Using Business Portals to Leverage Information

Note: This article is Part 1 of a two-part series focusing on enterprise portals.

Although a great deal has been written about business intelligence portals, I often find that my clients are still confused about what a portal is and why it should be the cornerstone of a customer intelligence strategy.

If the concept of portals is confusing, the implementation of portals is even more so. Today, every CRM application company is launching their version of a portal with differing capabilities. There is no "portal association" to standardize definitions and distinguish between an application portal, an enterprise intelligence portal, a customer intelligence portal, a collaborative portal, etc. To make matters worse, the Web development community often recommends no portal at all (but that is another story...).

The net result is more confusion over time, not less.

Why have a business intelligence portal in the first place? What is today’s business rationale, and what is the future potential?

In its most simple form, a portal is a "doorway" – a doorway to information. For example, consumer Web sites such as Yahoo and Excite search out information from many other sites and organize and place that information in a central location for viewing.

The Evolution of Portals

Consumer portals have evolved in three different phases which are now being mirrored in business intelligence applications:

Consolidation – multiple information sources brought to a single point.

Customization – selection of information sources based on personal preference.

Personalization – selection of specific information, regardless of source, that exactly meets personal requirements.

Consolidation

The initial phase of portal development placed information from a broad array of sources onto a single Web page. But what information did Yahoo or Excite put on that consolidator page? The information they believe held the highest value to the most people. As a result, these sites often gave you some of what you want, but not what you need as an information consumer – information that would specifically meet your personal needs, when it became available and when you were available to view it.

Customization

The next generation provided consumers with the ability to select different data sources that the portal would provide on a personal news page. Consumers could select from a mix of local, regional or national news in arts, sports, technology, international news, etc., so the information they saw reflected their personal preferences. In addition, weather, horoscopes, TV listings and more could be selected for inclusion on the personal news page.

Personalization

The most recent development in portals provides consumers with "preemptive searching" capability. Consumers can direct the site to continually search for specific information such as the name of a company or a location. The site then repeatedly searches and brings to a central location all relevant articles or information, 24x7. Consumers can visit that page and view the most current information, on demand, from any Web browser worldwide. In addition, the customized sites query users to determine the accuracy of the selected information, thereby becoming more accurate over time.

The market has become more specialized to include more and more industry/interest- specific portals with features such as enhanced e-commerce.

Need for Customized, Relevant Information Fuels Demand for Portals

What was the need that drove creation of consumer portals? As any frequent Web surfer will attest, the Web is filled with more and more information every day. As a result, search engines will often play back thousands of hits for a specific query making it difficult – if not impossible – to find current, relevant information in a timely manner. Today’s portal provides consumers with customized information without all the work of searching. In addition, information is guaranteed to be current and relevant, reducing the time a user must spend on administrative tasks and maximizing the time for processing information.

Business Intelligence Portals Make Corporations More Efficient

Business portals apply the same principles (and similar technology) to address the confusion inherent in another group of systems – corporate databases. Often these databases contain millions of documents located in information silos throughout the company, making corporate information as hard to locate as quality Web information. Once the information is found, recency becomes an issue. Many reports and analyses are produced on a one-time basis and often require manual regeneration for updates and trend examination.

When Web information is included in a corporate manager’s pool of available data sources, information overload can quickly develop. However, given the rapid change and expansion happening in most markets, superior leverage of internal and external information can be crucial to a company’s survival.

Business portals have all the same elements as consumer portals – consolidation, customization and personalization – but are designed to fit specific intracompany business requirements:

Consolidation

Business intelligence portals bring various data sources to a single news page which allows the manager to review the most current information offerings and select areas for further investigation and analysis. These sources include both company-wide and departmental information as well as Web sources such as press releases, stock price, analyst reports, published market research, etc. In addition, human resource data sources such as 401(k) registration and performance, company policies, etc. can be made available to all employees.

Customization

In addition, portals permit users to select information from a broad range of subjects and departments that they would like posted to their news page. For example, a marketing manager might select market research, product development, the promotions department and advertising analysis as subject categories. As a result, anytime new information becomes available on those subjects, it will automatically be posted to the user’s news page. Old information will expire and cease to appear when it is no longer current.

