5 August 2002

Portals - Cutting Through the Confusion

By Graham Urquhart, Director of Strategic Business Development, ITNET

Vendors are rushing to re-position themselves and put a portal spin on their existing products. But the result for local authorities looking at the technology can be confusion, with a range of different definitions and claims clouding the true picture.

Whether portal technology is considered to be the next big thing to drive a local authority's strategic direction, or just the next add-on technology to boost existing solutions, it is ultimately too important to overlook.

In simple terms, portals are a means by which an authority's employees, its partners and suppliers can work together, unifying all their information sources and presenting it, real-time, in a meaningful way.

Portal technology adds value by allowing people to work collaboratively, any time, anywhere, bringing parts of each technology solution together in a way that makes sense for the individual.

A portal is not a collection of links to other sites, and nothing more. It's much deeper than that - and the time is now right to bring clarity into what is a potentially hugely important technology.

Many local authorities and business organisations do understand that portals are much more than that, but do not refer to them as portals. They often say that they want a system that presents a group of other systems in a sensible way that is personalised to the user. That is, quite simply, what a portal does.

Time to clarify

Portals have a number of characteristics: they are 'user-centric' in that they present a number of services to an individual user in an intuitive way. They can even be user controllable but that is not a necessary condition. I wouldn't even restrict the definition to services that are only delivered by multiple parties.

Portals allow us to work with people we know - colleagues, suppliers, partners and other stakeholders. We take elements of service that we have and they have and bring the value chain and those services together in a way that makes sense for the individual. Portals are about solving a problem by getting a coherent user experience across a lot of incoherent systems.

So, we know when a portal is a portal. But why the distrust of portals when it is clear they can offer so much to the modern local authority?

Some authorities currently have a perception of loss of control, especially when the portal is being used to present third party information.

There are also security concerns. If data is fed into a particular service, accessed through a portal, just how is that data being protected from prying eyes? It is these sorts of issues that are stopping strategic multi-supplier portals.

Tactical or strategic?

Most portals today are used tactically as office efficiency aids rather than as strategically important tools. This is a good way of communicating up to date and relevant information to staff, letting users subscribe to the information they need and putting more control back in the hands of managers.

Certainly we at ITNET are implementing portals of that nature, both internally and externally, and particularly in the membership sector where portals are a popular way of providing news and information.

These portals can draw together office, word processing and mail applications, as well as all the information managers want to get to colleagues.

But many of these sort of portals are very tentatively linked to back office systems and are being used for community building rather than big system delivery. However, I can see them growing and becoming a means of drawing new systems together by giving them the look and feel of the authority.

Big benefits

One of the many benefits of using a portal to front back-office systems is that it actually forces a security issue that people usually fudge. For a start, you have to get a decent, ubiquitous security model to make it work, ensuring that the credentials that you give at the portal site are the credentials that are respected by all the back-office systems.

Portals also highlight an important issue about where on the desktop an individual spends his or her working day. A lot of people spend their time in email. This forces them into a reactive position. In some jobs that is quite a workable proposition, but when innovation and creativity are important you need more control.

This is where portals can help. Not only do they present you with tasks and mail which you can easily do but it can also present you with the systems the mail refers to, enabling you to build much tighter links with those systems. A portal, then, is a sort of 'digital dashboard.' It's a way of bringing together the place you work. That's one facet of the way portals are becoming important.

Another argument in favour of portals is that they can improve efficiency as an individual can tailor the portal to do the things they do regularly. This also has a morale implication because it makes employees feel more in control. Rather than being driven, they are driving.

Ultimately, a local authority has to decide whether the portal should just be a HR aid, or a desktop working environment. Whereas many people live inside mail today I can see the time when they will be living inside mail inside the portal.

What do you need to do to make a portal work?

But how do you go about implementing a portal? How do you ensure that the portal implementation goes smoothly and, more importantly, it does the job? The technical stuff is relatively simple. It is the 'softer' issues that are more complex. There are six basic guidelines:

	1	Technical infrastructure - there is no need to restrict yourself to existing technology, but you will need to interface to some of it.
	2	Applications - you need to have a clear strategic information architecture and introduce a programme of development with priorities. If it starts small and smart, with a focus on employee benefits, this will get buy-in from staff and will help bring in the benefits.
	3	Content management - content is king and must not be overlooked. Content must be correct, up to date and available. Anything less and it will be a failure, so this is mainly about internal education and the inclusion of 'content management' in staff objectives where required.
	4	User groups are essential - you must use staff to give you constructive feedback, use their ideas and make them ambassadors.
	5	A 'web champion' should be appointed to help you manage the site on a day to day basis as well as develop it.
	6	Statistics - you should gather the right statistics to show what is going right and what is going wrong.

Pulse - an employee portal in action

ITNET's own employee portal, called Pulse, now plays a key role within the organisation - and that role is growing all the time.

The system developed in a gradual, modular way, building up into the employee portal that the company's 2200 plus employees use every day.

We began the process by making our internal phone directory available on Pulse. Other modules were soon added, including an employee services area which gives access to purchasing and room bookings, a 'working in ITNET' section containing forms, FAQs and procedures, a 'personal development' area containing online training and career information and a communications section featuring company news and CEO objectives as well as the discussion database.

This effort was stepped up when we decided to use the system for two of our most important information gathering exercises: the anonymous employee survey, an annual event designed to measure how employees feel about working in the organisation, and employee annual appraisals.

An on-line expenses system has become a hugely appreciated part of the Pulse system, allowing employees a simple means to file their claims on Pulse. These are checked on-line by their manager and forwarded for processing. The procedure has cut out paperwork and speeded up the activity enormously, as well as instilling a standardised approach to the process.

Pulse, like any jigsaw, does not need to have all the pieces in order for it to fit together. Pulse is very much a modular system and as long as there is a final vision of the system in mind the pieces can be added to the jigsaw as and when they can be justified. This approach means that Pulse can grow with the organisation and be more easily tailored to user demands.

One of the big advantages for us in introducing Pulse was that people at different sites could get access to information as quickly as somebody sitting in the main offices. That's been very helpful, in that it has broken down the barriers in an organisation because people can get hold of what they want very easily now.

Conclusions

Most local authorities are still at the beginning as far as the development of portals is concerned and most do not fully appreciate what a portal can do for their organisations.

Yet the fact remains that the portal, which, in its true sense is a technology that provides the means to unify employee, partner and supplier information and present it in a meaningful way, should be recognised for the crucial business tool that it is.

Graham Urquhart is director of strategic business development at IT and business process outsourcing services company ITNET. Tel: 0121 459 1155. Email: info@itnetplc.com