Enterprise Portals
Just as a corporate Internet presence requires a starting point, a place where you can jump off to all the various resources and services on offering so the intranet and Extranet require a common location or portal from which navigation can begin.
The term portal in its simplest form may refer to an aggregator of content bringing together news, weather, stock quotes and feature articles with lots of jump-off points and links servicing a niche area of interest, or in the case of Google or Yahoo based around a powerful search engine.
A portal may also bring together business interests within certain industry areas to create critical mass for their particular goods and services. For the medium to large organisation though the portal is often the best way to provide common access to resources useful for staff and partner companies.
The enterprise or corporate information portal (EIP for short) is typically the gateway to electronic information held by an enterprise and the core location to access and interact with the associated applications. This may be available only to the enterprise in the case of an intranet or to business partners and selected customers outside of the organisational walls in the case of the extranet.
The EIP is designed to help release the competitive potential lying dormant in enterprise systems by integrating applications that combine, standardise, index, analyse and distribute targeted, relevant information so end users can do their jobs more efficiently and productively.
The concept of the portal continues to evolve but basically there is the decision processing portal which is closely aligned with data warehouses and data marts, and collaborative portals which might use Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange, to work closely with partners in the supply chain.
Why would you want a portal
An EIP must provide the infrastructure to improve organisational efficiency and effectiveness by leveraging internal applications and the associated information plus external information resources. This may include an internal search engine and the ability to broker the results from external search engines.
The success of an enterprise portal depends on the degree of integration of front- end and back-end systems and how it works with the enterprise information architecture. In coining the EIP term in 1998 Merrill Lynch identified benefits including lowered costs, increased sales and better deployment of resources.
Benefits
- A single gateway to essential information and applications for internal or external users
- A central point to view on-line catalogues and competitive information
- A location where orders can be placed and processed
- A focus for to simplify and integrate processes and procedures that would normally require paperwork or research in multiple areas
- A way to reduce cost, increase sales and create efficiencies in the supply chain
- A central point to view on-line catalogues and competitive information
Key Considerations:
Information presented by the EIP infrastructure, the underlying applications and search tools, needs to be relevant to the users with respect to their role inside or outside of the organisation. It must be a highly secure environment customized according to the permissions the user has to view various levels of information and applications.
It is difficult to make all your information available on the web if you don t t know what you ve got, can t access it when you need it and have an electronic knowledge management system to manage work flow.
The EIP typically has some intelligence associated with it rather than being simply a static location with links off to resources. It is often a major investment in itself and while the infrastructure is provided by the intranet and Extranet the functionality that can be delivered over those networks resides in the applications embraced by the portal including business intelligence systems, document management and financial systems.
The challenge is to create, manage, analyse and distribute information in real time both inside and outside the organisation using the technologies available not only as a result of the current Internet revolution, but also in tune with the application software used inside the organisation.
An enterprise portal is a single gateway into a corporate intranet or the Internet to relevant workflows, processes, application systems and databases which are integrated using XML or EDI and tailored to the specific job responsibilities of each individual. If this gateway is for use by suppliers for example it would be a gateway to purchase orders and related order status information.
A decision-processing portal for example would provide access to business intelligence, knowledge management, online analytical processing (OLAP) and other data warehouse decision support functions and represent the next step of evolution from the warehouse.
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