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

Continued from Page 1

Best Practice #1

Strategize just right. Embrace the concept of federated architectures.

Many organizations still think of PM portals as a very big project, requiring a very detailed top-to-bottom architecture definition. While it's true that stepping back and studying the big picture is necessary before embarking on such projects, architects and designers would do best to embrace a multigenerational planning process. This process involves delivering technical capabilities from the federated architecture standpoint, linking the principle tools and applications into an interdependent chain focused on:

• Providing an incremental deployment scheme: Start with a technology foundation that allows more discrete application modules to be plugged in as implementations go.
• Combining the business-innovation agenda and technology opportunities to achieve a real balance between need-driven and tool-driven approaches to project planning. In the old debate about what comes first, business strategy or technology, the right answer is both. One of the most critical success factors here is alignment between business process reengineering plans and technology capabilities: Business and IT need to share multigenerational designs of business- and system-model components of the PM portal framework.
• Ensuring flexibility in the choice of protocols and technology standards. Using multiple layers of abstraction in the federated architecture makes implementation faster and allows mixing and matching of implementations to requirements. Protocols and technology standards change. Layering allows replacing a declining protocol or technology with minimum impact.
• Unifying data on ongoing basis — constantly reducing data integration needs by eliminating redundant versions of critical data (such as customer data) within systems like ERP or CRM, wherever it is possible and cost-justifiable. The spotlight here should be on delivering a unified means of maintaining and extending a vocabulary of data semantics among various data formats within legacy and newly built applications, and among business dialects.
• Making decisions on an initial set of functions for the portal. The decisions should be based on the business process model and what type of data (process measurements) you're able to gather in or near real time. Based on that ability, you can then choose the analysis tools you'll integrate into the portal.
• Distinguishing between features more important for a specialized PM portal (such as visualization of activities and vital factors that drive the business process) and features geared for generalized portals (such as search, content management, and rich multimedia capabilities).

These recommendations reflect the fact that there is no need for PM portal projects to be costly and operationally disruptive. Taking the federated architecture approach makes the solution highly scalable in terms of both business and IT plans for PM. In other words, it lets you create an architecture that is just right for the time being, but one that will also last.

Multigenerational planning reaches a new level of consciousness through the concept of federated architecture. This combined approach shortens the multistep process between the creation of PM strategies and their implementation. It also allows the user, through a well-tailored, specialized portal, access to accurate and consistent process measurement information, resulting in the realization of benefits earlier in the project.

The wrong strategy is to first focus on best practices in performance management and then look for a portal that can support them. Start PM planning with defining the portal and automating the performance management process within that portal. To embark on PM is to set off for a journey; when you create the right portal, you enjoy success at the early stages of the journey.

Best Practice #2

Follow principles of composite application development.

Of all the portal development approaches at your disposal when designing hybrid PM portal applications, the concept of composite application development is one of the most influential. There are many terms that attempt to encapsulate this approach, including EAI extension, enterprise application cooperation, business PM integration, and service choreography. But I define composite application development as the full spectrum: combining disjointed components of existing processes with appropriate business logic (from PM scenarios) into newly assembled processes, and then presenting results to the user as a single (therefore "composite") application.

While characteristics of composite applications may vary, and there is yet no standard methodology to guide composite application development, it is nevertheless possible to formulate the key principles pertaining to such purposes, in particular:

• Business scenario-based configuration of components and interaction coordination
• Event-driven execution flow governed by the system's automated collaboration and workflow functionality
• Self-contained, loosely coupled application components, where components have no knowledge or understanding of each other
• Complete abstractions of middleware and infrastructure services (such as security, data stream transformation, and databases) through service-oriented connectors and corresponding APIs.

Best Practice #3

Ensure role-based presentation structuring.

This theme of providing a structure for role-based presentation involves a few distinct threads, the second of which shows up in best practice number 4. The first is the recognition that PM portals are much more effective if their presentation services are organized by user roles according to the principles of composite application development, including and especially for top-level management. You can characterize this practice as being subject-matter expert (SME)-driven. You should structure the portal according to the "SME — business scenarios" hierarchy referenced in Figure 2.

The increased SME reach of the portal presentation services inevitably means increased presentation depth and greater specialization among analysis tools — accruing greater advantages to all users.

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