Making the Portal the Point of Business Integration

The emergence of the enterprise portal as the face of online business provides a viable solution to the typical fragmented business environment, but only if we realize that a plan for technology integration implies also a plan for business integration. Integrating business in the new economy requires coordinating the unobservable mental processes of many people working together in different organizational arrangements, often as teams.

The typical approach of reducing everything to a problem of information processing simplifies matters, but it severely limits the understanding needed to design a solution that will promote integration of the day-to-day performance of knowledge workers. It is here that the enterprise portal emerges as an enabler of rationalizing business integration and technology integration for the purpose of creating a unified environment that is both productive and economical.

All too often, in moves to sensibly meet emerging business objectives, decisions are made that yield a positive result from one perspective - a savings in departmental operating costs, for example - but have detrimental side effects when considered from a broader business perspective. While narrow decision-making is not limited to questions of systems, nowhere is this pattern repeated more often than in the way technology is used as a means for transforming parts of the business.

True business integration requires keeping these three elements in sync:

In recent years, the online environment - particularly the enterprise portal - has come to serve as a fluid point of integration between business drivers and information systems. Legacy systems, outsourced arrangements, best-in-breed solutions that have been purchased and customized, are each too unwieldy to change in response to each business shift, and further, it is difficult and costly to try to get these point solutions to work with each other. Therefore, savvy companies have begun to use the portal to provide integration at the user experience level.

This is a useful concept, but viewing these three elements independently can leave the organization open to shearing and disconnects, as one aspect of the enterprise moves ahead of the others. Consider these cases:

1. The business changes, others scramble to catch up - Business leaders and process owners can envision new ways of doing business, but if their planning does not fully incorporate changes to delivery channels, then the planned changes will remain unrealized. This pitfall is especially likely when companies rely on third-party, best-in-breed providers for key components of their business; such providers can be unwilling, or unable, to make adjustments to their services.

2. The tail wags the dog - Systems are implemented without business drivers ..."a solution looking for a problem." Leaders in IT may become enamored with a new technology and take action to implement it. But unless the technology is tied to specific business needs and can be delivered online in a usable way, it cannot be fully leveraged for the good of the enterprise. ERP implementations and content management platforms are only two examples of technologies prone to this pitfall.

3. "We've got a portal, now what?" - The portal and other online channels should be viewed as a means to translate the capabilities of your information systems into a form that is usable by your business. For many early portal adopters, however, an enterprise portal was treated as an interesting infrastructure acquisition, not a part of an integrated solution. Without ties to specific needs, the portal itself is prone to becoming a technology white elephant - full of fascinating possibilities but not employed for any specific benefit for the enterprise.

In fact, these are not three separate and equal aspects of your environment. Your ultimate goal is always to bring about changes to the business itself. The portal and online channels exists within the context of your business - that is, your vision, your people, your culture, your organization and your processes. Information systems, in turn, should be considered in the context of an online experience you want to create for your users. Setting priorities this way gives you an integrated whole.