Enterprise Portal Development Methodology
Key to Avoiding the Mistakes of Intranets

Mike Rogero, Managing Director, Ion Global Taiwan
2nd Quarter, 2001 (Published by Oracle Corporation in 3rd Quarter 2001)


Sometimes known as third generation intranets, Enterprise Portals are taking the forefront in the next stage in corporate technology development as we go into the third phase of Internet growth – the collaborative technology age. The next wave of development after the end of dot.com frenzy will be found in bringing the power of the Internet tools to bear on the enterprise work environment by providing increased collaboration both within the workplace and through extending the enterprise systems out to customers and business partners. The 2nd e-commerce stage opened up businesses to partner’s transactions but the current phase will be about true integration of work processes and dissolving of barriers between partners, the enterprise, and customers. Enterprise Portals play a key role in this transition by empowering the Enterprise to open up not only information and transaction based processes but to also open up collaboration and workflow across departments, and outside of the Enterprise. Portals integrate disperate users and partners in shared systems which include workflow, performance metrics and information sources. By implementing these open information platform, the Enterprise is able to push decision making further down into the organization improving organizational efficiency at all levels.

Portal technology seems at first glance to be very similar to current Internets. However there are several key differences in what they offer the Enterprise. These differences also call upon very different ways of approaching planning and implementing a portal.

Role base vs. Content based – Enterprise portals focus on the role of the user and base all aspects of content, security, collaboration and presentation on the role of the user at that time. The knowledge economy makes switching roles a common facet of work. A single employee will often change roles depending on their responsibilities in any particular project. This fluidity of roles also calls upon their tools to be able to match the fluidity in responsibilities, which causes considerable challenge to developers to be able to correctly identify the various roles and levels within an enterprise and be able to reflect the processes and content for that particular role. Unlike intranets, this requires considerably more portal development energy to be focused on accurately reflecting roles and jobs within an organization.

Work based vs. Content based – Portal technology focuses on moving the desktop and related daily work processes into the portal. The greatest value of a portal comes from integrating the full process and workflow of a user. Intranets on the other hand have focused on simple delivery of content and have typically not offered clear categorization and search functionality seriously limiting their usefullness. In an era of information overload, the challenge is to clear off the desktop and focus specifically on the workflow of the user, not continue to pile more information on them. This requires a completely different way of looking at content since the focus is to provide only what a specific user will need for any particular role. Simply focusing on content delivery misses the point of increasing productivity by limiting value to delivery of content.

Knowledge Retention vs. Delivery – The change in focus from delivery of content to capturing workflow is also reflective of the change toward better forms of knowledge retention and syndication across a corporation. Intranets generally were a collection of documents scattered around an organization. Portals on the other hand are work platforms, which should be designed to not only facilitate work but to be able to capture and syndicate out the knowledge of the users. By centering around integration with the enterprise systems as well as building a slate of collaboration tools, all aspects of work become able to be learned from both in terms of processes appropriate for specific roles as well as grabbing the knowledge present in group asynchronous communication areas such as e-mail, instant messaging and chats. Often these communications are in direct response to questions from users which if can be gleaned to quickly build company knowledge bases.

What we are witnessing is the growth of new generation of platforms and systems growing from Internet technology. Moving from difficult to use document systems, intranets were a first stage to the next generation of productivity improvements based on portal technology. As we enter the collaboration era of Internet development, the focus must change from content delivery to workflow and process delivery. This change in development methodology is the key to avoiding the mistakes of past intranet failures and should be kept at the forefront when planning portal projects and choosing platforms and vendors for the project.