文章基本信息

标题：Portals: an E-Business success story - E-Business Readiness - Industry Trend or Event
作者：Chris Pickering
期刊名称：Software Magazine
出版年度：2002
卷号：Spring 2002
出版社：Rockport Custom Publishing, LLC

Portals: an E-Business success story - E-Business Readiness - Industry Trend or Event

Chris Pickering

Portals help organizations take advantage of the information and processing capabilities they already have, and therein lies their power.

Portals are one of the leading success stories of e-business. When it comes to e-business applications, only e-commerce and e-procurement are used by more companies than portals. Companies utilize portals in many ways, including human resource (HR) portals on intranets, customer-facing information portals, and supplier-facing information portals, and users include employees, customers, and suppliers.

According to Strategic Trends in Information Technology, a recent industry survey conducted by systems Development Inc., Overland Park, Kan., portals stand out as one of the leading e-business applications. Nearly one-third of companies use portals today, and another quarter of them plan to use portals within a year (see "Status of Portals," p. 23). Another 18% are either investigating portals now (7%) or planning to use them sometime (11%).

The combination of this established base and the active interest in portals should produce strong continuing growth in adoption. Portal implementation among respondents began in 1997, then increased significantly in 1999 and 2000. Portals lend themselves to implementation through an experiment-pilot-production implementation cycle. Most of those using portals today are already using them in production systems (71%). Another 14% of respondents are conducting pilot projects, 7% are experimenting, and 7% are using portals for review only.

Portal users tend to be either very successful or very unsuccessful (see "Portal Success Rate," p. 24). Nearly two-thirds of those using portals (64%) claim a success rate of 76% to 100%, but the remaining 36% have a success rate of 25% or less. Some of the reasons behind this bifurcation are addressed below.

There are a lot of portal packages available today. (See "Representative Portal Packages," p. 24, for a partial list.) This encourages the assumption that most portals will be based on a package. So it was a surprise when survey results showed that in-house development was far and away the most common source of portal applications. Just 20% of respondents use portal packages, while 87% of respondents use in-house development to deliver some portion of their portal capabilities (see "Source of Portal Application," p. 25).

Regardless of how companies source portals, the initial investment required to implement them tends to be small. Two-thirds of companies spent less than $500K to install their portals; 25% spent between $500K and 51 million; and only 8% made an initial investment greater than $1 million.

Companies' cost to maintain and enhance their portals tends to be less than the cost of implementation. A large percentage (82%) of companies using portals spend less than $500K annually to maintain and enhance them; 9% spend between $500K and $1 million; and 9% spend more than $1 million.

Expanding Functionality

The original purpose of portals was to provide a point of consolidation for disparate data, enabling convenient access to that data. Since then, portal functionality has expanded to include transaction processing, analytic processing, and other functions. From a complexity standpoint, portal functionality started with the simple and expanded to the complex.

Today, the simple functions are still the most popular (see "Portal Functions: Simplicity Prevails," p. 25). Nearly everyone uses portals for Web access (which, in this study, could mean either retrieving or publishing Web data), and almost three-fourths of companies use their portals to access corporate data. Data consolidation and transaction processing have both been implemented by 40% of those using portals, and one-third of users have implemented some type of analytic processing in their portal applications.

Customer-facing information portals are the most common applications (see "Portal Apps: Putting on a Good Face," p. 26). Other popular portal applications are self-service HR systems, supplier-facing information portals, and self-service time-and-expense systems. Transaction-oriented systems like online sales and purchasing are used far less frequently.

Portals' information-management capabilities produce significant benefits for users (see box, this page). Since the most-used portal application is customer-facing information portals, it is not too surprising that survey respondents rank improved customer satisfaction as the most significant benefit. Portals provide internal benefits as well, such as better decision-making, improved productivity, reduced costs, and improved quality.

Turning to the most significant costs of using portals (see box, p. 25) reveals the underlying challenges of achieving the benefits discussed above. The foundation of portals is data integration and distribution, yet leading respondents rank data access and integration costs ahead of all other costs of using portals. In a related vein, the second most significant cost is difficulty of integration with other applications, followed by cultural and organizational factors. Not surprisingly, given the modest financial investments most portal users have made, cost appears fairly far down the list. Staffing for portals and using them with an existing IT infrastructure represent relatively insignificant costs in most portal implementations.

