Tuesday, December 16, 2008

I've recently been tasked with working on a corporate portal strategy, which lead me down a path of thinking about a couple of important questions. First, what exactly is a portal these days? Second, given that definition, what exactly is a "portal strategy"? I'll delve into what I believe to be general answers to these questions, avoiding the particulars of my company's effort.

What is a portal?

Back in the late 1990's, I was never a fan of the term portal. If I was handing out awards for "buzzword of the year" back then, the term portal would have been a gold metal winner. For a few years the word seemed to decrease in usage (with the notable exception being the product vendors that focused on "portal" platforms). This was a bit of a relief for me, and allowed me to focus my buzzword angst on other targets. When I joined my current company, I was happy to be using the term "extranet" to describe the project that I was running. Things changed again when we purchased another managed services provider, and our leadership began to use the term portal anew. For the last four years, I've had to get over my issue with the term and come to embrace it as a good description of the integration platform and web application delivery tool that we have developed.

When trying to pin a definition on a buzzword, I always like to get the crowd-sourced opinion. A quick search of Wikipedia for the term "portal" returns the expected disambiguation page, but from there you can find two links related to this topic: Enterprise Portal and Web Portal. The enterprise portal page defines a portal as a "framework for integrating information, people and processes across organizational boundaries". The first line of the web portal page says "A web portal is a site that provides a single function via a web page or site." That's certainly a non-intuitive statement (and not one that I agree with). I couple of sentences later, it states "Portals present information from diverse sources in a unified way." Now that's a much more logical description. The key words seem to be "integrated" and "unified".

So, given my past experience and what the masses have to say about it, I've boiled it down to a couple of key aspects:

1. Web-based - It's got to use HTTP as the primary mechanism of accessing the system. I only say this, because there really isn't another protocol as widely adopted that caters to the application and content use cases that get associated with the term portal.
2. Integrated applications - Especially with in "Enterprise" portal solution, but even in several consumer portals on the Internet (such as iGoogle and Live), integration of different applications into a single interface is key.
3. Personalized and Customized - Personalization and customization are two keys to a successful user experience with a portal. While they aren't required, I'm adding them as key aspects because of their importance to the success of the system.

What is a portal strategy?

This is where I think that the conversation gets tricky. If we exclude any talk of a consumer oriented solution, a corporate portal strategy could really be one of three things:

Customer Portal Strategy - This is basically an extranet-style solution. The strategy around this should focus on the following:

• Consolidated experience across multiple lines of business (if they exist)
• Contractual, billing and operational transparency
• Self-service support
• New service purchasing

Internal Portal Strategy - If the customer portal strategy was an extranet, this is the intranet side of the solution. Strategy points for this:

• Operational Efficiency
• Infrastructure / Development Cost Reduction (Common Platform)
• Employee Satisfaction
• Knowledge Management
• Collaboration

Web Strategy - If you get rid of a log in prompt, the customer portal begins to look more like your corporate marketing website. Strategy points for this:

• Corporate Web Presence
• Search Engine Optimization
• Brand Protection / Reinforcement
• Web Analytics

Where they intersect - There are a couple of strategic areas that these three ideas have at their intersection:

• Customer Acquisition, Retention & Up/Cross Selling
• Intellectual Capital / Property Management
• Common Technical Architecture
• Governance & Standards

So to answer the question (What is a portal strategy?), I've come to the conclusion that it's something made up of most of the elements listed above. We will see how this plays out in the next couple of months (and as we engage with different leaders in the interactive industry), and I'll certainly write again if my perspective changes.