The human element
Although it's clearly possible to encourage strong takeup of an appropriately designed portal, not all companies will immediately see such benefits. This is particularly the case as increasingly easy-to-use portal software puts control over communities into users' hands.
Yet John Brand, vice president of analyst firm META Group, warns that companies need to be careful not to get carried away with the technology: "There are a lot of different outcomes that organisations should be looking for in using collaborative technologies," he explains.
"The reality is that you can identify a team space for every employee, customer, group of employees, or business issue that comes up. But just because vendors are providing those technologies doesn't mean you should be using them in that way. Organisations need to really understand what their current collaboration environment is, then apply new technologies in a way that protects the integrity of their enterprise architecture."
The promise of improving teamwork, quickly and inexpensively, is a major asset when angling for executive support. But empty promises will never be accepted without someone to blame if they fall short -- something that's led most portal leaders to recognise that no collaboration portal can meet its business goals without human involvement. In successful online collaboration models, this involvement usually takes the form of a human mediator who is for the responsible usefulness and integrity of each portal sub-community.
Human mediation was crucial for Starbucks Coffee Company, the parent of what has become a 6300-store global franchise, as it sat down to plan out its own internal corporate portal. Providing a useful business tool required the company to construct a broadly accepted online community that reflected regional differences and suited the needs of individual operators, whilst providing for the maintenance of a consistent global brand.
Surveying users' requirements allowed the portal architects to build their online presence around five key types of communities: line-of-business (corporate business units), functional/role (eg store and business managers), project teams (cross-functional and temporary), social activities (non-business communities such as ski clubs), and products/promotions (such as the Starbucks Card loyalty programme).
Understanding its portal requirements helped Starbucks develop a portal that's proved remarkably relevant across its business. In early 2002, the portal went live within offices consisting of some 6500 employees; in June this year, the portal was expanded to cover four roles and 4,000 stores across North America. Around 12,500 users now access the portal, which includes 248 different portlets (portal hooks into business applications), 330 different communities, and 120,000 online documents.
More telling, use of the portal has climbed dramatically: workers at all of the company's stores access it at least once a week, and 89 percent access it daily. Internally, around 62 percent of users access the portal every day, while 81 percent visit weekly.
Kris Winkler, portal manager with Starbucks, credits the portal's success to the company's focus on appointing 'community managers' who are tasked with jobs such as monitoring discussions, managing community memberships, approving published content, and advocating the use of portal communities within the company. Starbucks community managers undergo training that educates them about the responsibilities of the position, which include processes for maintaining membership, slightly technical training about how portals function, and the need for metadata to improve document management.
By applying such rigour to the creation of online communities, companies can ensure that those communities are serving the specific business needs of carefully delineated organisational subgroups. The benefits, in other words, are maximised by avoiding inefficient use of the portal.
That's turned into big savings for Halliburton, which -- upon going live with its portal -- appointed full-time knowledge brokers from specific business units. These knowledge brokers understand the nuances of the business, and are responsible for facilitating communication between people that have problems, and the people that can fix those problems. Faster closing of support issues alone is estimated to be saving the company more than $1.2m annually.
Knowledge about knowledge
While people-mediated collaboration has allowed portals to deliver value in ways that were technologically unthinkable a few years ago, it's also raised the stakes of the portal game. Heavy portal users, after all, soon come to rely on the portal as their primary source of information about the company and their jobs. And if that information is anything less than 100 percent accurate, the results can be more catastrophic than if no portal was available at all.
Data problems often come to light during portal implementations, since the portal's role as a central point of contact means it's the vehicle for data from many different applications. And, if anecdotal experiences from past data migration projects are anything to go by, that data needs a serious going-over before it's opened to the world.
"The way intranets grew up, everyone just built their own [workflow] applications and had their own servers and databases," says Halliburton's Lackey. "It grew up until we had an intranet that was linking these things together. However, a lot of times there was no content management on the intranet: one of our users called it a garden full of weeds. And it can be hard to get through to the good stuff because you've got to get through the weeds. Don't move bad content to the portal."
For companies contemplating portal implementation, the message is clear: build as many communities as you need, but make sure that delegating control over those communities doesn't result in data chaos. This means better content management, something addressed through formal modules that clip into most modern portal frameworks.
These modules give portals robust capabilities for tracking document versions, guiding workflow processes throughout the organisation, and so on. They provide a consistent index of enterprise content that can be invaluable in finding archived information. They build on basic document management features by introducing the rigour of metadata and they are invaluable in cutting through data weeds and focusing projects on the most readily available business value.
Yet implementation of content management requires a considerable effort on its own, and that is a story for another day. For now, the successes of so many companies confirms that portals have become must-consider items in any IT strategy.
