Buzz roundtable: Corporate portals, 09/27/99

Corporate portals

Network World Fusion, 09/27/99

Let's move on to corporate portals, which are intended to make it easier for people to find the information they need to do their jobs as compared with a plain vanilla intranet or Web site. How well do you think portal products, meaning development tools for building these portals, live up to this promise and how important do you expect this technology to be going forward?

Bradner: The concept is a valuable one. It's one that we're using with the students at Harvard and it looks quite impressive and quite good. I don't know about the products per se.

Nolle: I've only had a little experience with the products and the biggest problem I've seen in user applications with portals has been that a lot of organizations are not really aware of the fact that only 10% or 15% of their workers are really generalized information consumers. There's no point in spending a lot of money to information-empower somebody who has a job that is not information empowerable. For example, if you've got a bank teller, what's the value in giving them access to an information portal? Obviously, zero.

Bradner: Not quite zero because the portal has the business-related and employment-related information like retirement plans and health plans.

Nolle: But that's a personal value to them as an individual, it's not a value to their mission as a company employee.

Bradner: No, but it could be a cost savings for the company to do it this way vs. having a larger personnel office that the people take time off to go visit.

Nolle: Well one would have to ask in that instance if what you're doing is really a portal or an intranet.

Bradner: A portal I would define as something that's specific to the individual user, so that when I connect up I identify myself and it gives me my information – the information that either I've said I need or it's my retirement and my health information, not generalized information, which is definitely an intranet.

Kobielus: There's a real use for corporate portals as being basically just a template that a corporation has for its individual users. The company says, "You can use this standard template as your startup page or you can customize your own startup page to the needs of your own job. We plugged into this all the basic information sources that people in our company and our industry generally need." That makes a lot of sense.

Nolle: It makes sense for the high value employees. And I agree in theory, Scott, with your comment about cost reduction. But the problem is that, all of these technologies like portals are never going to achieve anything like the market success that people want them to achieve if one makes the assumption that there is a cost reduction benefit. That's because the cost associated with, for example, providing employees with retirement information by having them call the personnel office is not going to measured in the hundreds of billions of dollars.

Most of the products that I've seen have tended to be rather trivial in the way that they operated. And the trivialization was justified by the assumption that we were going to have a non-specialist worker use it. Well a non-specialist worker is probably not the target of portals in most cases. The truth is that there's only 10% to 15% of the workforce that's really going to gain value out of this.

Bradner: As I said at the beginning, I think the concept can be quite valuable. What the Harvard faculty of Arts & Sciences is doing with students is something which will be very valuable to effectively all the students. Students can get their course list and where they're supposed to be right now, their grades and all of that sort of stuff. Effectively, all the students will be empowered by this. But I don't think all the employees will be.

Kobielus: A corporate portal has to be eyeball glue, essentially, and it has to recognize the fact that the chief place where eyeballs are attached is to their e-mail. When I think of the right model for a corporate portal, I think of something like what Lotus has done with Release 5 of Domino and Notes. The Notes desktop now is wonderful because in one very nicely designed desktop you have their headline pages, which are basically pushed from the Internet or the intranet, you have their e-mail lists, you have their calendar. It's all in one format. That is the portal, that's the one place my eyes are always glued to.