When asked to estimate the gross annual financial benefit of portals (not adjusted for costs), all respondents judged their portals to provide $1 million or less in financial benefits. Comparing this with the portal investments these companies are making, however, shows that most are getting a positive financial return.

The overwhelming majority of respondents are neutral, satisfied, or extremely satisfied with portals (see "Portal Satisfaction," p. 26). Only 7% of today's portal users are disappointed in their results, and no one is totally disappointed. It is not surprising, then, that companies generally plan to increase their use of portals over the next 12 months (see "Portal Use Over the Next 12 Months," p. 27). No one currently using portals plans to decrease use, much less discontinue entirely, and only 14% of today's portal users plan to simply maintain their current level of use.

What Are the Advantages?

When assessing a technology's impact, organizations tend to focus on its technical capabilities and how it compares to other technologies. But this is only one aspect of the technology--its relative advantage. In order to judge how a technology will spread through industry and how well it will fit into a particular IT shop, it is necessary to consider other factors. The factors most commonly analyzed in this regard are the technology's compatibility with existing practices, complexity, ease of use on a trial basis ("trialability"), and visibility. (Visibility is the ability to observe others' use of portals. This is one way that those reviewing portals can decide whether portals really live up to their claims.) The higher a technology's relative advantage, compatibility, trialability, and visibility, and the lower its complexity, the more readily it will be adopted, by industry at large and within an organization.

As part of the Strategic Trends in Information Technology study, respondents were asked to judge portals for these characteristics on a five-point scale. The table on p. 27 summarizes their responses. On average, respondents consider portals to have good relative advantage, good compatibility, fairly high complexity, good trialability, and good visibility. This mix of characteristics promotes portal adoption in industry. These same positive factors apply to internal adoption, as well.

Since portals are perceived to offer advantages, are generally compatible with existing practices, can be used on a trial basis, and can be used successfully, the major factor to address in internal deployment is the fairly high complexity. Organizations perceive portal technology as hard to understand, so both pre- and post-implementation resources should be dedicated to training and education. Pre-implementation, organizations should conduct just-in-time education and hands-on training. Post-implementation, it is good to hold workshops, offer remedial training, and consider implementing a mentor program where the most successful (and communicative) portal users can pass on their experience to others in the company.

Beyond this, portal implementation should follow an experiment-pilot-production life cycle. Organizations that think they can use a portal effectively should bring it inhouse and experiment with it in a test environment, which leverages portals' good trialability. If it still looks good for deployment, organizations should then build a pilot portal for a small, well-defined practical purpose. Let everyone possible use the results of the pilot project and collect suggestions and feedback. Finally, if portals prove successful, organizations should then develop and implement more-complex portal applications.

With all the good news about portals, it may be surprising that not everyone is either using them or planning to. "Benefits not demonstrated" tops the list of obstacles, which is equivalent to saying that portals have no relative advantage for many nonusers (see box, p. 27). In this case, it's hard to argue that these companies should be using portals.

Some of the other obstacles to portal use can be overcome by making the appropriate changes. If an organization is unprepared but portals appear to be valuable, then education, training, experimentation, and organizational changes can pave the way for portal usage. Hiring staff, allocating budget based on a justified need, and similar obstacles are obviously amenable to specific remedies.

Some obstacles are, and should be, insurmountable. For example, if there is no business need, if user resistance will result in failure on deployment, if technical immaturity will produce an unstable or clumsy application, and so on, then this is not the time to implement a portal. Rather, this is the time to watch portals evolve, educate those who might benefit from them, and wait until portal capabilities and corporate needs and abilities coincide.

Taken as a whole, industry adoption will not reach 100%. There will remain a segment of industry that does not see any value in portals, faces cultural barriers, or does not have the necessary budget or staffing.

The Product Choices

For those organizations that decide to implement a portal (or several), survey results offer guidance on sourcing a portal solution. As mentioned, almost 90% of those using portals today rely on in-house development for at least some of their portal functionality, while only 20% use portal packages (respondents were allowed multiple answers). For organizations that have not yet implemented a portal but are planning on it, the appropriate strategy is the converse of what might be inferred from the statistics--buy as much packaged functionality as possible and use in-house development as a last resort.

