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August 12, 2002

The Outside-In Portal

Want your enterprise portal to justify its cost right away? Make sure that it continually reflects user needs

by Grant Norris & David J. Duray

Continued from Page 1

Neither the CFO nor the field service engineer is required to remember or learn arcane ERP transaction codes, yet both can access critical information faster. In addition, as the organization inserts or removes applications and modules, each user's routine will have minimal disruption.

Keeping Partners Happy

The true power of portals is found in communication between an enterprise and its partners. Collaboration is a fashionable buzzword, but few organizations have mastered the art of collaborating with external parties. A portal allows those within an enterprise to interact with all members of the enterprise ecosystem, including suppliers of materials, components, and subassemblies; partners who provide information, applications, and services; and business partners such as banks, insurance companies, and logistics providers.

Some partners even use the applications on the host company's workplace server. Here, the company itself may become an application service provider (ASP) for its collaborating partners. Conversely, a partner can serve as an ASP for the central company with the portal facilitating the rollout of this service to employees. Access can be tailored to the needs of the partner to ensure only authorized data is visible.

Many challenges that are notorious for dooming partnerships can be eased through a portal implementation. Lag time in partner communications is reduced, thereby improving time to market. XML can be deployed behind the portal to eliminate the constraint to specific system requirements. Technology training time and costs are minimized. Most important, portal "push" technology drives monitoring of project goals and key performance indicators for both the project owner and each partner in the chain.

Change Management: A Way of Life

As noted earlier, the IT portion of a portal implementation doesn't present unique challenges. Rather, the majority of the company's emphasis should be on the chain management required to migrate employees to the portal platform.

Portals minimize training over time, but can create initial anxiety about how the new interface will affect daily work. Traditional change management prepares employees for the outcome of change: moving from A to B. Yet portals both allow and promote rapid change. Therefore, part of implementing a portal interface is modifying workers' expectations to understand that change is a permanent characteristic of the corporate environment, and a company's ability to handle constant change is a significant corporate asset.

When the portal is in place, change management becomes less cumbersome because the portal becomes a change facilitator. Companies that follow the outside-in approach and deploy the portals in the early stages of systems build-out minimize the education and training required when back-end systems are added or modified.

Content is Key

The critical success factor in a successful portal implementation is content; the content displayed on the portal must be relevant. Merely pushing out data through a portal won't necessarily improve an employee's productivity. Productivity is enhanced when intermediaries manipulate and analyze data, turning it into useful information. Depending on the depth of a portal's content offerings, for every one technical specialist a company needs to maintain its portal, it will require between four and 10 content specialists — researchers, writers, editors, and Web site and graphics producers — to provide a timely stream of useful information to portal users.

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As the portal gains acceptance within the workplace and begins providing value, companies must allocate human resources to test, analyze, and determine the usefulness of new applications before they're added to those already available through the company's workplace.

The goal in a portal implementation is to get the maximum number of people to use the portal as quickly as possible. The outside-in approach supports this goal by providing the flexibility to prioritize applications that have the biggest impact. One of the early challenges facing all companies implementing portals is providing users with a fine-tuned balance of applications and content that are useful to them (for example, email, benefits management, and corporate travel management) and ones that are more useful to the company (such as supply chain management or CRM). Portal designers must analyze the needs of individuals who'll be using the system and determine which products best satisfy both the company's and the individuals' personal needs as they fulfill their roles.

Unlike previous solutions, portals provide a golden opportunity to deliver information that's pertinent to an employee's role; filtered, eliminating the need for individuals to wade through so much information that they become frustrated by the process; and flexible, so that even when roles change, the system remains relevant, easily navigable, and useful. The outside-in approach dictates that the sooner a company can begin a portal implementation the better for the company. Employees and partners will log on to the portal with the understanding that every information source, application, and service appearing on their screen is relevant. Companies will be in a position to fully leverage previous and future IT investments and significantly enhance employee, partner, and customer collaboration in the process.

Grant Norris [grant.norris@us.pwcglobal.com] is a partner with PricewaterhouseCoopers Consulting (PWC). He has 18 years of experience designing and installing enterprisewide systems for organizations in the telecommunications, transportation, defense, hospitality, and energy industries.

David J. Duray is a partner and global leader of PWC Consulting's SAP business, the world's largest SAP consulting practice. He has 24 years of experience in IT and has worked with numerous Fortune 500 companies. To reach Duray, contact Charles Zinkowski at 212-259-1897 or charles.zinkowski@us.pwcglobal.com.