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By Simon Marshall, 24 March 2004 12:35

COMMENT The enterprise portal movement is way beyond the vendor-hype stage. Organisations are communicating with their employees, partners, suppliers and customers like never before. Simon Marshall has been finding out the progress users are seeing.

Enterprise portals (EPs), it seems, can be many things. For users, they're the access gateway to tailored information, using a web browser. For IT managers, they're a way of presenting information from disparate databases in a single, popular format. For CIOs, they are becoming the vehicle for pushing through new policies in workflow, collaboration and, perhaps most pressingly, secure, tiered information access.

They're also going to be big.

"Enterprise portals could become the de facto [enterprise] operating environment," says Mike Davis, EP analyst at Butler Group, who thinks the popularity of EPs will rocket as they become the ideal access mechanism for Microsoft's web services aspirations.

But if the EP phenomenon is being driven on the market side, albeit indirectly, by the Microsoft marketing machine, how is it being driven on the enterprise side? Who is implementing what and how are they justifying it?

Enterprises are renowned for their allergy to implementing IT projects that show only soft benefits rather than hard ROI. But this wasn't a problem for the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI) when it decided last September to build an EP as a catalyst to disseminate information for the burgeoning UK fuel cell research community.

"Although this is the DTI's first [EP] pilot, it wasn't tough to implement," says Allan Mayo, the DTI's department director for key business technologies. "That's because there's a recognition that networks are important for the government to move the economy forward."

The DTI paid about £50,000 for an unlimited Vignette licence for Melton Mowbray-based Pera to develop an EP for UK universities and businesses to meet each other and their European and US counterparts. The 50 members can now access or post their own tailored news and research, and spider out – with technology from PFICKS - into global patent databases to examine intellectual property, while Foreign Office Science and Technology attaches can post reports from overseas. A VoIP conferencing facility from Interwise facilitates web conferencing between members and from guest speakers, such as Rolls Royce.

Mayo says success will be judged by what proportion of the known market became members, how many participated and, ultimately, how much the UK fuel cell industry has benefited commercially. Similar portals for the nanotechnology and composite materials sectors wait in the wings.

"We will support users [for free] up to the point of commercialisation, then we'll look for a paid membership and shared [portal] responsibility," says Mayo, indicating this may take up to three years.

"Portals have to be nourished to be successful and there has to be an active interest to inform the members," he says. To this end, a 'champion' posts his daily blog to the embryonic portal.

"A lot of organisations are developing [these] project-based portals," says Butler's Davis. These are at the vanguard because they allow a large number of projects to be run over a number of sites where members can enter and then leave when they have performed their function in the lifecycle. It also allows a project leader to invite and authenticate participants, backed by appropriate security and a robust underlying directory solution.

An implementation for the Open University Business School (OUBS) had similar objectives to the DTI's portal but had a more up-front justification case to make since it is a £40m business in its own right.

"The project was justified on a staff/time/cost basis, that is, the time spent by staff trying to locate information from disparate sources," says Craig Hutchinson-Howorth, facilities and IS manager at the OUBS. "There had been a tendency to build siloed information systems, and the actual hours spent accessing them were surprising."

Despite initial challenges in formatting portal views, linking to the sheer number of databases and establishing a single login, an increase in productivity and decrease in ill-targeted emails was noted. This is because information is now 'pulled' from the portal rather than 'pushed' from user to user. Irrelevant information is filtered out, streamlining the system.

Switzerland's Flakt Woods Group, an international ventilation and industrial air handling specialist with 3,500 staff in 30 countries, and a turnover of €500m, exemplifies the importance of this. After a substantial two-way merger, it selected Datum Consulting to build an EP so that sales teams from the two companies could access the same information. The result was a nine-month ROI from automating the document management process.

"Justifying this project was not too bad," says Rolf Beggerow, IT and systems manager at Flakt Woods. "We presented it as a phased programme where the first phase had cost saving because if we'd gone straight to the management and said we wanted an EP it would have been much harder to justify," he says.

Although the EP has united two separate sales teams, Beggerow admits that Flakt Woods still faces a cultural hurdle.

"We still have to pursue the sales teams to store it centrally where we can provide more control to the process," he says. This will ensure teams always work from the most recent version of documentation.

Flakt Woods' success illustrates the benefits of rolling out an EP across the organisation very quickly, rather than becoming stalled by adding more functionality to EPs that never make it beyond the pilot stage.

"Start small, get demonstrable results and then expand it to the rest of the organisation very quickly," says Butler's Davis. "Otherwise there's the temptation of feature-creep or what I call 'permanent pilot'," he warns.

Such a lack of progress would have been unacceptable to BT, which launched its Intellact EP in April 2003 and finished most of its development within six months. The Verity-powered portal provides access to news, analysis and research and is used by BT's sales, marketing and strategy people.

"Because BT is a large company, the effectiveness of distributed information was already pretty well understood and there wasn't too much arm-twisting to get Intellact off the ground," says Robert Besford, Intellact product manager. But he stresses that an EP is only as good as its information resources, which must be regularly updated.

"Because we also act as a research buying hub, we have a number of meetings throughout the year with key stakeholders in our business lines where we evaluate the content we have for each line," he explains. He now plans to tweak Intellact's search functionality and may even consider commercialising the product for BT's customers.

"There's potential for a [commercial] EP that provides a search across an organisation's information," he says, "I think there's a case for BT to do something like this."