EBusiness Portals - a door opens to productivity heaven or is it data deluge hell?

A very rare thing then, the cynic would say. But to advocates, portals are the thing that will perform miracles and move mountains, data mountains to be precise, to turn employees into knowledge workers and link business partners and customers around the globe. The question is will they deliver, and what strategic advantage can they offer the business?

Portal origins
Much can be understood about the promise of portals, and their potential use, when it is remembered that their origins can be traced back to the executive information systems (EIS) developed in the early 1980s. The vision then was to provide directors and senior managers with a single graphical interface that presented them with a wealth of corporate and general business information to inform their decision making. Things have moved on substantially with the advent of the portal.

Before the effort was largely focused on simply integrating data feeds. But now that organisations have learnt not only how to blend Reuters feeds with management emails, but perform such sophisticated analyses as merging the hard metrics of the bottom line with such soft metrics as customer satisfaction, the attention has turned to moving the data portal from being the toy of the in-house web wizard to being a serious, self-justifying support tool to be used directly by non-IT-friendly management at large, and directors in particular.

Further, analysis that actually helps the business in fast paced markets is not about producing reports for the board to consider at some later date. Being online is about nothing if it is not about being dynamic and that means knowing what is happening now, or even better, anticipated yesterday.

Closing the information gap
Another great challenge that IT has always faced is closing the gap between what it provides and what the business requires. To put it another way, the degree to which a computer system matches the shape of the organization and the processes that take place within it, is closely related to the strategic advantage it might afford.

Portals appear to take a step forward in this regard, for like many organizations, they are merely the front end of a network of relationships. Consider, say, the logistical challenge of connecting the owners of a global franchise operation or the suppliers in a worldwide manufacturing chain. A corporate portal, perhaps for the first time, offers at least the opportunity of providing an IT framework for linking these players that matches almost exactly the reality of their need to be connected on the ground.

With the portal, information that originates or needs managing centrally, such as corporate announcements or employee/partner benefits, can be as readily disseminated as information that is best devolved, concerning say local supplier relations or market specific promotions.

Alternatively, consider, for example, not only the matter of customizability but becoming genuinely customer-facing. It is the power of the personalized one-click searching approach that is behind the portal concept which suggests its application could extend to matters such as customer relationship management. At a very practical level portals are already proving valuable to individuals such as sales reps: here they bring together information about the customer which before would have needed several applications to find and required something of a juggling act to keep in front of them as they talked with the customer.

Similarly, portals can be used to push information into the supply chain. A company, for example, might use the portal to generate customized information sources for parties in the supply chain, showing even sensitive information such as receipts, invoices and payment data, since complete control of the operational systems from which it stems can be maintained centrally.

But what of the data deluge?
Of course, there is one area of information management with which everyone who works at a desktop in the organisation will be familiar: that of information overload. Whether in the form of emails, circulating documents, website references, or increasingly voice and video messages, the information individuals have to trawl through just to get into the day's work, let alone complete it, is growing fast.

Gartner, for example predicts that, if enterprises do not bring both internal and external data proliferation under control, the amount of time wasted by the average knowledge worker on electronic document related but non-value-added tasks will increase to between 30 per cent and 40 per cent of their time by 2003. This then is a serious hindrance to productivity. And it is one that portals aim to tackle.

At the highest level this is about the transformation of the desktop as a screen through which people access information for their work, to being the place where they actually do their work. The first step is to provide department based portals that people can customize, or customize automatically, as they grow into them. If this sounds on first hearing like merely perpetuating the data explosion that workers have to handle already that is to miss the point.

The idea is that the portal sifts through what is sent, or generates content for sending out automatically when that can be done, to help the individual focus solely on the matter in hand: it is about closing off certain information feeds as much as opening new ones up.

Of course, such a flexible work place could be very tricky to implement. On one level, it might make people less accessible, not more: perhaps the portal would have an 'in a meeting' button that could be too tempting, too often to hit.

Alternatively, the desktop portal would have to overcome many managerial and cultural hurdles to be effective. Matters such as information ownership are hard to solve when content generation is automated. And there are always those knowledge workers who simply don't want people to know what they are doing, or alternatively some even enjoy distractions. But then, human quirks have always tended to stymie good technological ideas!