NETTING IT OUT

Portals are hot! E-Business is not. As the portal fad continues, many companies are in danger of increasing the complexity of their operations and infrastructure.

Our suggestion: You should combine your e-business and portal initiatives into a single, comprehensive, and pragmatic strategy. You should leverage the learning and the investments you’ve already made in developing and delivering Internet, intranet, and extranet Web sites. But you should take advantage of this portal phase to accomplish three goals:

1. Redesign your business from your customers and constituents back.
2. Rationalize your redundant Web sites.
3. Prioritize and re-architect your IT application and infrastructure services and your customer-impacting business processes.

Issue: What's the Role of Portals in Your (E-)Business Strategy?

We’ve noticed a distressing trend afoot: Many companies are embarking on portal initiatives as if portals should be distinct from the organizations’ existing e-business operations. This is a mistake. Portals are e-business initiatives.

If your organization is like most others, you probably have ongoing e-business activities in the form of e-commerce Web sites; partner, customer, and/or supplier extranets; as well as employee intranets. You probably also have several portal projects underway: employee portals, customer portals, partner portals, and so on.

Unfortunately, we are finding that, rather than reducing complexity, many companies’ portal projects are often introducing more complexity. That’s because management is unclear about both the role of portals and the current role of e-business within their organizations.

What Should Your Portal Strategy Be?

We believe that you should use a portal approach (whether or not you call it a portal) to achieve three goals:

1. To make it easier for different constituencies to do business with your firm by providing them the tools, information, and resources they need to achieve their goals. These constituencies probably include different types of customers (by customer segment), different groups of employees (by roles), distribution partners and other business partners (your bankers, marketing partners, etc.), suppliers, government agencies and/or regulators, investors, and so on.
2. To rationalize your existing Internet, intranet, and extranet Web sites in order to reduce duplication of effort.
3. To transform your business processes and IT infrastructure by redesigning from the outside-in while you refine customer-impacting business processes and re-architect IT to leverage common application services.

We also believe that your portal initiatives and your e-business initiatives should be tightly coordinated with your customer experience initiatives--including CRM, contact centers, Point of Sale (POS) and in-store navigation, channel partners, inventory availability, billing, quoting, service, delivery, and so on--as well as with your customer profitability analysis.

Portals Are Hot! E-Biz Is Not

E-business is “out” and portals are “in.” That means that, for many of you, e-business budgets and staffing have been cut, while portal projects are getting management’s attention. That’s also why many companies are in danger of re-inventing the IT infrastructure wheel, once again. Here’s what we see happening in a number of companies.

In the aftermath of the dotcom bust, many executives and board members are embarrassed by the scale of their erstwhile e-commerce ambitions. As reality has set in, they’ve realized that they are never going to spin these operations off as separate companies with their own money-making IPOs, nor will their company generate lots of additional revenues just because it has an e-commerce Web site. The backlash has taken hold. E-business budgets are being cut, staffing has been pared down, and, unfortunately, projects to sell more products direct via the Web are being back-burnered.

However, these same organizations still have public Web sites with sections for prospects, customers, investors, and prospective employees, and sub-sites for each of their major product lines. They also have transactional e-commerce sites, interactive customer support sites, secure customer extranets for their largest accounts, private partner extranets for their dealers, and employee intranets. By now, most companies also have Internet-based supply chain management systems.

Thus, companies’ e-business initiatives haven’t disappeared. They’ve simply become the way we all do business. We use the Internet as our communications infrastructure and as the means by which we access information and applications. E-business initiatives, in the form of interactive Web sites, extranets, and intranets, have enabled us to expose our products, pricing, and many core business processes to a variety of constituencies. These e-business projects have often been the catalysts for change within our organizations. Our e-business initiatives have revealed many of the inconsistencies in our internal processes, raising long-buried customer-impacting issues to the top of the priority ...