Today's portal packages run the gamut from simple data aggregation and display products to analytic products that slice and dice collected data. Obviously, the first thing to do is match the package to the organization's needs. It's also worth remembering that many portal users get value from the basic function of providing a single access point for disparate data on a common topic; an HR portal, for example. More complex portal applications like transaction processing and online analytics are used less commonly and require more support to implement and use successfully.

Portal products fall into two categories: information management and vertical applications. Information-management products provide the tools and components to aggregate disparate data sources under a common, usually Web-browser-based interface. Vertical application products use a portal interface to transaction-processing systems like supply-chain management (SCM).

Hummingbird Ltd., Toronto, is a representative vendor in the information- management category. Hummingbird offers a suite of enterprise information-management products, including the Hummingbird EIP (Enterprise Information Portal).

Hummingbird EIP offers the core portal functions of data access and extraction, with the ability to analyze and act on that data. Convenience and simplicity are enhanced by providing users with single-logon capability, unified search features, personalization, application integration, collaboration, security, scalability, and openness.

Hummingbird leverages core portal functionality by bundling the additional functions of structured data access, unstructured data access, and application-system access in its Enterprise Portal Suite, with EIP as the interface.

A natural candidate for an EIP-type solution is a law firm, which typically deals with a large volume of disparate data. Dickstein Shapiro Morin & Oshinsky LLP, for example, was managing a large number of documents (150,000 plus) in disparate sources. The law firm, with offices in Washington, D.C., and New York City, already had knowledge management and document management applications from Hummingbird in place (the DOGS Open and CyberDocs products) and needed a convenient way to tie them together. It was natural that the firm looked first for a Hummingbird portal solution.

Keith Berklund, applications development manager at Dickstein Shapiro, summarizes the role played by BIP in this way: "It ties our knowledge management and document management solutions together. Having a single interface for business solutions is really what it's all about. The solution allows users to view the information in the most usable context. Having that ability to receive anything from internal legal judgments and correspondence to external articles and news feeds provides a true 'law office on the go' environment."

Manufacturers and heavy industry can use portals to their advantage, too. Industri-Matematik International (IMI), Mount Laurel, N.J., for example, is representative of a vertical application portal provider. IMI uses a portal interface on its supply-chain management package to give manufacturers, customers, and suppliers common visibility of the supply chain. Its Vivaldi portals are used internally for business-to-employee (B2E) functions and externally for both business-to-consumer (B2C) and business-to-business (B2B) functions. Providing information through a convenient portal interface is a key part of IMI's "Zero: 100" business model, whose goal is zero inventory with 100% visibility to everyone in the supply chain.

The principle of the Zero: 100 business model is to replace inventory with information. The first step in this process is to capture customer information, enabling a pull-driven supply chain. The Vivaldi Customer Portal provides e-commerce and Web-based customer self-service functions. It also integrates functions from enterprise resource planning (ERP) or other transactional systems to give customers visibility into selected data.

Through the Customer Portal, customers can enter orders, check available inventory, get pricing, review open orders and invoices, and check available credit. Suppliers tap into supply-chain data through the Vivaldi Vendor Portal, which enables them to review and confirm purchase orders, maintain product information, view selected forecast data, and receive feedback on fulfillment and delivery performance.

On the B2E front, IMI offers the Vivaldi User Portals, which consist of the Vivaldi Customer Service Dashboard and the Vivaldi Sales Portal. As the names suggest, the former is a portal for customer-service representatives and the latter for sales and marketing reps.

Here to Stay

Portals are cropping up everywhere. Besides the examples cited, customer relationship management, ERP, business intelligence, and other applications increasingly use a portal as their standard interface.

Portals are nothing esoteric. They simply help organizations take advantage of the information and processing capabilities they already have. But therein lies their power. Portals simplify the task of getting the information users need, when they need it, and where they need it. Like e-commerce (Web-based sales) and e-procurement (Web-based purchasing), portals provide a discrete, high-value function in an easy-to-use package.

Portals are already one of the leading e-business success stories, and are here to stay.

