December 5, 2001

See Your Way Through It

A tried-and-true system to restore order to chaotic portal plans

By Scott Wallace

With several competing constituencies, it's difficult to juggle user demands with corporate objectives and create an optimal corporate portal. By looking at the path another company took to arrive at the best solution, you can possibly gain perspective on your own project.

This fictional account of a company instituting a corporate portal to leverage existing resources and quickly capitalize on market changes is based on a series of engagements with clients that wish to remain anonymous.

THE CLIENT

The International Association of Professionals (IAP) is a 22-year-old, nonprofit organization with 140 employees who provide a variety of educational, market awareness, and research library products and services to its 150,000 members in 32 countries. Based upon the success of the products and services it already was delivering, IAP created a new division with the mission to provide an affiliated set of services to its largest corporate members. These corporate member services would enhance, extend, and rebrand IAP's research, education, professional development, and professional certification products and services for deployment as components of the members' corporate infrastructure services.

IAP had three operating Web initiatives:

• To protect ad revenue in its print publications, the domestic Web site includes little of the publications' content. Instead, it provides topic-focused chat rooms, moderated discussions, and Web seminars.
• The International Membership Web site was newer and was undertaken to reduce production and delivery expenses for IAP publications. Members say they value the ease of electronic delivery. However, this site lacks search capability and doesn't support the collaborative services found on the domestic site.
• The association's intranet was the newest initiative, with little more than a framework for accessing existing Web-ready information.

PORTAL REQUIREMENTS GATHERING

A board-appointed committee charged with studying the portal's requirements comprised the CEO, CIO, and CFO of IAP, plus the webmaster, a portal project manager, and a visionary from publication services who had prepared an informed and highly respected position paper on portal use.

The portal project manager led the portal's requirements assessment and project planning. He directed the interviewing of current Web-site users, which turned up some interesting findings:

• The sites — designed from the association's perspective rather than the members' — were hard for members to navigate.
• Finding items on the sites was nearly impossible. Only the domestic site had search capabilities, and a search couldn't span multiple document collections.
• Employees universally favored role-based personalization. But personalization encompasses a wide range of possibilities, not all of which would necessarily be feasible.
• One group within the association lacked a travel budget and, therefore, relied upon email and virtual meetings to move its projects along. This group very vocally supported the portal initiative and had many ideas about how the portal should work. This group's input on the services needed for their virtual meetings formed the base definition of the portal's collaboration requirements, but some portal committee members felt the requirements were too grandiose.

The interviews of representatives from the organization's operational areas made it clear that there were many opportunities to apply portal technology in the business. The hard issue was prioritizing the opportunities; it seemed no one had any real idea of where to start, except the CEO, who wanted his corporate member program to be the portal's first focus.

There were not only differences in opinion about the portal and what it should do but also significant differences in culture across the organization — particularly regarding information sharing and management practices. Some teams would have no trouble publishing materials to the portal for use by other departments. Other teams would require significant training and initial support if they were to invest the time to share their information and knowledge.

ADVISORY SUPPORT BROUGHT IN

One day, the project manager visited the Member Information Center, which provides research, resources, and support to members. While talking with staff about their activities and whether they might have any interest in the portal, he learned the Center had, in the last year, embarked on a knowledge management initiative. In the course of developing this initiative, they identified the Information Center's users, described their roles, and created bodies of knowledge for each role. This was certainly an interesting overview of their corporate information resources, but the project manager wasn't sure exactly what to do with it.

Everyone on the portal committee was sure that the portal needed to provide a richer set of search services. To do that, the information needed to be organized and categorized differently. Applications for the portal were so broad that the current, strictly manual, method of entering and categorizing information would never keep up. And IT department resources were already stretched.

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