Portals: Opening new doors to business

Case study: Sun shines on Suncorp portal
Financial services institutions live and die by their numbers, which makes it understandable why Suncorp made the consolidation of myriad financial reports a focus of its recent portal project.

Australia's sixth-largest bank and one of its biggest insurers, Suncorp has grown rapidly recently, particularly since its consolidation with Metway and 2001 acquisition of insurer GIO, which grew Suncorp to have 3.8 million customers. From an information systems point of view, however, this expansion meant that data had proliferated to every corner of the company -- and reporting suffered as a result.

Information created by analysts around the organisation was emailed to managers, printed and slipped under doors, stored in Excel spreadsheets or Word documents, or buried in any of a number of information systems. Managers often had to log onto several different systems before finding the information they needed.

"There was such a wealth and breadth of management information that they were losing track of information and the passwords to get it," says Damian Trad, information systems manager with Suncorp. "We wanted to bring together a lot of this information as a collation exercise."

A portal seemed like a natural solution for the company's woes. The IT team surveyed the market, and eventually selected Computer Associates' CleverPath as the basis of the system that would become known as eBis.

EBis provides Web-based access to a unified view of all sorts of information sourced from systems built on data platforms including Cognos (for OLAP analysis) and Business Objects (for business intelligence), and a variety of Cold Fusion-based reporting applications. Using a single password that authenticates them onto every system they need to access, managers can instantly access updated reports, PDFs, Office documents, and whatever else they need. Access controls are no issue, and the consistent presentation interface makes it much easier to act upon relevant information.

The system has been received so well by executives that the project team has been busy further upgrading its functionality. Senior managers worked with the IT team to customise the portal for the needs of business unit and eventually branch managers, giving eBis a total user base of several thousand people throughout the company.

Trad identifies increased productivity, shorter turnaround time for decision-making, the elimination of unnecessary manual labour, and even savings on disk storage as benefits of the portal. More importantly, it's unified the business decision makers -- and changed the company's culture in terms of the way information is perceived.

"It's been very well received, to the point that bank managers can't really send spreadsheets to their managers anymore because those managers have a distrust of anything that doesn't come from eBis," he crows. "They're sceptical of anything e-mailed to them. It's the availability, detail of information, and the accuracy of the portal that they've come to know and trust."

With such strong adoption amongst Suncorp's users, the challenge of acceptance has been well and truly conquered at the company. In the future, the portal team plans to increase the portal's ability to add value to the information it presents -- by, for example, grouping data into key performance indicators (KPIs) that can give managers a business dashboard-style view.

"We want to do a lot more in terms of tying analytics to strategy," Trad says.