Envisioning a Portal Solution

Envisioning a Portal Solution

Tushar Sachdev

Abstract

Portals deliver many business benefits, key among them being productivity gains. However, there are many pitfalls on the road to a successful portal deployment. The key to success lies in a structured solution envisioning program covering 5 fundamental areas - portal requirement, user experience, technology blueprint, governance and processes and the program roadmap.

The Need for a Portal

An Enterprise Information Portal (EIP) is a personalized environment that delivers all contextual digital content and services to employees, customers, suppliers and partners. It can create revenue growth opportunities and result in productivity gains leading to cost optimization. An EIP delivers many business benefits, some of which are listed below:

Business Components

ERP/ CRM Groupware Data

Warehouse Legacy ServerClient

Enterprise Information

Portal Infrastructure Personalization Identity &

Security Taxonomy /Search Collaboration Presentation

Unified presentation management Multi-channel delivery

Content repurposing Simplicity & personalization “Services”, not “applications” Cost of end-user computing

Integration complexity Process inefficiency

Time-to-market

Business Communities

Employees Customers Suppliers Partners

Reduced cost of end user computing

• Web technologies bring down the deployment cost of new or changed application services

• Application services can be deployed for more user communities, thus bringing down cost per user

• The unified and shared infrastructure that integrates core services such as single sign on, web security, content syndication, search engine and collaboration tools reduces the overall cost of infrastructure and services

Increased business process efficiency and cost avoidance

• Increased productivity due to a single access window to all content and services, and personalized, targeted services • Ability to interact with multiple business applications, and content sources on the intranet and Internet in a seamless

manner allowing faster and better decision making

• Self service leading to empowerment and eliminating non-value-added (NVA) activities

• Reduced information delivery cost as the need for disseminating information through traditional media is eliminated • Provides the platform for deploying new services such as e-Learning, knowledge management etc that improve process

efficiency

Ease of integration and faster time-to-market

• The portal framework allows easier integration and aggregation of services from systems and content sources, thus making it possible to create new services for users by stringing together application and content services

• Deployed portal services can be quickly made available to new users and business units since they can be unlocked to additional users using access control mechanisms without any need for code changes

What happens when a portal program is announced?

A portal program announcement is associated with a lot of excitement and expectations as well as skepticism in the organization. The usual announcements are made with a big bang and the roadmap provided usually gives a very idealistic view of the portal and its capabilities.

There is a lot of anticipation for the launch of the portal as it can potentially solve all the problems that exist in the current environment. Business units start proactively preparing their wish-lists for the portal. Each unit has its own priorities for the requirements. At the same time, the IT departments start exploring the technology. The features of the new technology lead to excitement for implementation as it could solve many day-to-day issues that these departments are undergoing as part of their maintenance.

The introduction of a portal is also accompanied by a lot of skepticism in the organization. The IT department starts asking questions related to the technology’s ability to integrate with the legacy applications. The Corporate Communications and Marketing departments are skeptical about the usability and performance of the new technology.

At the same time, even as the portal program is underway, governance issues start cropping up. People start identifying themselves as owners of the portal solution or a part of it.

This combination of excitement and skepticism leads to a chaotic situation and this poses a lot of challenges for the portal program to move forward. At times the portal program becomes too heavy to kick-off and dies before its birth. At other times, the skepticism is so high that the program goes into multiple cycles of proofs of technology and never really comes out of it.

The Need for “Envisioning”

The Portal Program Management team faces a lot of challenges while launching the program. Some of these challenges are:

Requirements management

The Program Management team is usually faced with an overwhelming set of requirements. These come from various business units across the organization. There is also the need to implement all the features that the existing intranet and Internet sites provide to enable decommissioning them. The prioritization of these requirements and managing stakeholders poses an enormous challenge for the Program Management team.

Technology integration

A portal program is usually accompanied with the need for integration with legacy systems — this is the underlying need for the portal to exist sometimes. Though the product vendors have tall claims, defining the technical challenges and architecture to address these needs is very critical.

