Unifying the Extended Enterprise
by BroadVision, Inc.
Portals promise to simplify the process of accessing relevant information—while CIOs must deliver immediate benefits despite increasing system complexity and reduced IT budgets. Enterprises support more business applications than ever before. And users want faster web browser-based access to more applications and information. As these demands tax web infrastructures, web sites are proliferating without central oversight.
Portals can help users get the right information quickly. Unfortunately, how point-solution portals “simplify” information access can increase IT expense and the complexity of content management and reduce information quality across the enterprise.
Why Portals Are Popular
Point-Solution Portals
Point-solution portals are generally inexpensive and relatively easy to implement. Business units often create these department-level solutions without corporate direction. Such “quick fix” portals cause decentralization, undermine corporate security, raise IT costs and reduce content and brand quality.
Because they put a thin veneer over multiple web sites, enterprise-information portals can disguise and encourage proliferation of sites company-wide. Yet each new site increases system cost and maintenance—up to $1 million annually per fully transactional site, according to the Gartner Group.
Content dispersed in decentralized systems can easily become outdated or inconsistent, making users wonder which information is correct. When content consistency suffers, so does brand, as more people compose in their own “voice,” regardless of corporate strategy and style. If customers and partners must visit multiple sites, their annoyance level is heightened by having to deal with different interface styles at each point. A customer relationship management system may provide a single view of the customer only to the organization, not to the customer. And many employees must visit different internal sites to complete simple tasks.
Next-Generation Portals
The next generation of portals can eliminate proliferated web sites as separate entities. This helps organizations gain oversight of their web presence and improve content quality and consistency of branding and information online. Next-generation portals reduce IT costs. Companies with dozens of sites, each requiring upkeep, could realize a 30% savings on administration and development costs from next-generation portals, plus save on hardware, databases and middleware necessary to run multiple sites.
Next-generation portals also enable collaboration across enterprises and consolidate back-end systems and databases under one common interface. They offer a personalized entry point with information and business processes targeted to users. Partners, suppliers, customers and employees can quickly locate the information they want. Next-generation portals increase productivity and furnish a consistent user experience, eliminating conflicting or outdated content. Besides self-service, next-generation portals offer personalization, integration, content management and scalability.
Personalization involves creating a web site based on who the user is, what he or she is doing or what he or she saw, bought or saved. It reduces operating expenses by enabling employees, business partners and customers to complete certain transactions without assistance. It also increases revenue potential by strengthening customer loyalty and providing more opportunities to purchase products or services.
Customization—configurable home pages or access control—does not “learn” over time or target information moment to moment. In next-generation portals, personalization also supplies relevant information to users based on known characteristics—for example, where they work, their interests and their online behavior. This portal reacts in real time to users’ needs and provides a personalized path to information. Some portals can personalize the quality of service based on the user’s role or activity. Next-generation portals must provide options for integrating to legacy systems—and for handling duplicate systems resulting from mergers. These include integrations by enterprise application integration vendors or point-to-point integrations using J2EE technologies. The portal must display these integrations simply and allow users to add them to configurable home pages. Portlets let users access databases, applications, other sites and external data feeds, such as stock quotes.
Content management facilities ensure that the portal’s content is appropriate, categorized, targeted to the right users and approved. These features range from publishing content directly into the portal without stringent workflows to highly controlled processes in which content is reviewed, versioned, tracked and managed at every step. Portal users can obtain syndicated content from other sources. To reliably support business-critical interactions with customers, partners, suppliers and employees, a next-generation portal must perform well under peak loads. Scalability features such as persistent caching, automated fail-over, load balancing, quality of service and distributed, delegated administration are essential for an enterprise-class solution.
IT Strategies for Tough Times
Excerpts from an interview with Shawn Farschi, CIO and SVP of Engineering
As BroadVision’s CIO and SVP of engineering, Shawn Farshchi understands IT pain points and is in a position to do something about them.
Q: What keeps CIOs awake at night in 2002?
A: In 1999 and 2000, it was fixing the Y2K issue and supporting all the new e-business initiatives. Then 2001 showed up and the economy took a nose dive. The result for IT organizations was: number one, they had to cut their budgets and their headcount; number two, they still had to show value to the business; and number three, as companies became more conscious about spending money, integration became a priority. Now the biggest challenge for IT managers is how to keep the organization going with constrained resources and how to get integration happening between many, disparate systems.
Q: What are CIOs doing about integration, given the lack of resources?
A: The brave ones are attempting the integration in-house. Others are falling back on outsourcing. Outsourcing makes it drastically easier because you don’t have to worry about the integration or the resources required to maintain them.
Q: What do you lose by outsourcing?
A: You lose the quick response—or you pay heavily to get it. When you lose expertise in-house, you also lose ingenuity. The vendor is also serving several different companies, so they don’t really understand every single business that they are providing services to.
Before the outsourcing trend, IT was making a big comeback. Rather than just providing phones and e-mail and things like that, they were getting involved in business processes. By outsourcing it, the expertise goes away and resources are shifting back to the business side. Instead of IT becoming more knowledgeable about business, the finance guy has to understand what does it mean to run one financial application over another. So there’s a lot to be lost when you outsource.
BroadVision InfoExchange Portal
Product Highlights:
InfoChannels: Managers may push info to targeted groups; Users may tune in to specific content, or receive notice of document events
Single sign-on access to pre-set apps and info
User management (LDAP) integration
Advanced personalization by business rules, context, access rights and user role and preferences
InfoExchange Portlets: Access external data feeds, legacy and ERP systems
Touchpoint integration: Wireless, POS, etc.
Collaboration pages: Document sharing, threaded discusssions, task/meeting management, knowledge communities
Workflow, Process/Task Automation
Alerts/Event Notification
E-mail integration (Reprinted with Permission, The Delphi Group, May 2001)
BroadVision is the world’s leading supplier of enterprise self-service (ESS) applications and technology that enable organizations to create immediate business value by fundamentally transforming the way they do business—moving interactions, transactions and services from a resource-centric paradigm to a personalized self-service model that enhances growth, reduces costs and improves productivity. More than 1,200 leading companies and government entities around the globe use BroadVision-powered applications to enable their enterprise self-service initiatives. They are leveraging the web to their wireless devices to unify and extend their enterprise’s applications, information and business processes to better serve their employees, partners and customers in a personalized and collaborative way.
BroadVision’s customer base represents a broad spectrum of organizations, including British Telecom, The Boeing Company, E*Trade, Ericsson, FleetBoston Financial, GE Supply, Home Depot, Rockwell Automation, Sears, State of California, Toyota and Vodafone. To learn how BroadVision can help your business create a next-generation portal, please contact your BroadVision sales representative at ContactUs@BroadVision.com or visit BroadVision.