Portal strategy – it's not just for large organizations

This week, I had an opportunity to speak at a conference for association executives in Washington, D.C. I talked about the importance of portal strategy - thinking about your business objectives, metrics, communications and training plan, information architecture and governance model - and why it's critical to do this before you get too far along in your deployment. The discussion, even though they had me as the very last time slot - right before the beer on a Friday afternoon - was very engaging, One of the more interesting questions I got was, "Is the development of an effective strategy, communications plan, training plan, governance plan, etc. as important for an organization of 15 people as it is in an organization of 15,000 people?"

I think the answer is definitely yes - it's just as easy to screw up a portal project in a small company as it is in a large one. But, of course, when the scale is much smaller, you have the gift of being able to "touch" all the stakeholders much more closely. I'm currently working on a portal deployment in a global organization of more than 60,000 people. Effectively communicating the governance plan and training the various Site Designers is a MAJOR effort in this organization. Imagine if there were only 15 people to train! The challenges are still there - everyone has to "buy in" to the governance plan and your information architecture still has to balance the time of the content contributors with the needs of the content users, but it's much easier to deploy. It's hard to say whether the information architecture will be more or less complex in a small organization versus a large one - I think it really depends on the domain of the content, but it's clear that deployment challenges are much smaller. So, the bottom line is, small organizations still need to carefully plan their portal strategy, but they have the gift of a much easier deployment.

• SMB
• Software
• portal strategy