative systems, and often difficult to achieve. It is important for the IT department to have service levels in place making the appropriate link to other relevant parties involved in system support. Furthermore, disaster recovery plans and an exit strategy need to be in place to manage the risks of the shared system to the organization.
In summary, being able to manage and deliver timely, accurate and insightful content is a strategic business issue that must be addressed. Enterprise portals provide the way forward - and they need not become the next IT trend that fails to deliver real business benefit, providing they are carefully planned, managed and led by the business.
