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Portal FusionOnce simply an interface to the enterprise knowledge repository, corporate portals are now evolving into the de facto platform for automated B2B transactionsBy Larry Hawes
The corporate portal is evolving rapidly since the introduction of commercially available software for internal business portals less than two years ago, the corporate portal has assumed many new roles. It has done so not merely because portal software vendors improved the functionality of their products, but because the business environment into which corporate portals are deployed has changed, causing user requirements to shift and grow as well. Furthermore, the portal is adapting to the force affecting nearly every aspect of commerce today: e-business. Initially, corporate portals were little more than electronic billboards, spaces filled with hyperlinks to static internal company information such as human resources policies and benefits, marketing collateral, and, in some cases, historical financial information. Portals provided a way to organize the generally unmanaged glut of information that rapidly accumulates on corporate intranets into a single point of access. Employees no longer had to know where specific information resided on the intranet in order to access it. Early portals also served as a crude method for publishing and distributing new information; webmasters would post a link to a new document to make the information easily available to employees. The portal interface evolved through a second phase as electronic billboard as well. Developers added links to external Web sites that provided information relevant to the industry in which the company operated, as well as links to the consumer forebears of the corporate portal—sites such as Yahoo and Lycos—that organize the sprawl of information available on the public Internet. Many portal developers also added links to focused destination sites such as CNN. com, Weather.com, MapQuest.com, and PreviewTravel.com. More important, document management and office productivity software vendors developed tools that enabled end users to publish directly to the Web. This capability eliminated a large bottleneck in intranet and corporate portal content management: the need for a webmaster to convert documents into HTML. As Web publishing became easier, the number of links to information grew exponentially. But users began to suffer from a malady the early portals ostensibly cured: information overload. Consequently, vendors added categorization and search tools to the portal environment to help users find information relevant to their jobs. The growth in the number of documents stored in managed repositories and on file servers accessible through the corporate portal prompted users to seek these tools. Several categorization- and search-tools vendors—including Autonomy Inc., Documentum Inc., Open Text Corp., and Verity Inc.—leveraged their success in the document- and knowledge-management markets as a springboard to enter the corporate portal market. The Personal Touch While query tools helped users find specific pieces of information, knowledge workers wanted quicker access to just the information resources they needed to do their jobs; searching through the entire universe of corporate documents to find relevant bits of information was no longer acceptable. Users also sought to change the physical layout of their portal’s main page so that the information presentation would better match their work processes. In response, portal developers incorporated personalization features into the next generation of products. The earliest personalization was ach-ieved with static profiles of each user’s interface layout and content preferences, originally configured by an administrator and modified by the end user upon deployment. However, as matrix management and cross-functional projects became the norm in most organizations, workers’ interests and expertise profiles began to change rapidly. To keep pace, a few portal suppliers created heuristic tools that monitor user interactions with the portal and automatically update their profiles in real time. Now specific users or groups can receive relevant content based on profiles that are always current. Vendors offering dynamic personalization in their portal products include Autonomy and IBM-Lotus; most profiling schemas have been enabled by the emergence of a de facto standard, the lightweight directory access protocol (LDAP). Another result of the massive buildup of corporate information was the demand for the integration of business intelligence tools into the portal environment. Huge data warehouses now gather structured enterprise data into one relational database; users need to perform data mining queries to make sense of this data, and they want to do so from within their portal rather than switching to another application. Many vendors, including Viador Inc., Hummingbird Communications Ltd., and Brio Technology, have turned this need into an opportunity to enter the corporate portal market. Their products let users slice and dice data as well as view charts and graphics summarizing the results without leaving the portal interface. Furthermore, as workforces have become more geographically distributed and mobile, portal users have begun to demand functionality to help them stay connected with coworkers and retain their sense of community. A small number of vendors have entered the corporate portal software market by leveraging their existing collaboration and knowledge management tools in a portal environment. Other vendors have incorporated, or are planning to include, basic collaboration tools into their corporate portal products—including email, threaded discussion forums, and profile-based directories of internal expertise. Vendors with more advanced collaboration capabilities—such as IBM-Lotus, KnowledgeTrack Corp., and Radnet Inc.—integrated project- or community of interest-oriented team spaces into their portals. In addition to incorporating the features I just mentioned, these virtual meeting places may be equipped with facilities for planning project deliverables, timelines, and tasks; sharing documents; and polling and tabulating members’ opinions. However, as new research from the Delphi Group reveals, these advanced collaboration tools are lacking in most corporate portal applications today. (See Figure 1.)
