- Enterprise Service Platforms Are Here to Stay
- From Web Portals to Multi-Constituent, Multi-Channel Portals
- The Next Step in Portal Evolution: Service Platforms
- Enterprise Service Platforms: Making Complexity Manageable
- Conclusion
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From Web Portals to Multi-Constituent, Multi-Channel Portals
In a few short years, web portals have influenced how companies serve both internal and external users. From sharing resources internally, to customer transactions and real-time collaboration with partners, portals have been widely deployed across the business landscape. Initially, portals were meant just to access information through a web browser. The next step was to link different applications so that users could retrieve transaction information such as order status. The next evolution was enabling users to act on that information, with hard-coded point-to-point integration.
Rapid time-to-value is one reason that portals have been widely adopted. Faced with the prospect of multiyear, multimillion-dollar enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM) projects, companies began reevaluating their visions for enterprise applications, breaking down monolithic initiatives into discrete, fast-payback pilots in areas such as supplier, reseller, and customer portals.
Every boom is followed by a bust period. Not surprisingly, the portal revolution is experiencing growing pains. Take, for instance, the fragmentation problem. A single company may have more than 100 different portals performing different tasks for different departments and aimed at disparate user segments. Often, these portals are built on dissimilar platforms and integrate different back-end applications. It isn't hard to see that value is leaking out of the processes due to disconnected "stovepipe" portals and silos of information.
In some organizations, the situation has become unmanageable. Portals exist in isolation, unable to work with each other or with the company as a whole. This is a huge headache for companies that need to share portal resources across the enterprise in a way that leverages their current investments and avoids having to build an entirely new system-wide portal network from scratch.
As the number of portals grows unchecked, chaos erupts. The expected value and realized value of portals vary widely (see Table 1). Deciding whether to centralize the portal infrastructure is the burning issue for organizations under pressure to achieve greater economies of scale from multimillion-dollar investments.
Table 1 The Trouble with Portals
|
Expected Value of Portals |
Realized Value of Portals |
|
Increase efficiency through automation |
Proprietary approaches have increased complexity |
|
Shorten the delivery time for new services |
Point solutions and disconnected product suites jeopardize business results |
|
Foster innovation through deeper understanding of business, customers, and core processes, with an ability to adapt as needed |
Complex deployments such as business-to-business portals freeze current and new services |
|
Increase value while reducing total cost of ownership |
Value is not increasing—integration costs are! |