How to successfully implement a Portal

This morning at the Gartner Portal, Content, and Collaboration Summint, Gartner analyst Jim Murphy, presenting 7 Portal Pitfalls. He’s also written numerous papers on the topic. It’s also interesting to note that our own Michael Porter and Glen Kline also maintain a list of Portal misdemeanors.

This was the most popular event I’ve attended this far. The hall was packed, almost all seats where occupied, and over 20 people, including myself where seated on the floor.

First Jim introduced Gartner’s 7 pitfalls in reverse order,

7. Product Fixation

• don’t let the vendor drive your decision
• don’t have an [Adobe|SharePoint|IBM|etc] strategy

6. Hidden Complexity

• portals are dependent on many different backend | cloud systems
• chosen portal software when it was not needed

5. Misuse

• if you need a page of links, why invest in a portal

4. Content Inertia

• content is old
• not maintained
• content is dumped on the portal
• can’t find information
• there are no standards for placing information on the portal

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3. Management Dysfunction

• no demand management plan
• no delegation of responsibility
• scale will be missing

2. User Neglect

• users don’t use the portal they way we tell them to
• no thought was given to the user
• steering committee – with all stakeholders except the user
• treat the user as priority
• what’s in it for the user (supplier, customer, employee, etc)
• no incorporation with existing systems

1. Faulty Governance

• relates to all of the above
• governance is not defined
• should mitigate conflict
• people get bound up in look-and-feel, taxonomy, product
• governance is about who has responsibility

Jim then went on to address how to overcome the pitfalls:

1. Get Governance Right

• establish an on-going portal steering committee (Center of Excellence) and governance program – needs to be perpetual (and it will change over time)
• define a statement of governance
• custom fit the governance model to the goals and culture of the organization
• social portal will have the end-user as the top priority (top-down)
• HR portal may have HR at the top

2. Activate End-user Value

• avoid user neglect
• persona development
• journey mapping
• sense and respond to evolving demands

3. Prepare for Expansive Demand

• employ management dysfunction
• employ agile practices
• if you have not produced / delivered anything in 9 months then you have problems
• employ citizen developers / power users
• what ROI do you get overtime.
• instill in users that the portal will get better over time (like Gmail / Facebook / etc )

4. Ensure content vitality

• instill your portal with a sense of purpose
• many company portals are organized by departments
• this is not user centric
• users don’t know where do go
• if it does not contribute to your mission it should not be on your portal
• garbage in – garbage out … content needs to be relevant
• Nike puts out analytics for the user (runs, etc)
• nike gets the data too…
• assign responsibility for content updates

5. Exploit the full power of the portal

• avoid misuse
• ensure requirements call for a portal
• If you need the following, then consider a portal:
• use personalization, content management, integration, SSO
• context awareness
• composite applications
• digital, social, and mobile experiences

6. Develop a goal-oriented strategy

• avoid hidden cost and complexity
• set reasonable, demonstrable, short-term goals

7. Forget products and vendors

• think about your vision first
• what is a day-in-the-life of a user going to be like
• name your initiative in line with your goal – not in line with your product vendor
• try to loosely couple content management and search