As available bandwidth increases and next-generation data compression algorithms develop, we will see even more advanced collaboration features become prominent corporate portal components. These features may include instant text messaging, voicemail, virtual whiteboards, and realtime audio and video conferencing. Advanced collaboration tools will add a new element of dynamism to the historically static corporate portal environment. They also will have a measurable impact on knowledge workers’ productivity by building community and trust among tomorrow’s free-agent employees. The broad deployment of intranets and the increase in business use of the Internet have fueled an exponential rate of growth in the amount of information available to employees. Corporate portals were developed in response, and their functionality has grown as the pace, global nature, and mobility of business have increased. However, not all corporate portal products offer the complete array of possible features. (See Figure 2.)
Over time, portal software vendors will continue to add missing functionality to their core strengths by partnering with or acquiring other vendors. Alternatively, resource-rich vendors may choose to develop these capabilities in-house. While not all user organizations will need every one of these functions, the vendors that can supply most or all of them in a modular architecture that allows for flexible deployment will eventually capture the largest share of the corporate portal market.
The E-Business FactorThe portal’s increasingly persistent role in corporate life has not been driven by portal developers seeking to perfect their creations through additional features. Rather, across its evolution, the corporate portal has grown in functionality as end users react to changes in the way they do their jobs or in the nature of those jobs themselves. Therefore, to predict how portal users’ requirements will change in the future and what the next generation of portals will offer, we must look to the shifts taking place in the “macro” business environment. E-business has taken corporate America by storm. It is nearly impossible to get through a day without being exposed to a message regarding “e-” something. However, e-business may be well worth the hype—it has the potential to permanently change not only the way we conduct commerce, but the very structure of the society in which we live. Rather than wading through a philosophical discussion of the changes that e-business might produce, let’s examine the emerging critical success factors (CSFs) of e-business and translate them into portal software users’ requirements. From there, we can deduce which functions of current corporate portal software will need the most enhancements as companies make the transition to e-business. The primary and obvious CSF for e-business, robust and reliable infrastructure, is already in place. Although speed and security have room for improvement, the Internet is a nearly ubiquitous and serviceable commerce platform in many parts of the world. The projected growth of the wireless Web, especially in developing countries, will broaden its reach considerably. Today’s Internet is ready for e-business, as is the internal IP network of many organizations. This infrastructure, and the technology that runs on top of it, enables an exponential growth in the number of customers, partners, and suppliers your organization can reach. Therefore, the next most important CSF for e-business is the number and quality of these relationships—successful e-businesses must become intimate with multitudes of organizations and individuals also plugged into the “e-conomy.” Most e-business revenue models are predicated on taking advantage of the reduced operating costs that the Internet affords. Because the marginal cost of selling another unit of product or service is very small on the Web, profit may be maximized if a larger amount of revenue is earned. To drive this revenue growth, everyone in the corporation must become a touchpoint for not only customers, but partners and suppliers as well. The Delphi Group recently aggregated responses from more than 600 individuals surveyed regarding the number and organizational level of employees in their companies who were in regular contact with external constituents. In our analysis, we compared the total survey population with a group of respondents that we categorized as “e-active”—that is, they were already engaged in many e-business related practices. (See Figure 3.) In summary, the e-active group relies less on senior executives and designated functional groups (such as sales or customer service) to serve as liaisons with customers, partners, and suppliers.
Clearly, e-active businesses understand that everyone in the corporation must maintain an external focus in addition to relating to their coworkers. To help their employees succeed, e-businesses will need to install technology through which individuals can monitor commerce relationships up and down the extended value chain.
The portal is poised to become the primary vehicle for the establishment, expression, measurement, and enhancement of these valuable relationships. Portals facilitate awareness and responsiveness among various elements of the networked value chain. (See Figure 4.)
Corporate portals also heighten internal awareness of external market conditions and enable sharing of internal knowledge. This information is made actionable through internal collaboration, which leads to an innovative response from within the enterprise and results in a new product or service that meets the requirements of external value chain members.
