What Every CEO Needs to Know About Portal Development

Transcription

1 Introduction What Every CEO Needs to Know About Portal Development by Rick Sidorowicz Many, if not most intranet portal development projects have fallen short of enterprise portal aspirations and promises that of providing a single point of personalized access to all enterprise information and applications, increasing productivity, increasing revenue, improving customer and employee satisfaction and loyalty, and enabling more effective knowledge management, knowledge transfer and collaboration. This article will provide CEOs a framework for the critical thinking and the questions to ask to ensure your portal development effort meets your organization s needs and succeeds. It will present an overview of the best practices in portal design and development, a rapid envisioning process to establish a comprehensive roadmap for implementation to avoid common problems, and the top ten critical success factors to ensure a significant return on investment. Organized chaos If your experience of portal in your organization is one of lengthy development times, cost overruns and questionable economic returns, unmet expectations and deliverables, a disjointed set of productivity, content and collaboration tools, user interfaces that confound and frustrate all, reluctant adoption rates, confusing navigation, ineffective search, outdated policies and procedures, confusing forms, workarounds and heroics to find information to serve customers, a one-way broadcasting of corporate media of questionable value to employees, and a proliferation of independent, inconsistent business unit, department and team portals you are not alone. Most intranets have become completely unwieldy and present a highly fragmented and confusing user experience, with no consistency and very little or poor navigational support. (Nielsen Norman Group Report 2007) As the popularity of portal technology and the expectations of users increase, application vendors and IT technologists are very often the drivers of portal implementation, selling an out-of-the-box solution looking for business needs to fill. A portal effort driven by vendors and IT more often than not will fail to connect with strategic business needs and also fail to deliver the user experience than can enable breakthroughs in performance and the more effective achievement of organizational goals. While there is no doubt that all, if not most enterprises would benefit from a portal framework, the effort must be strategically linked to your higher level business drivers, and must provide an optimal and improved user experience for success. An effective portal framework can enable very significant improvements in productivity and capacity, increased revenues, and employee and customer satisfaction, as well as bring the networked and collaborative organization of the knowledge economy to life. It doesn t have to be a multi-million dollar painful effort. There is a better way! 1

2 A brief overview A portal is a view into the information, applications, processes, knowledge, content and people of an enterprise, to both aggregate and integrate information to get work done faster, more efficiently, more mindfully, and more in alignment with the organization s purpose. The portal view is in essence, how an organization deploys its mission, brand, purpose and information assets - through its people to bring its strategies to life. Your portal is your business the experience of your portal is how people experience your business in the interactive space that has become so vital to everyday activity. Your portal matters - it is strategic to your success. Establish a portal strategy and roadmap that is grounded in the needs of the users, leverages the current ebusiness strategy, and delivers measurable results for the enterprise. A portal can be a great enabler and have a significant positive impact on how work gets done within an organization. Portal views and the information and tools they enable, provide a structure and framework within which people work and move the business of the organization forward. In theory, a portal provides a personalized view and a single point of entry into the various applications and distributed systems of an organization. Most portals also include navigation, search and collaborative functions, and ideally, anything individuals need to do their jobs. This task-based view is one of the most critical elements of portal design. A complete portal solution should provide users with convenient access to everything they need to get their tasks done anytime, anywhere in a secured manner. (Stefen Liesche) The preceding statement should be the overriding mission for the most effective portal development. It is a concise statement of the critical success factors and the criteria to guide all decision making what content, tools or applications to add to the portal, the priority of the same, and the allocation of funds and resources. 2