User experience

This is one of the most important components of a portal program. Understanding the user’s interaction with the system, ease of use and ability to perform tasks more productively are key challenges. Sometimes organization lack expertise which results in poor user experience management. This in turn could become the biggest bottleneck in the implementation process.

In-flight projects

There are always projects going on which are directly or indirectly dependent on the portal program. Some of them complement the portal whereas others are in direct conflict to what the portal would provide leading to waste of effort. Identifying projects and aligning them to the portal initiative or vice versa is a critical area and it is usually a challenging task.

Governance and process needs

Defining the portal governance structure is a politically sensitive issue. The focus shifts usually from roles, responsibilities and processes to ownership and authority. Identifying the roles and the tasks they perform without attaching names to them is a key challenge. Defining processes to work into the new portal paradigm also results in a lot of resistance from the support groups as they need to look at new ways of doing things. A federated governance model that would empower user groups sometimes faces resistance from the business users who need to take additional responsibilities

Organization change management

The portal – in concept and technology, usually needs a change in mindset. This is true not only for the users of the portal, but also content owners, infrastructure teams and the maintenance teams. Training these users and more importantly making the users understand the long-term benefits of the portal and the new technology are fundamental steps from an OCM (Organization Change Management) perspective.

Overall roadmap

As the portal program gets underway, a lot of focus is given to the execution plan and implementing all the needed features on to the portal. However, due to the focus on near term execution, an overall program roadmap takes a back-seat. It only comes into focus after the first release. Preparing the program roadmap, allows for better preparation for the future years and strategizing for generating and sustaining user momentum.

What does an envisioning exercise constitute of?

Defining the portal services

Level (0): Scope

Level (1): Choice of Information Primary

Product Line(s)

BUs

Specific Products

Specific Sectors

Specific Customers

The envisioning phase adopts a user-centric approach. Identifying the right user groups is one of the key activities. These user groups are based on portal needs and not on the multiple applications that are being integrated. The user groups could be defined based on a combination of business units, location, role, target customer base, specific line of business or sectors etc. These user groups would help generate a host of requirements for the portal. The envisioning phase not only focuses on managing these requirements, but also defining services that would be serving these requirements. The ultimate objective is to define re-usable portal services that could be enabled to build any portal requirement in the future with minimal effort. These services include basic portal services to be identified from a user stand-point. These include content management services, search and knowledge management services, collaboration services, integration to legacy applications for self-service, day-to-day work management and delegated administration services.

Content

Content delivery/access needs

Workspace

Applications/tools required for day-to-day work

Self Service

e.g., Leave system, request tracker etc.

Collaboration

email, chat, discussion, web conferencing etc.

Learning & KM

Training and knowledge capture and access

Miscellaneous

Services not classified

Geo/LOB

Rollout-specific needs (e.g., language) • Marketing executives in the US • HR assistants in the US • Sales Managers worldwide • Assistants in Payroll • Retired employees

• Executives worldwide <User Group 4>

EIP Delivery Matrix

• Leaves • Facilities • email • Calendar • Employee Directory • Stock ticker • Corporate News

• Business Unit News

• Training

• Timesheets

• Conference room

• Discussion forums

• Facts and Trivia

• Links • People Soft • Project Management • Communities • B2B – EDI Integration with supplier • Internationalization • Broad-based functionalities from

ERP and CRM solutions

• User-group specific functionalities

Conceptualizing the User Experience

Conceptualizing the user experience involves understanding the stakeholders’ vision, user goals and needs, how users perform theirs tasks and what users will be doing while carrying out their tasks.

The key stages of user experience are:

User Interface Design Usability Testing User Research

User Research

Information is collected by surveys, interviews, contextual inquiry or observation of users in a field study. User participation in context-of-use analysis, focus groups or brainstorming evaluations of an existing system may also be required.

