Network management Toolkit

Portals: Opening new doors to business

Tags:
Business Applications,
Portal,
Staff Management

David Braue

Published: 05 Jan 2004 15:55 GMT

Give the business what it wants
Strong support for portal projects means it should be easier than usual to get the executive support that's essential for any enterprise project to succeed.

That support, however, is not by any means something to be taken for granted. Earning executive support typically requires portal teams to do a considerable amount of groundwork to identify the company's worst pain points and the business solutions that are seen as potentially relieving those problems.

For natural gas giant Santos, this process was a key part of the groundwork that preceded construction of an internal portal, called The Well, that was envisioned from the start as a way of improving employees' access to their data and to each other.

Project planning involved surveying the needs of users across the company's major sites, gathering their feedback about the portal as a solution, testing prototypes with them, and then using these results to win both business sponsorship (a financial commitment to support the portal) and business ownership (a philosophical commitment to the whole idea of the portal). Those surveys revealed five key Santos business requirements: collaboration, communication, consolidation, consistency and access.

With this information in hand, the portal team was able to focus its pitch for executive support. The Well includes TeamLink, which supports the creation of 'team sites' that virtually unite Santos' more than 1,700 employees across the globe into project-focused workgroups; videoconferencing to improve communication; consolidation of information resources through secure document management; document publishing standards to ensure information was consistent throughout the company; and consistent and secure access from anywhere, any time.

Underscoring each of these elements is the promise of increased employee productivity, something that any executive can appreciate. Productivity, after all, is a driver for economic growth -- something that had US financial analysts smiling after US Labor Department figures revealed productivity in that country had grown by 6.8 percent between April and June despite the loss of 170,000 jobs during that quarter. Improved worker productivity, in short, allows companies to produce more, with fewer people.

Executives like this -- particularly in the current economic climate. So for companies looking into portal deployments, finding ways to simply increase productivity can be a great first step.

"We've had to do a lot of justification around ROI, and you have to work with the executives on their level," says myHalliburton.com programme manager Brandon Lackey. "Ask yourself the kinds of questions they're asking themselves. Just saying that the portal will add more value than it costs isn't relevant from an executive standpoint; if they're deciding whether to increase manufacturing capability, buy another truck, or add another sales employee -- where they know specifically how much revenue that's going to generate -- you have to be able to say that a portal can add more value than adding another sales employee."