I’m here at the Portal Excellence Conference and Blogging the Keynote.
John Murphy – Gartner
Portal Unbound – the Next Generation Web, the User Experience, and the Future of the Portal
- Jim believes there is a perpetual role for portal. Portal is NOT a dead market.
- Architecture and Customer Engagement are the primary issues Jim sees.
- Next comes Governance, globalization, business process improvement, BI, Customer Service, and B2B collaboration
- Businesses are trying to make the web show more of a business impact. Companies really want to enhance the customer experience with the web.
- Lately, customers dealing with the fact that they have multiple portals and that they will continue to have multiple portals. They are now trying to create architectures that make these portals cross-operate
- Jim showed a slide on 7 generations of portal in 12 years. It ranges from content portal to application portal to process portal to people based portal. Gen 4-7 are focused more on people than anything else.
- Generation 7 portals focus on unifying the customer experience. It includes Portal analytics and optimization, portal-less portals, portal ubiquity, user experience in context, widget germination, domination of mobile, and the emerging user experience platform.
The Portal-less portal
The portal has taken on responsibility for personalization in companies. Most other mechanisms like Rich apps, mashups, and social networking. If you can use portal services like a personalization engine in these other mechanisms then you have a “portal-less portal”
Portal Ubiquity
It doesn’t matter where your are or what context you have (blackberry, iphone, personal computer, work computer, etc.) It should know what the user is doing and in what context. The portal is not only a doorway for a person to the enterprise but can also be the enterprises doorway to the user. Think of facebook as that doorway.
Portal Perpetual Role
It’s not going away. The portal can be the center point for context awareness. It becomes the hub for sensing and responding to the audience. It’s the mediator of control and flexibility. (e.g. help capture knowledge but make it easy to get to. Reconcile the top down corporate portal with the bottom up team and my portal.)
Portal as a User Experience Platform
Portal has failed because of a couple reasons. One is governance. Governance requires a commitment many don’t make. The second reason for failure is usability. End users need to be stakeholders. How do you make the whole experience workable for users? This means you will be bringing in a host of technologies like portal, content management, web analytics, mobile, etc. This isn’t just technology here. There is a lot of learning.
Characteristics of a UXP
- User oriented
- unbound – services available from any device or application
- Unified communication enabled
- Service Oriented
- Rich – rich internet applications
- Natural – allows natural means of communication like voice, touch, and gesture
- Embedded – available in the work you already do. Available in the car, your ipod, your appliance, etc.)
- Immersive
Jim’s Recommendations
For Monday
- Take inventory of portal and portal like technologies and efforts in your enterprise
- Devise a framework and establish standrs for addressing ongoing UXP initiatives.
For the rest of 2010
- Gather feedback from business stakeholders and end users
- Define/redefine portal governance
- Identiry key performance indicators