For more information on this topic in the future, register at the following URL: www.softwaremag.com/moreinfo.

Status of Portals

% of Respondents

In use                        32%
Plan to use within 12 months  24%
Plan to use sometime          11%
Investigating now              7%
Investigated, didn't use       2%
Interested, no activity       11%
Discontinued                   2%
No Interest                    9%
Not aware                      2%

Source: Systems Development Inc.

Note: Table made from bar graph
Portal Implementation

Year of Implementation     % of
                        Respondents

'95                          0%
'96                          0%
'97                          7%
'98                         14%
'99                         29%
'00                         29%
'01                         21%

Source: Systems Developments Inc.

Note: Table made from bar graph
Representative Portal Packages

Company                  Web Site             Location

AlphaBlox Corp.          alphablox.com        Mountain View, Calif.
Authoria Inc.            authoria.com         Waltham, Mass.
Brio Technology Inc.     brio.com             Palo Alto, Calif.
Business Objects SA      businessobjects.com  San Jose, Calif.
Cognos Inc.              cognos.com           Burlington, Mass.
CoreChange               corechange.com       Boston
CoVia Technologies Inc.  covia.com            Mountain View, Calif.
Epicentric Inc.          epicentric.com       San Francisco
Hummingbird Ltd.         hummingbird.com      Toronto, Ontario
IBM Corp.                ibm.com              Armonk, N.Y.

Industri-Matematik       im.se                Mt. Laurel, N.J.
 International
Iona Technologies        iona.com             Waltham, Mass.
Oracle Corp.             oracle.com/portals/  Redwood Shores, Calif.
Plumtree Software        plumtree.com         San Francisco
Verity Inc.              verity.com           Sunnyvale, Calif.
Viador Inc.              viador.com           Mountain View, Calif.

Company                  Product

AlphaBlox Corp.          AlphaBlox 3
Authoria Inc.            Authoria HR
Brio Technology Inc.     Brio.Portal
Business Objects SA      InfoView
Cognos Inc.              Upfront
CoreChange               Coreport 3G
CoVia Technologies Inc.  InfoPortal
Epicentric Inc.          Epicentric Portal
Hummingbird Ltd.         Hummingbird E/P
IBM Corp.                IBM Enterprise
                          Information Portal
Industri-Matematik       Vivaldi
 International
Iona Technologies        iPortal Suite
Oracle Corp.             Oracle 9iAS Portal
Plumtree Software        Corporate Portal
Verity Inc.              Verity K2
Viador Inc.              Viador E-Portal
Portal Success Rate

Success Rate  % of Respondents

     <10%           27%
  10%-20%            9%
  28%-50%            0%
  51%-75%            0%
 78%-100%           64%

Source: Systems Development Inc.
Portal Functions: Simplicity Prevails

Web access              93%
Access corporate data   73%
Data consolidation      40%
Transaction processing  40%
Analytics               33%
Other                    0%

Source: Systems Development Inc.

Note: Table made from bar graph
Source of Portal Application

In-house development  87%
Package               20%
Domestic outsourcing  13%
ASP                    7%
Other                  7%
Offshore Outsourcing   0%

Source: System Development Inc.

Note: Table made from bar graph
Portal Applications: Putting on a Good Face

                              % of Respondents

Customer-facing information         86%
Self-service HR                     36%
Supplier-facing information         36%
Self-service T&E                    21%
Customer-facing purchasing           7%
Supplier-facing transactions         7%
Other                                7%

Source: Systems Development Inc.

Note: Table made from bar graph
Portal Satisfaction

                      % of Respondents

Totally Disappointed         0%
Disappointed                 7%
Neutral                     43%
Satisfied                   43%
Extremely Satisfied          7%

Source: Systems Development Inc.

Note: Table made from bar graph
Portal Use Over the Next 12 Months

Stay the same         14%
Decrease               0%
Discontinue entirely   0%
Increase              86%

Source: Systems Development Inc.

Note: Table made from pie chart
Innovation Characteristics

         Relative
         Advantage  Compatibility  Complexity  Trialability  Visibility

Portals    3.67         3.19          3.36         3.26         3.69

         Final
         Score

Portals  10.45