Corporate intranets can be so much more than just a place to post your HR policies and details of the upcoming sofball match. How can you make a portal work for employees and pay off for your company?
Inside this story
Look out every window
Many views, one portal
Good housekeeping
Open for business
Open the doors
Case study: CBA
Software providers have been shouting from the rooftops about the benefits of corporate intranets for years. Yet while most companies are now using at least rudimentary intranets to distribute information throughout their organisations, far fewer customers are taking their investment to the next step by using enterprise portal frameworks to restructure their information flow.
This poses something of a problem for vendors, who have been working through their own challenges and would like to see a far more enthusiastic take-up of the technologies they're offering.
Slow adoption forced consolidation of this nascent industry last year, and continuing pressures have forced vendors to innovate ferociously in an attempt finally to provide a compelling value proposition.
Industry estimates show the extent to which once optimistic expectations have been toned down. Merrill Lynch, which is credited with first identifying the enterprise portal market in 1998, then estimated the total market at US$4.4 billion and predicted revenues would beat US$14.8 billion by this year.
By contrast, in March of this year, by contrast, analyst firm IDC projected that enterprise portal revenues would only reach US$2.6 billion by 2006.
Customers, it seems, remain more conservative in their enthusiasm than was once expected--but who can blame them? Faced with an increased burden to rapidly deliver beneficial technologies under tight cost constraints, IT managers the world over have been necessarily conservative when it comes to major new investments.
Particularly given the economic uncertainty of the past year, they've been more willing to pick the low-hanging fruit than to embark on major projects that restructure the very way employees access enterprise information.
"I don't think I can ever remember such care being taken about the decision making process," says Robert Whiter, sales director with Hummingbird, one of the dozens of vendors looking to expand its role within enterprise customers by offering a comprehensive intranet portal framework.
"The complexity that's come to the application software marketplace over the last decade has made decision making for IT very difficult. Managers want to see exactly what they want, why they want it, and what the business is going to get for it.
That puts a lot of weight on the IT manager's shoulders to get it right, and portals have suffered from the difficulty in getting a clear return on in vestment metric to justify them."
It's not that they don't recognise the portal as a valid technology strategy, but rather that many companies still don't appreciate the way that intranet technologies can help restructure how their employees operate.
The bulletin-board mentality still pervades many organisations who may have invested heavily in intranet publishing technologies yet struggled with issues such as content management, user authentication, security, and other intranet-related concerns.
In a market survey conducted last year, Melbourne-based systems integrator Internet Business Systems (IBS) found that more than 80 percent of companies have failed to realise the potential of even the basic intranets they have set up.
Much of this disuse came from the habit of delegating content management to a single person within a workgroup or company; this meant the online content quickly became stale and irrelevant, which led to low utilisation rates among employees.
Other issues hindering intranet take-up included lack of staff training, older technology that was limited in its functionality or difficult to use, compatibility issues among old and new systems, and inter-departmental concerns about sharing information too widely.
"One of the problems with intranets was that customers were always facing a full 100 percent custom development project that was lengthy, costly and risky," says IBS CEO David Brykman.
"Technology frameworks used to mean maintenance was an absolute nightmare, and it's been exceptionally difficult to get people to use intranets because they don't see the value. Rather than looking at the intranet as a nice way of publishing pretty pictures and articles, companies should look at the intranet as a way of publishing important business processes."
In many cases, that means consolidating those business processes through a single interface backed by business logic that ties those processes together in a meaningful way. But given the poor track record of intranet utilisation already, justifying additional expenditure on a portal framework will be even harder for many cash-strapped companies.
