Portals: Opening new doors to business

Executive summary: building a better portal

Don't look to Yahoo for inspiration. Combining lots of content onto one screen may win over customers looking for a one-stop shop for information, but it can confuse employees who just want to get their job done. Tailor the portal with appropriate content for each person or group -- and think broadly about just what 'content' means. It's about a lot more than just showing the latest share price or social announcements.

Refine your sense of community. One of portals' biggest benefits is that they're accessible from anywhere. That makes for much better teamwork than when everybody's relying on streams of cryptic emails. Build your portal around communities of interest, then provide them with the tools to shape those communities as best suits their own needs.

Brush up on your IM lingo. Instant messaging started off as a novelty technology for millions of ICQ users, but it's well and truly in the business mainstream now -- particularly as collaborative portals are being given IM features so users can communicate on projects in real time. If the portal is the infrastructure for enterprise applications, IM is becoming the telephone system.

Knowledge management isn't about managing knowledge anymore. It's about managing people -- and, increasingly, about finding them. Once you can find someone, you can tap into their knowledge in a far more interactive and useful way than if you try to get them to commit words of wisdom into some database somewhere.

Listen to the business people...After all, they're going to be the ones using the portal. The best portal business cases are built not around better presentation of content, but instead around solving specific business problems such as ways to provide better technical support, customer interaction, visibility of company performance, and so on.

...then put them to work. Although portal technology can do a lot of things, it can't effectively make human judgments about the value or proper categorisation of content. Just as with the bulletin boards of old or moderated newsgroups of today, successful portal communities are managed by a subject matter expert who can keep things moving, solve potential problems faster, and keep the members of the community focused and talking.

Delineate roles carefully. Because the portal provides a window into so much critical business information -- often available with a single password -- it's essential that adequate security mechanisms are in place. User authentication, directory services, and business policies about who can view and change what are all essential companions to a portal project.

Get your numbers right. Although they combine all sorts of information into a single place, portals can also become conduits for misinformation if the underlying data is incorrect. And it often is incorrect. Technically, you don't actually migrate data into a portal -- but make sure you check and clean your data sources before putting too much stock in potentially inaccurate numbers. Some companies end up discarding nearly two thirds of their irrelevant or inaccurate data.

Moderation is a good thing. Vendors have produced thousands of portlets that can snap into your portal, and offer rich toolkits that will let you integrate every feature known to man. Don't pay too much attention to what vendors offer; focus on how they can give you what you need.

Expect big things. Success is contagious. Once your users start realising that a portal is making their lives easier, anticipate increasing demands for new features and capabilities. Their dependence on the portal carries great responsibilities, but can also become a driver for significant cultural and procedural change throughout the company.

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