The joys of enterprise portals: establishing a successful enterprise portal can help businesses manage company information, databases, and records more easily and efficiently.

• Author: Rose, Jerrold G.
• Position: Tech Trends

At the Core

This article

* describes portal uses and capabilities

* examines how to successfully determine which functions to target for portal technology

* reviews crucial elements of portal implementation

Even though the term "portal" continues to be an industry buzzword, it is a technology that is widely misunderstood and misused. Delphi Group, a Boston-based business and technology advisory group, defines the enterprise portal as a single point of integrated, personalized, online access and further states that "it is important to establish that the business portal is not a thing, but an application deploying a broad set of technologies following a highly customized information design." Another, simpler description of a portal is: a Web site offering a broad array of resources and services for members, such as e-mail, forums, search engines, chat groups, and online shopping malls.

Lured by strong sales pitches and the desire for immediate results, many companies bought into the financial promise of portals without fully comprehending the necessity of identifying applicable functions within their businesses or the role of a solid, executable strategy for portal implementation. As a result, companies abandoned the process and are left with disorganized, unmaintained, and unused Web pages that provide less-than-adequate or less-than-desirable information.

To say that enterprise portals have made their way into the corporate mainstream during the past few years would be an understatement. In fact, portals have become big business. It would be hard to find a major company or organization that has yet to incorporate a portal structure for its business practices or, at the very least, begun to explore the realm of possibilities with portal technology.

According to recent research by Delphi Group, the combined enterprise portal software market is expected to reach $957 million worldwide by the end of 2003, an anticipated growth rate of more than 20 percent over 2002. In fact, growth has been in double and triple digits since 1999, when Delphi first started monitoring the enterprise portal software market. So the relevance of enterprise portals in today's marketplace cannot be understated.

If portal technology has become so commonplace and leading companies have stretched their budgets to accommodate portal implementation within their corporate structure, why are some portals drawing more criticism than praise from records and information managers who evaluate and manage portal performance? When enterprise portals fail to deliver the benefits they were intended to deliver--increased work productivity, expanded bottom line, and improved management, employee, and customer satisfaction--the reasons typically include a lack of strategic planning and difficulty in implementation.

How, then, can information managers ensure that their employers' portals deliver maximum results for business? To understand what makes portal implementation successful, it is important to understand what an enterprise portal's capabilities and uses are.

The "Gateway-to-the-World" Model

There are many ways to describe a portal and its functions, and the definition of a portal is a moving target, which helps explain why many intranets, extranets, and basic Web sites are currently mislabeled as "portals" What truly differentiates portals from those is a portal's ability to organize both data and functions from multiple sources into a single, easy-to-use interface.

Yahoo, eBay, and Amazon.com were among the first to offer consumers the convenience of purchasing products and services online and so are common examples of successful portal technology. In a sense, such portals revolutionized the way businesses market themselves to consumers. Expanding on that trend, a growing number of companies are adapting the enterprise portal's "gateway-to-the-world" model as an efficient way to support their business efforts. Many companies' futuristic goal is to enable all employees, customers, and vendors to access the information and functions they need anywhere and at anytime via the enterprise portal.

Enterprise portals allow a central user interface to "push" and "pull" information from internal and external sources. Portals also integrate disparate internal and external business applications and provide transaction-processing support to all involved parties. These generic functions support any corporate function, from marketing to manufacturing.

In many ways, managing company information, databases, and records is simpler and more manageable via an enterprise portal, as opposed to the company's Web site serving as the recipient of all office "post-it" notices. For example, imagine that a lawsuit against a large international corporation stipulates that all information on a particular issue from four different divisions must be retrieved and handed over to the court. The reality of such a situation...