Network management Toolkit

Portals: Opening new doors to business

David Braue

Published: 05 Jan 2004 15:55 GMT

If they're done right, portals can provide financial returns and less tangible benefits. How can you get the best results and how do you measure your success?

Like any new technology, enterprise information portals (EIPs) were greeted with raucous enthusiasm when they began emerging as a concept several years ago. Unlike many new technologies, however, they've actually proven their worth as a practical way of making it easier for users to access the information and programs they need.

Years down the track, early portal adopters are weighing in on the benefits portals have provided. They report employees working more efficiently, managers getting better access to information, faster resolution of internal problems, and customers that come back time and again. In many cases, this has led to a clearly demonstrable return on investment (ROI) that has more than justified companies' investments in portal technology.

Consider the experience of $7bn global oil and gas services giant Halliburton, which set up its myHalliburton.com portal as a way of concentrating internal knowledge and external customer contact into a single interface. At a cost of around $7.2m over the last three years, the portal has generated an estimated ROI of 559 percent in direct savings -- through better access to documents, faster payments, and increased sales. More to the point, the availability of the portal has been named by customers as having influenced around $220m in new business.

These kinds of numbers are enough to make any business manager sit up and take notice, which may be why portals have become a shining star in an otherwise lacklustre IT spending market. In a survey of more than 2800 organisations in Australia and 11 other regional countries, IDC found that growth in companies' spending on enterprise portals had outpaced all other areas of IT investment -- jumping from 12 percent in earlier years to 17 percent in 2002.

For its part, research firm S2 Intelligence, in a recent survey of senior IT decision makers at Australian companies, found that enterprise portals were ranked third out of the 31 categories of projects seen to be delivering the greatest business value. They trailed enterprise resource planning and telephony projects, but came out well ahead of other much-discussed investment areas like security, business intelligence, wireless networking, and B2C commerce.