Making Portals Fit for E-Business
The term portal has become a common part of the workplace vernacular. The definition of a portal varies because people see so many possibilities for it. Interpretations range from the simple to the complex; a portal is defined as anything from a single interface connecting to a variety of hyperlinked resources with search capabilities, to an e-business workplace with contextual personalization, collaborative workspaces and wireless access. A meaningful way to have a portal discussion is to focus on what portals can provide to the organization. And using the plural “portals” is no accident. Organizations are likely to have more than one as they have multiple e-business problems to solve.
What’s the KM in Portals?
Portals are the ideal area in which to weave KM functionality and best practices as portal implementations mature into the essential workplace for individuals and workgroups. And because the portal integrates with existing enterprise applications like CRM, ERP, SFA and others, the KM functionality extends to them as well. We call this “contextual KM,” the embedding of functionality that enlivens an application with the ability to Locate, Learn, Capture, Reuse.
Locate, Learn, Capture and Reuse represent the strong themes of KM that resonate most with the following business user pains: people want to locate the content and people who can help them do their jobs with more continuity and quality. They want to learn from the collective experience of the organization as represented by its individuals and they want to capture those learnings for future reuse.
The KM functionality in the WebSphere Portal family addresses each of these elements: the ability to access disparate content and present it to the user in a personalized fashion; discover links between content and expertise; communicate with people from anywhere within the portal environment; instigate the formation of communities with or without IS involvement; capture the work efforts of both structured and serendipitous groups from the workplaces; and index and categorize those efforts for future retrieval and reuse.
From Portal to Electronic Workplace
Like most current corporate technology concepts, the portal emerged from the mainstreaming of the Internet and the World Wide Web. The average user was often overwhelmed when trying to navigate through the vast amount of accessible information. Consequently, “search” sites like Yahoo and AOL emerged to guide users to their desired Internet destinations. These initial portals offered no personalization and thus had little incentive for loyalty from users who floated from site to site. Portals radically changed when it became “all about me” and the user could personalize them by configuring hyperlinks to favorite news, stock market information, sports teams, weather and local content sites. It provided stickiness and increased the likelihood of re-visits. To further ensure the loyalty of their customers companies like AOL and Yahoo! have continually improved the usefulness and utility by adding features like instant messaging, community groups, free Web pages, family picture galleries and free e-mail creating a virtual homespace where people spend inordinate periods of time.
Enterprise users have come to expect the same kinds of Internet portal features fronting their corporate resources, which are even more disparate and difficult to navigate than the Internet. The addition of collaboration tools, interaction with transaction systems, extensions to mobile devices along with the inclusion of customers, partners and suppliers to the corporate Web site is evolving the portal into an electronic workspace for conducting e-business. This provides users a way to manage the resources, relationships and value chain of an organization to better do their jobs.
A Portal Framework
A portal workplace is not achieved simply by putting an attractive design over a multitude of content sources and applications that were previously difficult to access and navigate. In fact, the challenge of building a high-level portal is not in the user interface; it’s providing unified business processes that cuts across many IT systems to provide such things as single sign-on, comprehensive search, application access and integration, personalization, deployment, administration, collaboration, Web content management, expertise location, business intelligence, metrics analysis, security and a host of other options unique to each company. The vendor you select must be able to either provide all these capabilities directly or through a series of partners, integrate them together and make sure they scale and are maintained.
While the UI makes it look easy, as well it should, its substance consists of a whole lot of middleware integrating with existing infrastructures pieces—a condition that is best served through a robust portal framework that can flex to many diverse requirements rather than a single product. This approach has proven successful beyond IBM’s expectations in the creation of the WebSphere Portal family. The customer benefits by extracting completely new value from its existing applications, content and expertise—in effect, transforming a loosely related compilation of assets into a single, cohesive e-business workplace. Every portal implementation has a specific focus. Business-to-employee (B2E) portals focus on enterprise application integration, community development and peer collaboration, whereas the business-to-business (B2B) portals focus on extranet security and vertical utility. Business-to-consumer (B2C) portals concentrate on scalability, transaction handling and customer retention. On top of any of these could be a vertical focus with its own, additional set of requirements as might be found in a pharmaceutical industry portal whose goal is to accelerate that FDA drug approval process. Previously, these requirements have been met by multiple portals and served by a wide variety of portal vendors, each specializing in a particular area. For example, let’s say a large, commercial bank uses a business-to-employee (B2E) portal to dispense information about company news, provide a venue for employee benefit enrollment, and access to customer relationship management content. This bank also has a customer-facing (B2C) portal through which commercial customers can access and view accounts, shift funds, inquire about products and receive account attention. In addition, the bank also hosts a business-to-business (B2B) portal through which short-term loans from commercial banks to smaller retail banks are negotiated. Managing these multiple vendor relationships and code bases creates a complex task for an organization’s IT team.