3 Your portal is strategic to your success and so very tactical as it s all about getting the business of your organization done faster, better, easier! It can be a very powerful enabling application of technology if done mindfully. Common types of portals There are several types of portals to be considered within an overall strategy for the web or interactive channel or space. They are distinct in their focus, but intrinsically related and governed by the same principles. Portal solutions can be developed to address the needs of a specific target audience or business segment. There are Customer Engagement or business-to-consumer (B2C), Business Partner Engagement or business-to-business (B2B), and Employee Engagement or business-to-employee (B2E) with collaboration portals. Customer engagement (B2C) The customer engagement portal is the view, tools and applications you create for your customers. It should be designed for ease of experience, relevance of information and applications, and valueadding in terms of information and tools. The customer engagement portal supports improved customer service, increased customer self-service, and ideally, increased revenue. This can enable a business to be more responsive to customers, provide accurate and current information, and deepen the relationship increasing the customer s loyalty to the business. Business partner engagement (B2B) A business partner engagement portal facilitates quick communication between company employees, business processes, external partners and suppliers. This type of portal can enable improved communication, faster process cycle times, a reduction in bottlenecks, and an increase in productivity for all participants. 3

4 Employee engagement (B2E) An employee engagement portal is designed to increase productivity and reduce costs by providing a single, consistent interface. The main goals are to integrate existing applications, increase selfservice and increase communications while reducing complexity. The benefits include faster access to people, processes, and information and improved communications. Employee engagement portals today typically include collaboration and social networking features that allow users to chat, , share calendars, and define user project, team and social communities. All types of organization portals are vital for success in our current and future contexts and there is no doubt that your organization will ultimately engage in all three. However, if you are getting started, or more likely re-starting, start with the internal portal first - to get it right and experience the benefits of increased productivity and improved tool-sets. The employee engagement (B2E) with collaboration portal type typically (and as best practice) comprises the internal corporate intranet portal for an enterprise or organization. Beyond technology Portal projects are well beyond technology in scope. They involve much more than a set of technical solutions to create a single gateway to all corporate information and services. A recent Nielson Norman Group report cites that in the most successful portal development projects two thirds of the effort must be devoted to non-technical issues. At all the companies we studied, the key issues when building a good intranet portal were political and organizational not technical. Back of the envelop math from successful portal launches suggests technology accounts for roughly one-third of the work, and internal processes the rest. (Nielsen Norman Group Report 2007) From our experience with a number of corporate intranet portals it is clear that a significant portion of the effort involves establishing a fully functional governance infrastructure, as well as defined processes, process control metrics, and a content infrastructure framework fully integrated with the proper toolset and technology. Governance and process are essential elements of the project. Establishing good governance and process management ensures the development of meaningful tools that support all organization priorities including improved productivity, increased capacity, innovation, faster service and execution of tasks, faster on-boarding, orientation and training, cross selling capabilities, streamlined referrals, improved communication, collaboration and knowledge sharing. As an enterprise moves to greater self service and an increasing presence in the interactive space, the processes will ensure the portal directly supports everyday work to be able to work smarter and more productively, with confidence in the information and tools at employees fingertips. The overarching purpose is to make it easier for all employees to do their jobs. Achieving that purpose will also have a direct and most positive impact on customer service, satisfaction and loyalty. 4

5 An intranet portal must be seen as a strategic initiative aligned with and supporting key business drivers and processes. In the knowledge-based economy, information is an organization s key asset, and an effective intranet portal provides the method of deployment and execution to get work done and achieve results. Best practice Rapid envisioning process Before selecting the application solution or starting the portal build, best practice suggests you first conduct a rapid envisioning process. This preliminary exercise will assist your team to: Clarify and articulate the Intranet/Internal Portal vision; Provide a high level logical design and architecture; Provide a roadmap for rapid and manageable implementation; Identify the key success criteria for delivering a high value solution; Prioritize and sequence the requirements, and assess the effort and risk of all initiatives. The involvement of an external multi-disciplined team in the envisioning process is recommended to ensure an unbiased enterprise perspective, an employee-centric view on tasks and requirements, the involvement of a wide audience in the process, the application of best practices and a solution that will meet and align with the business purpose and requirements. The envisioning process should clarify and elaborate the following: The key business drivers and goals and how the intranet portal will align with and support important strategic initiatives and priorities; An organizational readiness assessment, including user experience, content architecture, governance and process, and technology; Who will provide leadership and own the strategy for the interactive space (web and mobile), including delivering a cohesive and integrated user experience; Recommendations for a overall governance framework of executive steering committee, advisory board and other line of business or project teams with clear roles and responsibilities and adequate resources; The opportunities for improvements in productivity, increased capacity, and other quantitative benefits; The opportunities for improvements in qualitative areas such as ease of use, satisfaction and engagement; The resourcing plan including identifying the skills, expertise and capabilities needed to ensure successful implementation of the portal and effective ongoing support and continuous improvement. The approach to increase business agility and flexibility to be able to adapt to new business needs and initiatives in the short term, and develop an overall strategy for greater standardization and integration in technology; 5

