Enterprise Information Portals: The Power and the Peril, Andy Moore
I read an article the other day on the subject of enterprise portals. The otherwise informative and interesting piece featured a graphic of a bottle labeled “Portal—The All-In-One Solution.” The implication, I suppose, is that portal technologies should be viewed dubiously, as one would a traveling salesman’s flim-flam ... a sort of snake-oil grift preying on the hayseed rube technology buyer that stakes his future on the next big buzzword . . .
What a load of crap.
There are so many things wrong with that illustration that it’s practically libelous.
I can tell you this: Portals—Enterprise Information Portals, to be formal—are the most uniquely democratic technology development that I’ve ever witnessed. Why? Because portals were never imposed. Nobody ever said: “Today, let them eat portal.” And do you want to know why? Because people want portals. They truly do. More to the point ... YOUR people want portals.
Granted, there’s a substantial amount of marketingship at work, but it’s unfair to drape such a valuable and clever advancement with such a thoughtless cloak. There’s greatness and there’s guile here, and we need to understand the difference. And that’s why we are publishing this collection of positions and practices.
When it Works, It Works “The purpose of portals is to leverage existing applications into a better view, one that is familiar to people,” reminds Bob Kruger, VP and Chief Technology Officer of Citrix, a professional services goliath that recently acquired Sequoia Software.
Portals emerged, practically from grassroots, as information workers learned (quickly, those clever buggers) to cop ideas from their home-consumer faves (such as My Yahoo!) and apply them to their workplace information view, “beginning life as a consumer application before business began to perceive its value,” as The Delphi Group puts it. Then, something not completely typical happened: business DID begin to perceive the value hidden in portals. Remember, at the time the management books and magazines were all talking about collaboration, frictionless information access, knowledge management, etc., so it’s easy to imagine the reasoning that led to attempts—still ongoing attempts—to create the business equivalent of MyYahoo! in your own backyard.
“Creating portals is a good first step in leveraging unstructured information,” says Nimish Mehta, CEO of PurpleYogi. “The problem is how do you use it, maintain it, keep it current.” Creating a business MyYahoo! is a pretty good rough diagram for a business plan, but it’s a long way from there to complete solution. And what we have learned from compiling this White Paper on Enterprise Information Portals is: we ain’t there yet.
Mission Impossible In business, knowledge is an extreme sport. Providing the gear for such dangerous play is not for the timid. The challenge for portal vendors is not so much “what is a portal?” but “what ISN’T a portal?” It’s amusing to read some of the “early literature” (we’re talking 1998 here) while it tried to deal with the definition question. As is traditional, the writers strained for metaphors from daily life to describe complex technologies: “A portal is like a door ...”; “A portal is a kind of gatekeeper”; “A portal is like the dashboard of a ‘64 Chevy Impala.”
If a portal is a door, it’s not a very darn good one. Doors keep things out and restrict access from both sides. If a portal IS a door, it better be a screen door that allows the free ventilation of content to pass both ways, filtered, maybe, but only slightly restricted. The difficult trick, as Mehta points out, is to make certain that the filter understands the needs of the worker, and adjusts to keep the good stuff coming in, but avoids creating an “information landfill.”
If a portal is a gatekeeper, you can keep it. The last thing a rapid organization needs is a traffic cop. And as for the Chevy Impala ... I made that one up. I just had one of those once, and I miss it. (Although, now that I think about it, smarter people than me have tried to strain that dashboard metaphor.)
Speaking of strained metaphors: “It is as if the user is at the doorstep of a great library with well-indexed catalogs and colorful signs to help her find anything she wants, but what’s the point if she has no idea what to look for or how to apply what’s ‘out there’ to the task at hand. That’s where portals fail today—they dump you in front of a flood of resources without helping you figure out what to do with them!” —Kumar Nochur
Kumar is a buddy of mine who is not only a Ph.D., but is also smart. Kumar has developed KM and decision-support software to help people get more leverage from their corporate portals. And as you read this White Paper, you’ll discover that most of the vendors in this space are doing something similar, i.e., trying to improve existing offerings by enhancing the “back-end” or the “front-end” or the “middle-ware” or some damn thing.
