The Number One Portal Mistake
If you followed our i-Wise Newsletter over the past seven months, you watched as we counted down the top ten portal mistakes. To create this countdown, the i-Squared team researched and reminisced until we agreed on the most common problems that arise and their degree of severity. Topping the list is a factor that no portal can succeed without. Mistake #1 is a lack of strategy.
The term strategy is not uncommon in the corporate environment where we earn rewards for carefully setting goals and making the crucial decisions necessary to meet them. But even if you have pored over devising a strategy before, you’re not alone if you do not know what a portal strategy entails.
A successful portal strategy must include two important factors. First, you must align it to the company’s business drivers. Once you and the portal team have an understanding of the key drivers, discuss how the portal can help the organization achieve those ambitions. For example, if an important driver is to be an innovator in your industry, discuss and come to a consensus on how the portal will facilitate innovation at your company. The latest portal software can enhance collaboration and orchestrate processes, and when those features are paired together in a portal strategy, new ideas can be quickly brought to light and developed within the company. In another example, many companies have key business drivers to increase efficiency and improve customer satisfaction, and, as a result, they strategize to build portals that increase self-service among employees, customers and partners.
The second critical factor is to secure direction and support from the top. To succeed, a portal strategy must be driven by executive management. Without their direction and support, a portal project can quickly become a power struggle or, worse, a forgotten idea. Because a portal is implemented across multiple communities in a company, it requires upper-level management to prioritize how the portal is built to serve these communities and to influence employees to use the portal and adopt it as part of the corporate culture.
When i-Squared worked on a project to redesign the hospital care portal for the Maryland Health Care Commission, we invited all stakeholders to a brainstorm session at the beginning of the project. The input from these stakeholders was as influential to the success of the project as their understanding of the benefits a portal could provide them. Management provides clear-sighted goals, critical moral support, and all-important financial backing. A portal commenced without engaging executive management would be short-lived, if not disastrous.
After business drivers and support from executive management are worked in, draw out the rest of your strategy to be comprehensive with your environment and staff. Review our previous articles about the top ten portal mistakes to make sure that you don’t make them! Here are some questions to help you answer critical issues in your planning:
- Who will be involved in the effort?
- Where do you predict a return on investment and how will you measure it?
- Does your technology support overall business goals?
- Do you have a process to maintain content?
- Who is taking ownership?
- How will the portal be implemented?
- How will content be organized?
- How will you introduce the portal and encourage its use within the organization?
- Do you have internal support?
After you answer these questions as well as some of your own, set milestones and work out a timeline for completion.
Once you devise a strategy, take a careful look to ensure you have established purpose with a clear direction towards your company’s goals. Eliminate the “eye candy” factor from your portal strategy. No shortage of gadget envy exists in the IT industry, but a smart portal strategist does not succumb to peer pressure to adopt a feature because you see it used elsewhere or because a brand new innovation dazzles you. “Just rolling out a technology because you think you should will fail–plan, plan and plan and you will succeed,” said i-Squared CEO Joyce Query.
Simply put, a portal is square one for sharing company information, applications and services to employees, partners or customers (or some combination of the three). Despite this simple definition, do not underestimate its complexity to develop because it integrates many aspects of an organization, such as intellectual assets, communication flow, and technology, to name a few. By agreeing to a portal strategy at the beginning of project, you set a framework to corral all elements and steer them towards effectiveness.