Better B2BBusiness-to-business (B2B) portals are corporate portals turned inside out. They are vehicles through which an enterprise can respond to the external environment. In turn, external constituents act on that awareness and respond in turn, providing feedback to the organization, augmenting its knowledge base, and spurring further adaptation in the changing market. The challenge to corporate portal vendors and, ultimately, end users, will be to take existing, internally focused collaboration tools and deploy them beyond the firewall through B2B portals. This addition of collaboration functionality to outwardly focused portals will strengthen the bonds between an enterprise and members of its extended value chain—a phenomenon similar to the “stickiness” that consumer Internet portals strive for today—adding incredible value for all community members. I can easily imagine embedding into a B2B portal a virtual project space that offers a rich selection of advanced collaboration tools to employees, suppliers, partners, and customers working together to design a new product, create a new service, or combine the two in an innovative solution. Salespeople could use synchronous chat rooms to probe customer requirements instantly. Component specifications might be the subject of discussions in an online session employing a virtual whiteboard and shared CAD documents. Channel partners could receive marketing campaign ideas in a video conference using QuickTime or ScreenCam movies. Portals with these capabilities will help e-businesses move at Internet speed to capitalize on market opportunities. As a bonus, B2B portals will capture the decision-making processes that are part of these collaborations, creating a corporate memory that may be referenced in similar situations in the future.
Interorganizational Process IntimacyAs knowledge workers begin to collaborate online to share new ideas and existing knowledge among e-businesses, their organizations will need to become intimate on another level. In addition to realizing the potential gains produced by the increased innovation and responsiveness that B2B portals generate, e-businesses must reduce costs by automating many of their interactions. The final e-business CSF that we will examine here is process intimacy. During the late 1980s and early ‘90s, corporations turned their collective focus on understanding and reengineering of their internal business processes. Most large businesses continue to rely on the enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems they installed at that time to tie transactional flows together within the organization. However, these systems do little, if anything, to connect processes among businesses. Historically, corporate portals have not included a strong process element. Vendors with a legacy of success in the document management market embedded their document-centric process tools in their portal offerings, and the few groupware vendors that entered the corporate portal market incorporated their messaging-centric process capabilities into their portal products. The current generation of portal software offers connectivity to the data repositories of legacy ERP systems but usually does not make that data available to suppliers, partners, and customers in the context of a specific business process. The next decade will mark a new era in process mapping and redesign, one that is directed at B2B processes. B2B portals will be the mechanism through which the automation of business transactions (monetary- and information-based) is accomplished. Consider the portal initiative undertaken last year by the vendor that has captured the largest ERP market share: SAP released a portal interface, mySAP. com, that lets partners tie their back-office systems together to automatically share inventory levels and production schedules, produce and purchase goods as needed, and account for these transactions. Internet-based commerce portals such as my SAP.com will provide the process software that glues e-businesses together, saving them the substantial expense of building similar workflow-driven systems on their own. These portals will also offer many of the collaborative tools that e-businesses need to coordinate activities that cannot be automated.
The logical endpoint of this continuum is the “vortal,” a vertically oriented electronic marketplace in which every transaction element is automated with workflow tools. (See Figure 5.) The vortal concept is not taken from a current science-fiction novel; these e-markets are already beginning to populate the e-conomy. The largest vortal initiative to date is the joint venture between GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler to build an automated electronic marketplace that connects the companies to the hundreds of thousands of component suppliers that make up the global automotive industry. The Big Three automakers expect that more than $700 billion in transactions per year will flow through this B2B portal, which will be built on software from Commerce One Inc. and Oracle. Other industries, including chem- icals, oil and gas, forest products, food and beverage, and retail are using B2B portal software from these two vendors as well as e-market pioneer Ariba Inc. and supply-chain leader i2 Technologies Inc. to build and deploy vortals.
Collaboration and process tools constitute only one-quarter of the total functionality that advanced e-business applications will eventually offer, but they are as important as the commerce transaction, content management, and other elements within e-markets. As existing corporate portal vendors reposition them- selves as suppliers of B2B portals, they will need to add e-community and e-process capabilities to their products, if they are not already present. New vendors will appear and expand the boundaries of this rapidly developing frontier of B2B commerce. Some may invent new ways to collaborate online or develop industry-specific libraries of efficient electronic processes. The portal has already come a long way, and its evolution will continue for years to come. Like Brutus in Julius Caesar, we can only wish that we had the ability to predict with complete confidence where that evolutionary process will take today’s portal software. Oh that a man might know The end of this day’s business ere it come! Julius Caesar
Larry Hawes (leh@delphigroup.com) is a senior analyst and consultant with the Delphi Group, based in Boston. He works with vendors and end users of e-business, corporate portal, and knowledge management software to help them understand and act on growth opportunities at the intersection of business and technology.
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