PORTALS AND CONTENT MANAGEMENT

We often hear portals and content management mentioned together. Content management is one of the key challenges for organizations implementing portals. And portals have become key delivery points for, if not drivers of, content.

While closely connected, these domains are different in philosophy, priorities, and processes.

Depends on Your Perspective

From a portal-centric point of view, content management is a process and technology by which proper and accurate content is created and maintained for use in the portal. It is secondary to the main portal goal of providing custom experiences to specific constituencies and the core portal processes and technologies such as single sign-on, customization, and providing access to external (to the portal) content, data, and applications.

From a content management-centric point of view, portals are but one of the access/publishing methods for content that has a life cycle of its own. Thus, content usage via the portal becomes secondary to the core content management activities such as creating, categorizing, publishing, maintaining, archiving, etc.

From a Portal-Centric Perspective

In this piece, we will take a portal-centric view to examine several of the issues around portals and content management. In doing this, we will point to several components of our Customer Scenario® Mapping methodology that specifically apply to designing portals and defining the required content within the portal. In addition, we offer Executive Seminars that focus on portals and content management; within each of these, we address their interrelationship.

KEY CONTENT MANAGEMENT ISSUES

Journalists are told that the way to get to the heart of a story is to focus on the who, what, where, when, why, and how of the events. Understanding the key content management issues in portal implementation involves the same exercise, though we’ll examine them in a different order: Why, What, Where, When, How, and Who.

Why Is the Content Being Offered in the Portal?

The Why revolves around the purpose of the portal and the user scenarios that it supports. Why are the customers/employees/partners/etc. coming to the portal? Are they doing their day-to-day jobs in a custom workspace portal? Is this an occasional task such as reviewing and updating personal information in an HR resource portal? Or are they performing a one-time activity such as returning an incorrectly shipped item in a task-oriented customer portal?

In designing portals with our clients, we use our methodology of Customer Scenario® Mapping to determine users desired outcomes and scenarios, as well as the tasks that must be supported within each. We define a Customer Scenario as a set of tasks a customer is willing/happy to do to achieve his/her desired outcome. An example of a customer scenario is:

A customer whose car lease has expired may come to a customer portal of an automobile dealer to determine whether to lease another car or to buy this one. The customer’s successful outcome would be to know that she had made the right decision (see Illustration 1).

Customer Scenario
Lease-Car-Customer-Scenario.jpg
Illustration 1. A customer wants to decide whether to purchase her currently leased car or lease a new one.

What Content Is Required to Meet the User’s Need?

For each task involved in achieving the desired outcome, we ask What information they need. There is usually specific information that the user needs to accomplish each task. This information can be transactional information from a financial application, product information from a catalog or set of specification sheets, customer information from a CRM system, as well as a whole set of documents, Web pages, and even emails, discussions, and instant messages. Proceeding with out automobile customer example, Illustration 2 shows some of the content that she would need to see.

Defining What Content Is Required
Defining-What-Content-Is-Required.jpg
Illustration 2. Each step that the customer takes requires a set of content.

Where Does This Content Come From?

The next step is to identify Where the specific content currently exists or whether it needs to be obtained or created. While this is seemingly easy, it frequently involves activities that approach those of a scavenger hunt, along with negotiations with different internal and external organizations that actually “own” or control the content.