Pondering the Portal
The IT department may influence EIP initiatives more than expected
A comprehensive enterprise information portal (EIP) survey conducted by Survey. com has revealed the latest industry trends about what IT executives and decision-makers consider when planning an EIP and purchasing EIP products and services. The survey, entitled “Beyond the Doge’s Palace: Enterprise Information Portals in the 21st Century,” is the largest of its kind ever undertaken in the EIP market and includes data from 1,069 respondents, of which 643, or about 60 percent, are Intelligent Enterprise readers.
Among the EIP survey’s revelations is the fact that about 45 percent of the respondents among the Intelligent Enterprise reader subset will complete an EIP deployment before 2001, even though more than 50 percent of readers polled are still in the conceptual stage of their EIP project and have yet to select vendors. Close to 70 percent of the respondents are involved in corporate IS/IT functions, either as managers, staff, or executives, which could explain in part why 50 percent of them chose IT as one of the three most influential departments in driving an EIP initiative. Nearly 90 percent of surveyed Intelligent Enterprise readers identified IT executives as being extremely (57 percent) or somewhat (30 percent) important in choosing EIP vendors and also considered IT managers and staff to be significant in EIP purchasing decisions.
When asked about the scope of their EIP plans, 40 percent of respondents chose customer relationship management (CRM) as one of the top three reasons for implementing a portal, followed by employee self-service (31 percent) and ERP (27 percent). Customers and executives are the two most important users of portals, according to the survey, while online access to structured business intelligence data in warehouses or data marts topped the list of priorities for building a portal. According to survey results for Intelligent Enterprise readers, once deployed, EIP resources will be divided among these functions: B2B e-commerce (38 percent), business-to-employee (B2E) e-commerce (37 percent), and business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce (25 percent).
FIGURE 1 Eipplatform deployment.
More than 48 percent of surveyed readers said that they plan to outsource EIP solution design and implementation and more than 80 percent said their solutions would be deployed in the Windows NT/ 2000 environment. Intelligent Enterprise readers also have stringent requirements for what technologies the EIP must support, with 52 percent specifying Java compatibility and close to 90 percent needing extensible markup language (XML) support. Applications from Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM are the top three products the EIP must work with, based on reader choices in the survey. When choosing a portal product, nearly 45 percent of readers said integration with other enterprise applications is the most important factor, along with ease of use and integration with back-end data sources.
“The most important consideration in choosing an EIP is application integration. This is [noteworthy] because of what it implies about the [value assigned to] the services capabilities of portal vendors,” said Dave Trowbridge, a senior analyst at Survey.com
FIGURE 2 Eipresources are divided fairly equitably among different e-commerce models.
When looking for market and technology information to aid in making portal decisions, Intelligent Enterprise readers mainly rely on independent analyst reports and conferences, but also find peer word-of-mouth and trade press articles to be important sources. Readers refer to vendor-sponsored events and publications to a lesser extent when researching portal solutions.—Claudia Willen
Privacy Watch
Carnivore: Feast for the Eyes
The American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Privacy Information Center have each filed legal pleadings to compel the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) to reveal technical information about its new Carnivore surveillance system. Carnivore, which the FBI wants to install on Internet service provider networks to aid targeted criminal investigations, can purportedly chart the electronic movements—including email, visited URLs, and even Internet relay chat sessions — of single individuals. The FBI claims that Carnivore would not be invoked without court order, but privacy advocates and several ISPs are skeptical.
Toying with Customer Information
Following the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) decision to let it sell customer lists as assets during bankruptcy proceedings, defunct online retailer Toysmart.com has pulled the lists from auction because of weak offers. The FTC had allowed the sale on condition the buyer adheres to Toysmart.com’s stated privacy policy of keeping personal data out of the hands of third parties.
Truth in Advertising
Privacy Partnership 2000, a consortium of 36 e-commerce-related companies that includes America Online, RealNetworks Inc., Microsoft, and IBM, will fund a multichannel media campaign to educate consumers about online privacy.