Application traffic in a day per user role

Application usage per user per day _Who Visits per user role per day

?

Geographical visit distribution per user

per day Where

Application traffic across various countries

How

Access mode distribution for user roles Access mode distribution for applications

How much

Access mode distribution across the organization

The relation between priority & hierarchy of tasks is understood by task analysis, and a conceptual model of the user experience is arrived at.

User Interface (UI) Design

During the UI Design phase, wireframes are developed to illustrate the overall navigation and determine the layout of UI elements such as content, functionality, etc.

Global Navigation

Navigation > Service Menu

Content Second Level

Navigation _{Search Function}Common

Objects (building blocks)

role specific) _Contextual Menu

A wireframe is a grayscale block diagram that demonstrates which UI elements a web page or application screen will contain and roughly where they might go. It does not include any visual design elements.

Any existing guidelines and standards related to branding, visual design and usability are looked into before the visual design is done. Visual design concepts that explore different visual schemes are generated.

Next, interactive prototypes are developed to demonstrate the user interface to end users. These prototypes may also be used later for usability testing with users.

To achieve a consistent user experience across the entire application/ project, a UI Style guide may be defined.

Customizable homepage with layout elements specific to user profile A dashboard of today’s “in-tray” for the user

Telephone Directory functionality based on CDS

User’s most often used links

Intranet search Self-service environment e-Learningfeatures Collaborative environment -email, discussion forums,

online chat etc.

Thematically arranged “link-index” to existing intranet pages User can customize the look and feel of his/ her portal and the position

of the portlets

Constant left pane Customizable Space

A collection of personal portlets like weather or traffic updates Business

applications specific to user group e.g. CRM

Usability Testing/ Review

The wireframes/ prototypes are tested with the users and feedback is used by the design team to iterate on the design of the interface.

Defining the technology blue-print

The envisioning phase looks at identifying business patterns to be used for the portal which are derived from the

requirements. From the business patterns, the technical architect derives the integration and application patterns. A technical architecture is derived for these patterns. The architecture is defined at a high-level providing multiple options for achieving the architectural goals. These have to be decided during the subsequent phases along with addition of more details.

Identify the functional capabilities of the solutions and classify them into these Business Patterns

Extended

Enterprise Self Servic

e Collaboration In formation Aggreg ation Access Integration Application Integration

Identify the front end Integration patterns

Identify the back-end Integration patterns or EAI requirements Identify solutions in terms of Application patterns 1 2 3 Limitations Benefits Solution Context Business and IT drivers Description Limitations Benefits Solution Context Business and IT drivers Description Document the patterns 4

Addressing governance and process needs

A portal governance framework will have to address five components – Solution Management, Portal Administration, User Experience, Application and Content Integration. These five areas address the key aspects of portal management.

SOLUTION MANAGEMENT USER EXPERIENCE PORTAL ADMINISTRATION APPLICATION

INTEGRATION INTEGRATIONCONTENT EIP

Solution management:

• Managing the evolution of the portal and releases

• Refining vision and objectives on an ongoing basis and aligning the portal with the organization’s business and IT direction

• Managing technology changes and evolution • Managing risks

• This is predominantly a central function

Portal administration:

• Entitlement and management of user groups • Managing a portlet library to maximize re-use • Deployment and retirement of portlets

• Deployment of new technologies to keep pace with change in technology

User experience:

As the portal provides a platform for delivering a large amount of content and services to end users which was previously not possible, information architecture, interaction design, and visual design become essential ingredients to ensure a high degree of usability

Application integration:

• Identifying applications to be integrated with the portal

• Defining frameworks for integration of applications or application families with the portal • Exposing application services to the portal

Content integration:

• Managing integration of content sources and management systems with the portal • Assigning ownership for content in the portal

Defining a program roadmap

Envisioning also includes collecting requirements, prioritizing them from a business stand-point and identifying the technical complexity. The criteria for defining business value are:

