What to Do
Understand the Possibilities
An enterprise portal (sometimes called an enterprise information portal) can be just a company intranet, but an effective portal offers not only internal content, but also external content useful to employees and customers. The portal can be set up to entitle (allow access) to sensitive company information only by employees, while general information is available to the public.
Learn from Others
Software packages are available for companies desiring to develop their own portals, but it’s important to remember that, while anyone can publish on the Internet, that doesn’t mean that people will want to read their content. Few public portals have survived, because they have not been able to build a viable business case.
Some portals provide information that is organized around a vertical market sector, such as pharmaceuticals or plastics. These “vortals” and e-marketplaces are similar and in many sectors may be one and the same thing. Few of these vortals, if they haven’t evolved into e-marketplaces, may survive either.
The lessons to be drawn from a study of public portals and industry vortals include the following:
- People are very conservative in the way they consume content
- The majority of people favor a few trusted brands
- Maintaining a portal is expensive, and many have not survived because they did not have a proper business model
Keep the Attention of a Captive Audience
The enterprise portal would seem to have its employees as a captive audience, but staff who use an enterprise portal demand high publishing standards. Such standards are expensive to maintain, and many enterprise portals fail because they lack enough quality content, the content is not kept up to date, and the portal is poorly organized and structured. Many organizations discover that providing a volume of relevant information is good in theory but expensive and difficult to manage in practice.
Assess Your Employees’ Content Needs
Before deciding to establish an enterprise portal, ask the following questions:
- How are employees’ information needs currently being met?
- Are any of these needs not fully satisfied?
- Can our company fill this gap in a cost-effective manner?
- Will my staff trust me to provide information?
- Will there be a return on this investment?
The key question must be: Where is the return on investment? If employees can just as easily get this information somewhere else, why duplicate the effort? Unfortunately, organizations often don’t take the time to examine which content is of value to the business and which has little effect.
Where to Learn More
Books:
Kastel, Berthold.
Wilson, Chip.
Web Sites:
IT Toolbox/Knowledge Management-Knowledge Base, “Enterprise Portals”: http://knowledgemanagement.ittoolbox.com/topics/t.asp?t=322&p=322&h1=322
Microsoft’s “Microsoft Web Enterprise Portal”: www.microsoft.com/technet/itshowcase/content/MSWebTWP.mspx