Personalization

Finally, business users can now provide portals with criteria such as key words that can be used in continual searches. Any new information meeting the selected criteria found within corporate data sources and selected sources on the Web will be posted to the news page.

The end result is that managers have the right information to run the business and effectively care for their customers at their fingertips – information that is current and delivered without frustration or questions about timeliness or validity. With marketplaces changing so quickly, information that is three to six months old is considered outdated, and the conclusions are discarded. In this way, the business portal provides a critical function for corporate managers – the necessary data to challenge and rediscover fundamental knowledge about rapidly changing customer behavior.

A Publishing Strategy – The Critical Link

To maximize the value of the information delivered through business portals, key information needs to be circulated to key personnel in a timely fashion. This requires the development of publishing strategies, often by the knowledge managers within the company. This activity is critical and often requires more thought than, on the surface, seems necessary.

The key factors in a company’s publishing strategy involve timing the release of information, deciding when documents should expire and selecting appropriate delivery targets for the information. In effect, a publishing strategy is much like a marketing campaign for the information – it determines the appropriate level of information to be shared, identifies the target audience and selects the appropriate way to drive awareness of the existence and value of the information.

Timing

The knee-jerk reaction is to share all information immediately with as many people as possible. But many challenges arise from such an approach, and they often raise more questions than answers. For example, if the CEO reviews his desktop in the morning and discovers questionable sales results for a key product line, he may have a higher level of concern than if he were to receive the information in the afternoon, along with a published memo addressing the issue. The danger is that key information circulated without interpretation can create confusion, slowing down rather than speeding up an organization’s processes. Therefore, in our example, the publishing strategy may be to circulate key information to line management in the morning and to the CEO in the afternoon. This staggered information sharing still increases information flow through the organization, with far less disruption.

Expiration

Paying attention to information aging issues assures that the portal does not become the electronic equivalent of the filing cabinet, getting fuller over time. By setting an expiration date, the user ensures that outdated information is archived. By doing this, the user won’t mistake old information for the most current, relevant data, leading to mistaken conclusions, confusion and a lack of productivity. Again, decisions about expiration dates are not as simple as they first appear. A document should expire when:

1. More current information is available.
2. The information in the document is outdated and should not be used to draw conclusions (a more tricky decision).
3. Expiration decisions require careful thought about timing, market changes, etc., to ensure that the portal stays relevant and easy to access for all key users.

Delivery Targets

To which user groups should specific information be assigned? Again, the decision is more complicated than it looks. The easy answer is to make sure that everyone gets everything. But, in fact, every publishing effort needs to consider which users would see value and utilize key information and in what level of detail. Often a key document is valuable to different user groups, but in different levels of detail. For example, marketing plans may be valuable to the finance department with every detail down to dollars and cents. The CEO, on the other hand, may only be interested in a top-line view of the marketing plans. That way, the portal stays relevant and useful to users.

Driving Information Through the Organization

The business goal of the consumer portal companies is to become the single destination point for consumer information needs. Business portals, which evolved conceptually from consumer portals, have similar objectives. The business portal should become the single destination for business information from all sources including internal marketing databases and external Web sources. In this way, the portal can decrease the administrative burden on managers, freeing time to focus on revenue growth, strategic planning and tactical execution. Improved information flow also can create collaboration, awareness and relationships between key performance indicators and employees, thereby focusing the organization on the variables that most impact business growth.

Portals Can Help Restructure Companies Around the Customer

The transformative nature of portals – reinventing the management and transmission of information through an organization – makes them the foundation for a customer intelligence strategy which seeks to restructure the company around the customer. All the analytic tools of customer intelligence (query and reporting, data mining tools, visual analysis, OLAP, etc.) can be structured to function within the portal, consistent with the single information destination point objective.

Portal technology is available today, and companies that develop business processes to support portals will enjoy a significant competitive advantage. Customer information is critical to business growth, but only when that information is easy to find and use. Portals make that possible.

Business Rules – Becoming the Real-Time Organization

While the immediate potential of customer intelligence portals is dramatic for organizations, the future potential is even more so. The rise of intelligent agents holds the potential to create real-time organizational processes that change in response to customer behavior as quickly as that behavior registers in the data warehouse. In my next article (which will be published in the May 26 issue of DM Direct), I will discuss the potential of business rules to impact the portal and organizational processes as a whole.