COMMENTARY--Talk to any information technology, corporate communications, or eBusiness executive about their technology and marketing priorities, and you’ll likely hear an earful about enterprise portals. You’ll discover how these decision makers are building a portal for their company or how they wish they knew where to start.
The unfulfilled ‘90’s promise of B2C portals has been eclipsed by a new wave of B2B and B2E portals that are proving to have substantial ripple effects on every part of corporate life. For companies still recovering from information excess and process overload, portals offer a gateway to cost savings and efficiency improvement.
A portal often evolves through an enterprise first as an outlet for employees, then as an enhanced application aggregator, next as a content and service integrator, and ultimately as a collaborative business platform that can open to partners and customers.
It all starts inside your organization, with the decisions you make today. I hereby challenge you to be the change agent for sparking interest in portal development within your company.
Start by asking colleagues: How much time do you spend looking for information? How often do you recreate lost, misfiled, or outdated materials? How many phone calls and emails did it take to get your last business challenge solved? Knowing these answers will provide you the anecdotal data needed to convince your managers to green-light a portal.
As you dive fully into portal implementation, you will likely evaluate multiple software vendors and systems integrators. You’ll develop a roadmap of risks and rewards. But let’s dip our toes into the water first as you embark on the maiden voyage of portal-building in your organization. Start by following these rules – the seven C’s of launching an enterprise portal – and you’ll steer your way to cost savings and efficiencies:
1. Confirm c-suite buy-in.
In the quest to organize and disseminate information and processes in a way that is personalized for all of your key constituents, you must wear multiple hats. You must simultaneously manage the expectations of a variety of constituents while maintaining a technical fluency and finesse that can demonstrate why the portal is a destination worth building. While the idea of collaboration could seem esoteric to some, the bottom line impact you can stress to executives will certainly pique their interest.
Start by reminding executives how visionary they were to invest so much in ERP. Portals bring relevancy to and draw upon ERP and extend applications further across the enterprise. The portal’s layer of collaboration tools on top of ERP and legacy systems deliver information that will make users more effective in solving problems and serving customers.
There is often a glimmer in executives’ eyes when you show them how a portal can serve up real-time business metrics in a graphic interface right on their desktops. That “digital dashboard” proof of concept that folks have been showing off for the past few years never ceases to whet the appetite of management. Bold business moves--those “gut decisions” true leaders make--are easier to formulate with access to all the background information, including relevance and risk.
Many vertical industries have found specific ongoing benefits in portals that greatly improve their business processes. One of our pharmaceutical industry clients introduced a portal that enabled faster order processing. An insurance client’s portal was the source of uncovering information to detect fraud. Whether the value lies in personalized customer reports or simply on-time performance, the portal’s centralized access to data and applications allows you to refine raw data into useful information.
2. Construct a governance model.
Whether it’s a consortium of tech-savvy leaders from each business unit or the domain of a central department, the governance structure you choose will determine how the “bill becomes law” in proverbial portal implementation.
In making decisions about governance, poll your constituents; you’ll find in every department challenges that can be solved through a common collaboration platform. Marketing folks need to keep pace with messages that are constantly evolving in a rapidly shifting competitive landscape. The human resources department wants to handle more strategic tasks but is swamped with paperwork. Sales and delivery teams need instant access to data and to draw from past tools to avoid recreating the wheel. And accounting needs the ability to spot exceptions and nuances in the numbers they’re crunching.
With one of our aerospace clients, the governance of his company’s portal lies in the communications department, and he has shepherded content ranging from instruction manuals to medical insurance forms to company newsletters and sales force automation tools all into one system. Department heads or designees meet with him once a month to ensure the portal is meeting the needs of all constituencies.
Another client houses her portal in the company’s business operations unit, with input from the IT department for system scalability and support. Her portal maintains everything from software code to searchable HR databases, so it’s important that the platform support multiple applications and offers specialized collaboration areas.
3. Check out other innovators
Your company may already have standalone sites or portlets for specific business processes or single units, or you may have stopped a prior portal implementation in its tracks because of lack of focus or resources. One thing is for sure, though: someone in your industry has implemented a portal program successfully. Learn from them.
To benchmark best practices, you can either look at what a handful of competitors are doing, or you can choose a standout company from an industry with business processes that are a lot like yours. Another source for inspiration is partner companies: For instance, one restaurant franchise is looking at a food manufacturer’s portal for some components of its new system.
When benchmarking, determine how the company you’re evaluating is using the portal along with problems and challenges they had in implementing and maintaining it. Find out how they evaluated and arrived at the technologies they have chosen.