• Strategic impact • Cost impact

• Accelerate user adoption

Busine

ss Need/Benefit

Ease of ImplementationMedium High

Med

Low High

Low

Quick wins High benefit initiatives

Busine

ss Need/Benefit

Ease of ImplementationMedium High

Med

Low High

Low

Quick wins High benefit initiatives

Ease of Implementation • Technological change • Process change

We can identify high business value and low complexity requirements as quick wins for the portal implementation. These quick-wins

• need to be easy to implement and should have high potential to create value • should be identified such that they are integrated with the overall portal strategy

• should be linked to bottom line related issues important to senior management, thereby facilitating consensus building Beyond the current release, the envisioning team defines a long term roadmap for the program. This includes mapping the services that need to be delivered to user groups/ locations as well as to quarters. This approach provides quarterly releases where not only new users are added but also new services get added with each release.

Content

Content capture and storage and retrieval needs

Workflow

New business processes automation requirements

Integration

ERP/ CRM/ Data-warehouse/ Portal

Collaboration

email, chat, discussion, web conferencing etc.

Record. Management

Managing business records for legal compliance

Miscellaneous

Services not classified

User Group/ Geo/ LoB

Rollout

Q1 Q2 Q3 Q4

ECM Release Plan

Projects

Content

Content capture and storage and retrieval needs

Workflow

New business processes automation requirements

Integration

ERP/ CRM/ Data-warehouse/ Portal

Collaboration

email, chat, discussion, web conferencing etc.

Record. Management

Managing business records for legal compliance

Miscellaneous

Services not classified

User Group/ Geo/ LoB

Rollout

Q1 Q2 Q3

Projects

Q4 ECM Release Plan

Envisioning team and approach

Envisioning is usually about a 6-8 week exercise. The exercise is done with a highly diverse skilled team. Each of the team members would have very specific responsibilities to execute.

The Envisioning Team

Role Responsibilities

Program Manager (PMO office) The Project Management Office owns overall responsibility

for the engagement execution, risk management and issue resolution

Portal Solution consultant Responsible for user group analysis, scope, portal services,

prioritization etc

User Experience designer Responsible for visualizing the UI for the portal

Technical Architect Responsible for identifying technology options and make

recommendations

Team of developers Responsible for researching and developing prototypes

The program also requires active participation from the Enterprise Architecture, IT Infrastructure and IT Maintenance teams

The Envisioning Approach

The team approaches envisioning using the following methods:

• User interviews and workshops – The user interviews and workshops will help at arriving top level requirements as well as assigning business value to the requirements. The workshops will be conducted using a lot of interactive white-board sessions. These need to be conducted with a variety of stakeholders – project sponsors, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Human Resources and all major business units.

Business Objectives FUNCTIONAL RQMTS USER EXPERIENCE CONTENT MGMT TECHNOLOGY IDEAS Solution Brief

• Studying the exiting documentation – Before a portal is launched, typically one can find a lot of documentation for applications to be launched, newer websites, failed attempts, strategy and roadmap documentation. Studying these documents provides a lot of valuable information. It helps not only in preventing wrong paths taken in the past but also helps avoid duplication of efforts for activities that have been already done.

• Industry analysis - The portal landscape is changing rapidly. We have a lot of powerful features being introduced with every release of these products. Having a good understanding of the product suite, supporting products and trends will be important for making technology choices as well as prioritizing requirements.

Envisioning Deliverables

The deliverable from an envisioning phase is a portal solution brief. The solution brief is a summary of the understanding from all the different aspects worked in the envisioning phase

• Portal requirements matrix

• Classified and prioritized requirements • Preliminary solution architecture

• High level architecture, organized in patterns • Content migration strategy

• Approach to address intersections and dependencies • User experience blueprint

• UI concept prototype • Usability requirements • High level site map

• Key governance and process requirements • Implementation plan

• Detailed plan