And I can’t help thinking ... “Why do I need a Ph.D. and another product? Why can’t I just buy a portal that does the job, and let’s get on with it?” I mean, I’ve already owned up to the knowledge-sharing problem, and I bought the information-overload thing and I think there’s something to this New Economy stuff, so how come my problems just get worse???
“A portal,” says Bob Wesker, CEO of Sequoia Software, “is supposed to know what you don’t know.” Whoa. THAT'S the challenge for the vendors and those who deploy enterprise portals—a portal has to do the impossible, and that's why it's so difficult!
Where Are We Anyway? The Delphi Group is as—totally deservedly—respected an analyst group as you’ll ever find. They have fresh research that shows that business portal software sales, which reached $407 million in 2000, will continue its high-double-digit-growth through to 2003 and, I guess, beyond. But they are also quick to caution that the total cost of ownership in enterprise portals hides a severe iceberg effect, meaning there’s a BUNCH of stuff that doesn’t meet the eye. And you don’t have to be Leonardo DiCaprio to understand what that means.
On a recent syndicated business TV show, Sun Microsystems’ CEO Scott McNealy admitted that “somewhere between zero and 20% of our structured and unstructured information is Web-ready.” Wow. This is SUN we’re talking about, for cryin’ out loud, and they are as darkly prepared as the rest of us when it comes to presenting information to users, partners and the public. Add to this: context-sensitive information requirements; revolving workforces; misaligned IT infrastructures; and just plain screw-ups.
“With multiple information and application sources, cycles get long in an enterprisewide solution,” warns Sequoia’s Bob Wesker. This long cycle time has created what Delphi terms an “unanticipated cost center.” Not what most executives want to hear when they sign up for a solution.
But it’s ultimately the moving-target nature of the beastly thing that is the problem. PurpleYogi’s CEO Nimish Mehta summarizes the challenge this way: “As companies grow, they evolve ... things change. Portals must be adaptable to the concept drift that occurs as businesses progress.” “Concept drift.” Great term, but an even greater problem for information delivery systems. It’s bad enough when merger or acquisition forces a seismic change onto a workforce. It’s easy to predict the turmoil that results from that. But what about the subtle micro-quakes at every desk in your company that quietly and irreversibly alter the momentum of your progress, every minute of every day? Can there be a fixed solution for such a slippery condition?
That’s what the companies represented in this White Paper talk about every day. As recently as this spring, the Gartner Group tracked about 25 companies that have a play to make in the portal marketplace, and ranked them according to their relative status among their peers. For the record, Gartner listed exactly none of them as “leaders,” or even “challengers” to take a heads-above-the-crowd position in the marketplace. But the field was filled with “visionaries”; those who have the ability to achieve the long view of their goals, and better than half a chance to pull it off.
One of my favorite canned questions to ask during the interviews for this paper was: “Are portals for delivery or discovery?” Provocative question, I learned. It’s a matter of philosophy for most, but cuts to the core of many portal products out there. What I found out: We are now at a threshold. Portals are beyond the first-gen Yahoo knock-offs that allow a level of personalization that is as rudimentary as Model-Ts were black, but not quite the sensitive and aware helpmates they are made out to be. Not yet.
The best answer to my “delivery or discovery” question was from Bob Kruger of Citrix , whose answer was basically, Who cares?: “How about both? When you’re dealing with information at this level, it’s much more fundamental than push or pull. Why should it matter? What matters is how you want to operate. Then it’s up to the software to be adaptable.”
Software that’s adaptable. But to what? To the organization’s perceived requirements? To the whim of the worker? To a fluid and immense universe of data sources, as near as your desktop and as remote as the Web?
That’s what we set out to learn with this White Paper. The answers herein are consistent: Portals are pretty easy to understand and pretty difficult to execute. Their power is in the details, and the details can be elusive and complex. Read on.
Andy Moore has often been a well-known presence in the emergence of new technologies, from independent telecommunications through networking and information management. Most recently, Moore has been pleased to witness first-hand the decade's most significant business and organizational revolution: the drive to leverage organizational knowledge assets (documents, records, information and object repositories) and the expertise and skill of the organizations' knowledge workers in order to create true learning organizations. He can be reached at andy_moore@verizon.net and welcomes feedback and conversation.