InformationWeek

"My taxonomy of information--or topics and categories--might always be displayed on the left, decision-support graphs in the middle, my news feeds on the right, my company-news ticker tape at the top, and my toolbox at the bottom," says Jonathan Harding, executive VP of Viador. "What I actually see in each of those windows will be determined by who I am, what I do, and by my preferences."

Portals are growing so popular that Yankee Group predicts the worldwide market for business portals will reach $1.2 billion by 2003. The portal is the latest stage in the intranet's evolution, and it's one that should be embraced by all companies, says Mark O'Connor, Yankee Group's associate director for enterprise knowledge management, because the benefits far outweigh the hassle of implementing and maintaining the technology.

The main advantages, analysts and users say, are increased productivity and job satisfaction. If, for example, a manager gets a request for proposals from a big insurance company and has to respond in 10 days, he or she can use the portal to find the content and people that can help produce the RFP. The manager can also put out a request for help from someone who has experience preparing RFPs for insurance companies.

Still, quantifying the benefits that IT managers, analysts, and portal software vendors insist come with portal use can be hard to do. "It's difficult to put a hard number on the value of a product-research person finding something on the intranet that they may not have been able to find before and, because of that, speeding up the development of a new product," Gerbus says. "How do you even find out what happened, much less measure it?"

Some companies are turning to outside consultants that use benchmarking techniques to help them measure the benefits of implementing portal technology. Osram Sylvania Inc. is using a portal to move its previously outsourced benefits administration in-house. After hiring a consultant to do the metrics, the lighting manufacturer expects the move to save $750,000 a year, a number that's expected to grow as the company insources more of the HR process, says Roger Rudenstein, project manager in the IT division.

As good as portals can be, there's no such thing as a one that works for all companies. Although many vendors boast that their tools can handle all users' needs, that's rarely, if ever, the case. "There's no single portal that offers you access to everything you need," says Yankee Group's O'Connor. "You have to pick your battles to decide what should be included and what can be included, determine what sort of information you're trying to include, and then make a decision about which vendor best fits that scenario."

While some companies focus on companywide portals, others prefer to create a portal for each division. Osram Sylvania's HR InfoNet portal, which is accessible by the Danvers, Mass., company's 12,500 employees through the company intranet, provides only human-resources information--though that covers quite a bit, including benefits policies and enrollment, job applications and postings, bonus and pension information, and salary valuations based on current labor-market data.

The portal has greatly reduced the time it takes employees to find information and enroll in benefits plans, and has made other processes more efficient, Rudenstein says. Managers can create requisitions for job postings online that are sent instantaneously for approval to the human resources specialist assigned to that group. The approved job posting is then sent automatically to employees via E-mail and becomes part of the permanent job file. The job listing is also posted automatically on the intranet and on the company's public Web site.

"We're slowly but surely Web-izing the entire HR department, from a bunch of static pages that people couldn't navigate well to a rapid process that relies on intelligent workflow," Rudenstein says.

The Federal Highway Administration, with the help of American Management Systems and the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has built a portal by using a combination of Lotus Domino release 5 templates and custom coding. The portal, which is available to all 2,900 agency employees, replaced a system based on Xerox's DocuShare platform.

continued...page 3
return to page 1