This article is about corporate portals. Corporate portals are all the rage. They provide simple, web-base jumping off point for users to locate information, participate in business process, and collaborate with others. The significance of this article is that if we are going to be IT managers in the future, we might want to use these corporate portals to improve our organization. This article gives use some guidelines on how to build an effective portal. If IT managers are to use these corporate portals, they must become intimately familiar with their myriad business processes and procedures that form the circulatory system of their organization. If not, they would not get the full benefits of corporate portals and could be setting themselves up for failure.

In order to better understand this article, we must first understand what corporate portals, sometimes referred to as enterprise portals, do. Corporate portals are the next step after intranets. If the intranet was developed as a place where corporate content could reside, the portal is designed to dynamically organize that information. Just substitute MyYahoo with MY (whatever is your company name) and you get the idea. Instead of browsing on web portals like Yahoo, imagine going to your own company’s browser-based internal portal and finding all the essential business information for your job.

The Corporate portals will cut down or eliminate the need for employees to waste time searching the web for information they need. Corporate portals can aggregate information relevant to employees’ individual roles making them more productive, and for less expense than other information-sharing methods such as paper documents, meetings, or training sessions. Corporate Portals give companies an effective way to deliver critical internal communications regarding change management, performance improvement, or internal branding. Now that we know what Corporate Portals do, we now have to understand our own organization to which our portal will encompass.

The article suggests that we look at our organization through multi-focus lens or through different perspectives: it is a seven-step guideline

1. Corporate Hierarchy Where you determine who is the prime mover in your organization? What is the scope of their responsibility?
2. Corporate strategic initiatives Find out what is the future of your organization. This will give you flexibility so you can anticipate change.
3. Line-of-business roles and functions
4. Project or Process
5. Collaboration or Production
6. Profit centers or Cost centers- this knowledge will factor prominently in future funding considerations.
7. Social values or Cosmic values- determine what your organization and its line of business value the most, both on a social and cosmic level. Under social values all things seem fair and equal, cosmic not fair and not equal.

The result of the multi-focus lens exercise will be manifested into the portal you should build. It gives you an idea of what you will need to build an effective corporate portal.

Then the article goes on to talk about PETs (portal enabling technologies), which can satisfy your portal needs. They address your company’s requirements. There is a chart, which summarizes techniques and approaches on certain areas.

XML is being used on corporate portals to pass data and content between various systems and most importantly, to access it from a single user interface. These capabilities will play a crucial role in the success of your corporate portal, and your ability to integrate islands of information and technology.

It also mentions that company’s that do not support e-commerce, should make it their highest priority and leave corporate portals somewhere below it. E-commerce is a must-have, and much of the integration work required can be reused in subsequent portals.

So, when building a corporate portal, the key is up-front planning and analysis, it’s not just the technical issues you should be looking at but the analytical view as well.