Gartner PCC: Portals – Mature, Yet Still Disruptive

Gene Phifer, the father of portal at Gartner, spoke about Portals and his view on where they are headed.  I have to admit I like the title.  I agree that they are mature but things are still changing.

Portal continue to change with new methods of portal integration, new delivery models (cloud), and a new batch of vendors.  This could be a massive set of changes.  Gene covered three key issues

1. what is the portal’s role in light of emerging customer demands
2. what architecture should enterprises adopt
3. which of the established and new player will play a key role in the future

Portal’s Role

We have a list of alphabet soup with B2C, B2B, B2E, G2C, G2B.  The past 10 years has seen a lot of success but it’s also seen way too many failures.   Anyway, the most common features of a portal include:

• Personalization by role, geography, etc.  Gene notes that you can do too much personalization.  Target your personalization without making it too complicated.  (I agree with Gene completely on this. It’s easy to mess this up and create a horrible user experience because users cannot see content)
• Customization, this is different from personalization because it’s driven by what the user asks for.
• Content: whether it be documents or web content, this is key to a portal. (I usually rely on a 80/20 split of content to applications.  Lately, however, I’ve seen more of a 90/10 content to app split)
• Features. Gene calls them features, I refer to them as the applications.  These can be huge value adds with the various self service functions for your constituent.
• Web 2.0 Features:  It’s all about social.  In customer facing portals, this could be product reviews, self-support, etc.
• Deployments: employee portals are 50%. Customer portals represent 30%, and partner/supplier portals represent 20% of the total.  Gene notes that customer facing portals are increasing. (Something I’ve seen for the past three years.)
• Not part of Gene’s slide but he mentions it.  SSO is ALWAYS on the list of what user wants.

11 Keys to an effective Portal Strategy

It’s amazing how many don’t have one.   This leads to portal failure.

1. Build one enterprise wide portal strategy tied to overall channel/user interaction strategy
2. Build a shared vision of the portal by engaging stakeholders and and users
3. Implement appropriate governance.  This is STILL the number one cause of portal failure.
4. Manage change proactively
5. Link portal to business goals and objectives
6. Define tangible ROI, but don’t go crazy
7. Identify audiences/demographics/psychographics for personalization purposes.
8. Rationalize multiple portals
9. Focus on usability
10. Link to or create content strategy
11. Create funding strategy

So I’m going to pat myself on the back.  I’ve been preaching these best practices for years now and that’s why we talk to portal roadmap, governance, foundation, and other offerings.  They are all relatively cheap but so few take the time to figure it out.

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Portals have a base set of functionality but new portals must support additional functionality.

1. It is aggregation framework
2. It includes cloud capabilities
3. It embraces WOA/REST with support of widgets and mashups
4. It supports, “My Portal”
5. It supports mobile computing.  If you cannot support mobile, then you have a huge problem.
6. The framework should be one component of an overall user experience strategy and a part of the emerging User Experience (UX) platform megamarket
7. Social software functions are critical and include integration with the consumer web

The next gen portal, gen 7 in Gartner terms include analytics which I would include web analytics and not just business intelligence.

Key Change: It’s about the widget model.  REST will become the dominant model.   Portlets won’t go away but you will see more widgets in use and on the same page with portlets.

The Portal Ecosystem

Gene makes a great point about portal not acting alone. I’ve blogged on this topics a couple times and he’s spot on. Portal cannot stand alone.  It’s just the front end.  This includes database, ldap, CRM, ERP, SSO, and a whole host of technologies.  You need to take all this into account for both cost and time as you built it out.

Portal in a Cloud

You will have two models:

1. Your single tenant portal on cloud infrastructure.  Very agile but more expensive
2. Multi-tenant shared portal.  This has some security and other challenges but it can be much less expensive.
3. Private cloud internal use
4. Private cloud external use

Mobility

You have to support your customers and employees.  “You can’t be in business nowadays unless you have support for those mobile customers”

Future

Portal will become so ubiquitous that it won’t even be called a portal.  It will include the User Experience Platform. (This is directly related to IBM’s customer experience suite).  The portal market just got bigger.  You will see new vendors like Adobe and Cisco entering the UX Platform market.