Introduction to Enterprise Portals
"Portal" is a term overloaded with many definitions. Telling colleagues at your enterprise that you are heading up a portal project offers no guarantee that they will understand it nearly the same way you do. Portal could mean a public destination like yahoo.com, portal software like SharePoint Portal Server, or simply an intranet website that aggregates important links on common index pages. For our purposes, an enterprise portal is:
A framework for integrating information and processes across organizational boundariesThe concept of an online portal is not new, although it has evolved over time. The mid-1990s saw the advent of public portals like AltaVista, AOL, Excite, and Yahoo!. These sites provided a key set of features most notably news, e-mail, weather, stock quotes, and search combined with advertising. In the interest of stickiness, these public portals tried to provide as much information and services as possible in one place to make the visitor stay longer.
Before long, companies of all sizes began to see a need for a similar starting place for their variety of internal repositories and applications, many of which were migrating to Web-based technologies. The enterprise portal was born. Naturally, software vendors were fast to pick up on this need and beginning in 1999 began releasing portal software, basically toolkits for enterprises trying to develop internal and partner portals. Many of these early products were built off a particular application server and vendors saw them as a chance to stave off the commoditization of application server technology.
Frustration and Promise
Today enterprise portals have become a common component of IT infrastructures, even if many portal software licensees have struggled to get full value from their investments amid basic questions about their purpose and value. Portal remains a frequently misused word, and even some vendors try to avoid the term, favoring instead talking about personalization, self-service, or employee dashboards. Some of the confusion stems from the fact that portals like any enterprise-scale software can offer a wide range of functionality in contrast to more self-contained applications. Many IT applications address a narrow, departmental need, such as a process control system for a specialized manufacturing operation. Some applications, like financial packages, touch many parts of an organization but are ultimately controlled and managed by a single department.
Portals are different. They reach multiple points in an organization but do not necessarily have a single owner. As frameworks for integrating applications and processes across organizational boundaries, portals have taken on growing importance as well as daunting complexity. Implementing a portal raises difficult issues about business processes, systems integration, information architecture, security, and a host of other factors that span organizations. If a financial application is not sharing data with a manufacturing package, a portal will not solve that problem. The portal project may provide an umbrella operation for initiating the necessary integration work but be careful of putting the cart before the horse. Portals often simply project underlying problems in IT infrastructure to a wider audience.
Nonetheless, as a concept, portals are here to stay, because, under the right circumstances, they can provide real business value. Many portal implementations are justified on a combination of tactical cost savings, such as reducing content distribution costs (e.g., printing, faxing, mailing), or reduced support expenses associated with self-service applications and online help.
While these cost savings can indeed be realized, in the past few years portals have come to be seen as more strategic applications. The goals of organizations deploying enterprise portals tend to be tied to broad organizational objectives, such as:
Reducing call center costs by driving customer support to the Web Streamlining the supply chain by giving suppliers access to inventory and related information for just-in-time inventory management
Automating workflow processes and business rule enforcement to improve operational consistency and ensure compliance with regulations
Decreasing security risk exposure by better managing identities, application access, user provisioning, and auditing.
Just as importantly, portals lie at the confluence of three important technology trends:
A renewed emphasis on enterprise architecture and a desire to harmonize IT investments across distributed organizations.
The dominance of the Web platform including the ubiquity of the browser as a common client and the concomitant desire within enterprises to work from a common Web application development and information platform.
The very slow but inexorable transition to more componentized, services-oriented architectures which beg some sort of common platform for services to be provisioned, aggregated, and integrated.
All the same, successful portals depend on well-designed policies and procedures. Organizations deploying portals should commit to addressing governance topics, including:
How to delegate administration responsibilities Who controls access to content in a portal
Who defines taxonomies
How to set information architecture standards such as page layout, navigation, and metadata standards
How to set critical security and identity management issues.
Portals raise organizational as well as technical challenges. I n this area of the site as well as our Enterprise Portals Report, we identify and investigate these challenges fully.