Benchmarking can mean borrowing as little or as much as you need. In one case, a financial institution modeled its taxonomy and infrastructure in a format similar to one a credit bureau had used. In another case, a retailer borrowed only the process for creating customized reports from the consumer products company whose portal it analyzed.
It will be gratifying to know that your portal had mentors! Build on the smarts of others, and develop a portal creatively and organically from that baseline in a way that is reflective of your company’s culture.
4. Calculate return on investment
Take a look at your company’s key metrics or business objectives, and map to these the critical areas in which your portal can have the most immediate and abiding impact.
For instance, if your company is a shipper, you can calculate how your portal could enable proactive notification and help shipments to be on time more often for the top ten customers who comprise the majority of your business.
Or if your engineering firm requires teamwork across the globe, the ROI of a portal becomes a function of collaboration ability: One engineer can work on a project until the sun sets, and another in a different time zone can pick up her lead, leaving notes about updates and changes. The efficiency of allowing multiple team members to collaborate without having to rely on email trails, paper sharing, or overnight-shipped high-density discs will make the ROI of a portal evident after the first successful project.
5. Create change
Implementing a portal means migrating from a mindset in which each person in your company is a free agent, working in a silo that neither draws from or adds to the collective company knowledge repository. The new reality of a company with a portal means data can now transform into information that leads to knowledge and more decisive action. This can be quite a sea change for the uninitiated and requires a change management process.
From teaching the fundamentals of access control to setting up discipline around adding metadata tags for new pieces of content, it is critical to put structure around these new changes in the way employees approach their daily tasks within the business.
One university that implemented an effective portal started an incentive program based around individual contributions to the portal’s knowledge database. Faculty members and college employees are judged on ensuring their additions to the portal are timely and helpful to others in the system.
Another organization--a biotech company--enforces rules that make specific content additions and collaboration check-ins mandatory. As a result, they demonstrate to key stakeholders their compliance with industry regulations and maintain an employee base that is 100 percent educated on key information that requires sign-on and authentication.
6. Classify priorities
If you’re creating a portal to solve your most pressing business needs, it won’t be difficult to get basic functionality up and running and live for your employees. There are always other bells and whistles that you can add in the next iteration. It is important to start with Column A of your requirements and Column B of your wish list for the near future.
One requirement is likely to be the capability to publish content and make it widely available and accessible to individuals throughout the company. For this step, ascertain how much content is out there and predict how fast it will grow. How many types of information content are out there? How will you organize and access it?
Another mandatory will be search capability. All the information you put into your portal should be classified in pre-determined categories and tagged for a quick search. Everyone in your company will become more resourceful with this capability.
In addition to the dozen or so features that directly support your business objectives and help you reduce costs, increase efficiency, and even generate revenues most expediently, there are a variety of advanced features to consider as you continue to expand the capabilities of your portal. These may include Web services or applications-on-demand, collaboration spaces that can be shared with partners or customers, online learning centers, syndicated content about your industry, instant messaging or discussion boards, polling, and common calendars extended enterprise-wide.
7. Conduct an adoption program.
Suppose you built a portal and nobody came. This was a scenario that one professional services company faced when it launched its enterprise portal last year. By its very nature, a portal requires perpetual input; and end users’ collaboration in the portal space will build on its own success. An adoption program--a methodical program to communicate the portal’s benefits and encourage constant use--is the step that brings your portal to full, vital life.
It is important to gain user acceptance early, to get employees to use the portal significantly so you can justify continued spending and resources to maintain it and upgrade it over time. Training comes in many forms and is specific to the culture of your organization. Some companies offer a self-paced learning program on how to use a portal; others use videos, poster teasers, printed brochures and fanfare including special events around the launch of a portal site to jumpstart interest and adoption.
Take a bottom-up approach rather than a top-down plan in promoting the portal. Any constituent who believes the portal is being forced on them or will only edify management will be less inclined to accept it. But the value of the portal will be clear to end users who discover they can focus in on the strategic work that really gets them jazzed, save time spent on mundane tasks, connect better with colleagues, or solve problems in ways that will advance their careers.
Portals can be a center of convergence for business processes. If you do your job well and follow the seven steps, all your work should be seamless and the portal will truly open the floodgates of savings and efficiency as an organic extension of your company’s mission.
biography
Kevin Foster is President of Atlanta-based Web development and consulting firm Macquarium Intelligent Communications. His firm focuses on four practices: enterprise portal development, content management systems, interactive marketing, and user experience. Macquarium serves clients such as UPS, The International Olympic Committee, CIBA Vision, and Randstad. (Contact Foster via pr@macquarium.com).
