October 30, 2003

The Portal Reborn

Process management's evolution, supported by recent technology advances, gives IT good reason to look again at what kind of portal will deliver the most value to users. Here are the best practices to help you succeed

by Mark M. Davydov

The early successes of portal implementations have left IT organizations excited about the possibilities suggested by the powerful underpinnings of portals. IT groups are especially eager to use key functions, such as personalization and security, collaboration, content management, and unified search to create a comprehensive environment for employees, customers, and partners across the enterprise to interact with each other and different systems.

Meanwhile, many businesses have turned their attention to a new change-management and systems-implementation methodology called process management (PM — distinguished from business performance management, or BPM). PM lets you view enterprise systems through the lens of business processes rather than as disjointed computer applications — providing the visibility, flexibility, and responsiveness necessary to manage the business optimally.

From these two trends has arisen the concept of PM/portal hybrid applications (otherwise known as PM portals). As an ideal, PM portals offer the unified information access and dissemination services of portals while integrating the deeper analytic and low-level decision-support power of PM concepts and business performance measurement tools such as the Balanced Scorecard, Robert Saaty's Analytic Hierarchy Process, business process modeling, and strategic benchmark mapping.

With the increase in opportunities to create these hybrid applications, it's time for the portal development community to seriously discuss best practices for their development. Multiple practical implementations have shown there are many possibilities for integrating portals with PM systems, but which of these are viable and truly offer the best that both technologies have to offer?

A New Twist for Familiar Technology

Many wonder if the PM portal is really just an EIP that's been rebranded. But whereas the typical EIP implementation is "pure BI" — focusing on data warehousing with seamless access to online analytic processing applications — the PM portal goes beyond analysis and reporting. A PM portal closes the loop between heterogeneous information sources, operational and decision-support systems, and the information delivery infrastructure in order to optimally manage business processes. BI components must be tightly integrated into a mixture of other components such as groupware applications for communications and workflow, and enterprisewide messaging infrastructure (such as JMS platforms) for engineering enterprise integration capabilities.

As the industry accelerates toward a new PM-based model of portal implementations, the result is a technology architecture fundamentally different from the one we are familiar with. The most important characteristics (see Figure 1) of this different architecture include:

Process-driven vs. data warehouse-driven. The data warehouse data model no longer governs. Instead, the scope and function of the enterprise IT architecture is formulated in accordance with the definition of the activities involved in fulfilling the requirements of the business management process (intraenterprise and interenterprise), regardless of the people or systems involved. The result is an architecture that can support multiple activities occurring in parallel across several decision-support applications and operational systems. More specifically, it delivers the services, integration, and mediation necessary to complete each of the activities that together form the sum of the entire process.

Presentation-level vs. data-level integration. Applications need to access data as though it were in a single database, whether or not it is. Your predominant focus should be integrating key metrics, measures, and dimensions from disparate applications instead of on the nuts and bolts of providing direct application-driven access to various applications. This way, you end up with a hybrid architecture that is a combination of virtual (presentation-level) and physical (operational systems, data warehouses, data marts, and so on) access to data. Virtually integrated data should include not only structured data, but also unstructured data — through content management and XML application programming interfaces (APIs).

Service-oriented vs. discrete nature of applications and analytic tools. The architecture does not anticipate that users will interact with discrete applications and related analytic tools as in traditional EIP. To the contrary, it facilitates the use of a large number of application components as services: Web services technology integrates the components into a single application; business process definitions act as the interface to service specifications for determining which components should be included in the Web service. This approach gives you highly dynamic, enterprisewide (intraorganization) intranet/extranet integration. It also moves you toward interenterprise business process integration, with the ability to comprehensively interchange interorganization information and BI capabilities — such as interenterprise collaborative data warehousing and BI Web services.

Federated, broker-oriented exchange model vs. monolithic, hub-and-spoke model. The information exchange model is based on the principles of a federated architecture, which assumes heterogeneous "best-of-breed" solutions. These principles contrast against monolithic, hub-and-spoke structures that serve a single, conceptually homogeneous solution — which is rigid and unable to accept and integrate with any turnkey (such as commercial off-the-shelf) application later. The federated strategy accelerates deployment of new applications. Monolithic, hub-and-spoke models are great in theory, but undesirable in reality!

The bottom line is that in order to understand PM portals, you have to realize that there is no single presentation or reporting consolidation feature that classifies a portal as a PM portal. The most important defining feature is an underlying layer of interconnected services running within the portal environment, an infrastructure layer that transparently provides software automation to enable the following:

• Visualization of activities in inter- and intraenterprise business processes as required to determine root causes related to specific problems or defects
• Monitoring the critical components of the entire value stream, focusing on end-to-end process management and identification of factors that destabilize supply and demand balance across the stream
• Flexibility in access mode (push or pull)
• Seamless integration, both virtual (presentation-level) and physical (such as in operational systems, data warehouses, and data marts)
• Dual-process measurement capabilities: Measurement of effectiveness — how well do processes meet or exceed expectations? Measurement of efficiency — measuring resources used by processes to meet or exceed expectations.

Until now, IT organizations have had little ability to make strategies based on the PM portal framework a reality because it required implementing many pieces from scratch. Recent advances in application server and portal platforms, PM systems, content management systems, and application integration solutions have reduced significantly the dependency on custom development, allowing IT organizations to start undertaking the move.

Successful PM Portal Applications

Each business is different, and choosing the correct strategies for PM portal applications isn't easy. There are no cookie cutters available. However, paying careful attention to the following important principles of design and development of PM portals can help significantly in creating high-value PM implementations that can ensure the ability of corporate employees to improve their efficiency and effectiveness, as well as the efficiency and effectiveness of the whole enterprise.

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