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February 21, 2002

Not Just A Portal

Never mind "worker productivity"; enterprise portals are the next strategic business application

by Justin Kestelyn

Depending on whom you're talking to, the fact that U.S. productivity doubled between 1990 and 2000, from 1.4 percent per year to 2.5 percent per year, registers either a look of complete surprise or barely a shrug of recognition.

I suspect that this expectations gap partly reflects the existence of two fundamental and deeply held convictions: either the explosion in available information has stunted productivity or has encouraged it. If you fall into the former camp, then you're probably one of those people who spends more time looking for information than digesting it. (IDC estimates that knowledge workers may waste up to three hours per day searching for information, at a significant cost to their employers.) If you belong in the latter camp, then you've probably managed to adapt to, and even benefit from, information overload. After all, one person's overload is another person's mother lode.

True, the source of this infamous productivity increase — and especially the role of IT in fueling it — is a mystery perhaps better left to sociologists than economists, and one that will probably never be settled. Nevertheless, it stands to reason that the development of more efficient business processes, regardless of their causal relationship to technology, had a lot to do with it. And as all IT executives worth their salt know, integrating stove-piped infrastructure enables those operational improvements to occur, although such integration could not strictly be said to improve productivity.

THE NEW PORTAL

The enterprise portal, of course, is considered by many (particularly the vendors of portal solutions) as the antidote to information overload, and by implication, a tool for improving knowledge worker productivity. Establishing a direct relationship between portal-enabled information access and productivity (or even tangible business gain) is as difficult as establishing the mysterious link between nationwide economic productivity and IT. But even the increasing pressure on IT and business executives to justify expenditures through "hard" ROI has failed to slow the demand: Butler Group estimates that the enterprise portal market will grow to $4 billion by 2005.

The important thing to understand about enterprise portals is that their business value no longer derives solely from giving decision makers better access to information in some personalized manner (although for some companies, that capability is valuable enough). Rather, some vendors are evolving their portals into integration frameworks that are closely tied to underlying application server platforms. In that manner, as we've frequently pointed out in these pages, portal and enterprise application integration technologies are converging.

Isn't it interesting that Tibco Software Inc. and BEA Systems Inc., two consummate business integration technology companies, are getting into the enterprise portal business with a vengeance? And that pure-play portal vendors such as Plumtree Software Inc. are becoming interested in application integration? (See "Lack of Distinction," News & Analysis, Nov. 12, 2001.) Furthermore, as Colin White explains in this issue's cover story ("Window of Opportunity"), IBM and SAP Portals are two examples of companies that are adding workflow into the portal mix as well. And as its SharePoint Portal matures, it will be best to keep an eye on Microsoft.

GROW UP

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As packaged application companies continue to erect Web services frameworks around their offerings, and application server providers rush to support Web services protocols, enterprise portals may in fact become an even more elegant unifying interface between decision makers and business-critical applications infrastructure.

These developments augur the fact that enterprise portals are "growing up." They are advancing from barely integrated productivity tools into truly strategic business applications that make new and improved operational processes possible. And by the way, they also make it a lot easier to discover and digest information.