Line of Business & Functional Workspace Portals

While Corporate Services, HR, Corporate Communications, and Sales and Marketing organizations are often considered to be the largest "tenants" on the Enterprise Portal, there is no doubt that department-specific and business unit-centric sites have had just as significant a presence. The difference with these Line of Business or Functional Workspace portals is that these sites are often the main desktop sites of their users.

Here, users find access to the tools most often associated with their business units (BUs) or subsidiaries, or with the departments (e.g., IT, Finance, and Operations) with which they are affiliated. Not surprisingly, these sites tend to be rich sources of information and resources most critical to people and their work practices, including:

• Rich content, specifications, methods and procedures, and other work-context resources
• Access to necessary downstream systems and third-party applications
• Tools that promote collaboration for project work or special assignments
• Directories that help people locate subject matter experts within and around their organization
• Business analytics or business intelligence that provide key performance indicators, reports, and analysis.

Sometimes these portals are so significant within a company's structure that they carry their own sub-branding and/or unique user experiences that resonate with people affiliated with these organizations. When this occurs, careful attention needs to be given to avoid potential competing interests between the BU or department site and other Enterprise Portal standards or assets. This fragmentation may force users to choose between local resources and corporate resources in a way that can be confusing or inefficient.

This conflict is entirely avoidable, though, as an effective Portal Strategy enables the matrix of corporate, region, BU and department affiliation to be managed and optimized both for individual users and the company as a whole. The emerging best practice, then, is enabling robust, highly-productive and useful BU and Functional Work Spaces to be supported within the enterprise, while aligning this experience to the rest of the Enterprise Portal.

Stakeholders in Line of Business and Functional Work Space Portals are often the advocates of this holistic, albeit specialized, approach. They understand that an effective portal for their organization means:

• Engaging employees and enabling access and adoption across all resources that users need to act effectively in their roles as employees, managers, knowledge workers, and specialists within their various affiliations
• Seamless and single sign-on access, on a 24/7 basis, to systems, tools and workspaces needed for both desktop and mobile users to do their jobs
• Reports, helpful analysis, and decision-support tools that enable managers to make timely and informed decisions
• Access to corporate services, corporate strategy and tools, and a common, often global, employee experience in which the brand and effectiveness of the business is maintained, even while the day-to-day jobs of people are locally executed.

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