The portal has evolved into a more integrated framework; what began as a way to locate content has become a platform from which to execute multiple transactions, conduct e-business and collaborate with peers and partners. As you can see our definition of a portal is based upon the varied needs of the market: B2B, B2C, B2E, E2E. A portal must be quickly deployable but broadly customizable, be able to incorporate many diverse content and application sources, provide collaboration for those who need it and in general be a flexible enough platform from which to design, launch and maintain an electronic workplace for users. In bold terms the portal evolves the traditional, productivity tool-centric, stovepiped work environment to the more critical mobile, personalized, collaborative workplace. For most people if you took away all their productivity tools but let them have access to a mail file and the Inter/intranet then they would have 95% of what they need to do their job.
Extending Portals from “Me” to “We”
As mentioned above portals really thrived when focus shifted to serving the needs of “me.” Of even greater importance, especially in the enterprise, is the “we”—people congregating in a portal workspace as a project team, a group with a common role or a community of interest. The “we” extends beyond your immediate organization to suppliers, partners, investors, customers and others who represent your extended value chain. WebSphere Portal family includes Lotus software that helps users do things as a team or community across traditional boundaries like role, group, company, organization, or country. The online workplace that serves the individual is naturally extended to the group/community level. Customizing a portal space where they can work together takes personalization to a new level of usefulness. When groups and communities can effectively and efficiently organize themselves online, projects get done faster with better participation and decision-making. The community functions of WebSphere Portal enable user-initiated communities to rapidly form around specific projects and issues. It provides tools for membership management and collaborative computing, such as instant messaging, discussions, document libraries with check-in and check-out, group calendar, task management, shared bookmarks and more.
Weaving Collaborative Services into the Portal
Previously, users traversed the portal landscape in search of content relevant to them. In general, they “viewed” it. In addition to out-of-the-box workplaces, Lotus also provides a series of modular software components that provide collaboration services to build any type of WebSphere Portal that enables users to now “do” things with the content that involves other people. For example, a discussion thread represented in a portlet (the little window on a portal page containing content) may list the subject of each topic in one column and the name of the author in the other. WebSphere Portal takes this basic capability and enhances it by visually indicating the online status of the author. The user can then right-click the author’s name and initiate an instant chat, audio/video session, whiteboard sharing, virtual meeting, send mail or add them as a new member to a community portal. With the addition of the Lotus Discovery Sever the user can view the author’s biography, expertise or find all of their authored documents. Collaboration must be a natural extension of the content and daily activities performed between users. These capabilities are integrated into the portal so that the collaborative functions are in context; they are available anywhere a piece of content or name occurs—which is far more productive than having awareness and chat services in a separate application that may be on another part of the screen or an unrelated page with no connection to the content. According to a survey done by META Group, 70% of those implementing a portal desire collaboration within their portal environment.
The IBM Portal Strategy
IBM provides an end-to-end portal solution for our customers that can be implemented in a modular fashion as their needs for employee, partner, customer and supplier portals evolve. This strategy includes creating additional value from existing investments in enterprise applications, data and security. The very nature of a portal is to bring relevance, personalization and cohesion of the entire organizational information structure to each individual and community to assist them in decision-making and job execution. WebSphere Portal family provides access to critical business content but also facilitates action by connecting people so that they can collaborate on what they discover.
Key elements to the IBM portal strategy include:
- One size doesn’t fit all: Not all portal needs are the same. WebSphere Portal family delivers a three-tiered set of offerings for maximum portal implementation flexibility (E2E, B2E, B2B, B2C). Some organizations may need all the parts, some will need only a few and some are going to start small and have requirements to grow.;
- Best of breed technologies across IBM: WebSphere Portal family combines the best of breed portal technologies from all IBM Software Group brands—Lotus® , WebSphere, Tivoli® and DB2™ Data Management—into a single family of offerings that cannot be matched by other vendors.;
- Horizontal framework: Customers have demonstrated a desire for a core framework that can link to existing infrastructure components, such as security (single sign-on), directory, e-mail and enterprise applications. This core framework ensures that an organization can extract additional value from its existing infrastructure and investment in technical skills to support multiple portals (E2E, B2E, B2B, B2C) from a single platform. The framework is easily extended through a wide variety of portlets and use of open standards.;
- Partners and services: The portal is a tool in service to the larger concept of an online workplace, the requirements of which vary from one implementation to another. Whether building a solution to address employee relationship management, customer relationship management, sales force automation, supply chain management, a combination of these or some other customized e-business solution, IBM has the partners and services available to construct an infinite variety of vertical and specialized solutions.;
WebSphere Portal serves organizations that see the portal as more than a place to access news or search for content. Forward-thinking organizations see it as an online workplace with permeable boundaries that cuts across the value chain, connecting colleagues, customers and suppliers and enabling e-business. WebSphere Portal provides—and links—a broad set of functionality to serve the objectives of the variety of portal applications it can create.
For more information visit: IBM WebSphere Portal family