Building a corporate portal:
A Corporate portal, what do it do? Why do I need a portal?
It provides single location for all information. An intranet is not a portal, because a portal is design and presented the right information at the right time. It is personalized to my needs instead of the generic corporate portal.“When Yahoo added personalization, when they added myYahoo, the number of users grew from 9 million to 14 million in 3 months! Of course other features, such as search, and browsing, and notification are important, but the essence of what it does for the user is convenience and personalization.”
Businesses want to improve their business, satisfy their customers and increase profitability. They need to make intelligent and timely business decisions. That is why businesses are interested in Knowledge Management. The decision making process is basically about: Define the problem, Evaluate the decision factors, Collect relevant information, Identify a solution, Develop and implement a Plan and Evaluate the results.
What are the information needed to make decisions? There are structured information, e.g. reports and analyses. Unstructured information are office documents, web, e-Mail, collaboration and Business Process, experience. Most of our information is unstructured information.
Current Information Technology is not satisfying Information needs for making decisions. Applications are not integrated. They rarely provide all the information needed to make decisions. Often, the information is not timely enough for the business to act on the information.
The business drivers are of corporate portals are: the significant growth of corporate data, growth and diversity of data customers, increasing cross functional business requirements and increasing use of ERP systems. Knowledge workers are increasing from 17% in 1900 to 59% now. They are spending too much time in searching for information. Studies showed that less than 5% of a worker’s intellectual capital are submitted to company’s knowledge store.
A corporate portal should be a knowledge portal. “A knowledge portal is a (single point of access) window not into just information, but the connections between the information which transforms it into knowledge.” “The portal creats a process model out of chaos of the desktop,” Thomas Koulopoulos, CEO, Delphi Group. It is web-enabled application that delivers personalized information to people, to everybody, i.e. employee, suppliers, customers and partners. Most of the information is internal and have been accessed in one way or another. The challenge is knowing where and how to get the information. Information can be from data warehouse, and production systems, e.g. applications, reporting, queries, analyses and specialized analyses (OLAP).
A portal should meet the corporate needs. It should provide framework that is open enough for everybody and flexible enough to meet the ever changing environment. The portal is for your people, accessing your information using your IT infrastructure. It provides all of the security and content management needed to support access to all of the kinds of information needed to support your business requirements.
Information of a portal includes, documents that are managed, access to the web, e-mail and threaded discussions, data from data-warehouse and from applications.
The metrics of a portal should have the ability to publish and subscribe, easy to use navigation and categorization and search engines, accessible portal information store, a good business intelligence engine for analyses, timely delivery, authorized, authenticated to ensure it is personalized, to the right personal at the right time.
Corporate portal should be a enterprise ready: B2E and B2C to integrates all appropriate information and applications, user friendly with minimal training required with dynamic personalization, B2B: Able to collaborative with customer, suppliers and partners that is customizable and with security.