6 A clear understanding of the current state and limitations, and the intranet portal vision and future state aspirations and benefits; Enterprise content management requirements including ownership, roles, responsibilities, content life-cycles and management processes; The approach to develop specific role and task-based views or personas that will be leveraged to create personalized strata of content access. Task-driven assessments in the form of personas will drive out a feature set that is usability and needs-based to ensure that a single view will only contain what serves the level of audience defined. A decision framework for portal content prioritization; The overall portal feature set, portal dependencies, feature set integration and usability enhancing tools; Development timeline, value and feasibility; A tactical implementation plan to achieve significant wins quickly and reduce overall project risk. The rapid envisioning process will provide a comprehensive and realistic roadmap for your development effort. The top ten critical success factors The following ten key success factors will minimize risk and contribute to a positive return on your portal investment: 1. Your portal is strategic. The effort must be linked to your business strategy and drivers, as it is how your enterprise is experienced by employees, customers, business partners and vendors. 2. Leadership and ownership. Who will provide leadership and develop and own the strategy for the interactive space (web and mobile)? 3. User experience (UX). Think usability and delivering a cohesive and integrated user experience. 4. Task/role-based portal views. Focus on tasks and roles anything individuals and teams need to get their jobs done. 5. Governance. Be prepared to devote significant time and resources to establishing appropriate portal governance processes and frameworks. 6. Enterprise content management (ecm). Be prepared to devote significant time and resources to ecm disciplines and processes. 7. Self service. Simplify and make it easy to navigate. Provide relevant tools, information and resources. Invest in ecm disciplines, taxonomy and effective search functionality. 8. Realistic business case. Invest the time and resources to elaborate the qualitative and quantitative benefits envisioned and the measurement metrics that will be employed. Focus on 6

7 the impact of increased self service, increased productivity and capacity, and increased revenues and customer loyalty. 9. Rapid envisioning process. Develop a comprehensive roadmap before you start or select the technology. 10. Tactical implementation plan. Employ a short term tactical implementation cycle to achieve significant wins quickly, reduce overall project risk, and inspire energy for your portal development project. We ve been talking about portal development and haven t even begun to consider the technology, or the application solution. And we won t talk technology until we get through the prerequisites of governance, enterprise content management (ecm), and a most effective tactical implementation model. There is a better way and this series of articles will help you get there mindfully and on purpose. We hope this overview provides you a framework for the critical thinking that is required to develop effective portals that serve the needs of your users and support your strategic priorities. Reference: Usability of Intranet Portals - Nielsen Norman Group Report 2007 The Author Rick Sidorowicz works with T4G as a Business Strategist developing innovative solutions for retailers and financial services organizations. His most recent related assignment was a member of T4G s multidisciplined team conducting an intranet portal rapid envisioning process for a major Canadian financial services organization. For additional information or to schedule a conversation please rick.sidorowicz@sympatico.ca About T4G T4G is a project-based technology services and consulting company specializing in building top performance teams who solve critical business needs in all areas of information delivery from application development and technology infrastructure, through to content, design and consultation. Through the intelligent application of the right technology, we create sustainable value for our clients while developing leading-edge solutions that keep pace with and extract the best of what technology has to offer. T4G has rich experience in enterprise portal development, user experience, content management and application solutions, and also offers a most effective rapid envisioning process for portal development for enterprises and organizations. For additional information please mary.lou.zietsoff@t4g.com and visit 7