Enterprise Portals As Executive Early Warning Systems

You should congratulate yourself. You were one of the smart ones. You recognized the value of an enterprise portal immediately, and you’ve standardized on an enterprise-wide portal for all of your employees and business partners. Everyone comes in every morning and logs into their personalized workspace for access to all of the data, content, systems, and applications that they need to do their job. You’ve done everything you can possibly do with a portal, right? Maybe not.

Ever notice what almost all executives do when asked a question about the health of their business? Or about sales or production or shipments last month or last year? They pick up the phone—because the person who has the answer is somewhere in IT or IS, and the answer is decidedly not available in any portlet in any Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) that this executive can access. Or, if it is buried somewhere within the content of the EIP, it certainly can’t be found quickly or easily.

In working with thousands of executives at Global 2000 organizations in virtually all industries, we have integrated our dashboard technology with our portal technology to define a new Best Practice in Enterprise Portals: creating portal-based executive dashboards. These dashboards not only provide an easy-to-understand visual representation of business metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs), but also function as early warning systems to enable corrective action that can prevent small concerns from becoming huge crises.

Our architecture enables implementation of these dashboards with an amazingly fast time-to-value, both in terms of initial deployment and ongoing business value. For example:

• A customer in the shipping industry was able to create an executive dashboard, from plan to deployment, in 9 business days
• Employees at a large manufacturing company are now able to get customized reports in 2-3 minutes instead of hours or days
• A telecommunications provider is able to process orders 30 times faster than before
• A large transportation provider improved from #10 in on-time performance to #1
• An insurance company saved over $3 million (U.S.) per year by detecting fraudulent claims.

These cost and time savings are due to the ability of our architecture to leverage the same interface that the executives are already familiar with; to access the same applications, systems and data sources that the portal is already integrated with, and to provide prebuilt interfaces to the most commonly-requested KPIs and business metrics.

The combination of the familiar portal interface and the visual graphics provide executives, or any business decision makers, with an easy-to-interpret view of the health of their business—along with an immediate indication of any problem areas, or areas of concern.

For more information about how CA’s CleverPath™ solutions can deliver executive dashboards, visit http://www.ca.com/cleverpat