Developing an Information Portal

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Developing an Information Portal

• Considerations and Criteria
• Susan Quinn
• American College of Physician Executives

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Who Wants to be a Millionaire?

• a. A grand or imposing gate
• b. An entrance or means of entrance
• c. Navigation scheme around huge amounts of
  information

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Portals

• Gather information from one or more servers as
  well as from the Internet and deliver that
  information through a single consistent interface
  across the enterprise
• Documents
• Databases
• Email
• Websites
• Graphics
• Audio/Video

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Mega portals

• Become the desktop
• for the user
• Vortals

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Why a portal?

• Access to relevant information
• Save users time
• Increase user productivity

• Enable more efficient communication across the
  enterprise
• Create a competitive advantage

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Portal strategy

• Site Objectives
• Portal design
• Content

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Site Objectives

• Aggregate content
• Improve access
• Consolidate functionality

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Portal design

• Usability
• Performance
• Reliability
• Organize and package

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Content

• Unstructured
• -documents, hypertext content, etc
• Structured
• -data stored in relational or other databases
• Multimedia
• Groupware data
• -email, group calendaring, listservs

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Users

• Target users
• Use focus groups, cross-functional work teams
• Understand what information they need

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Elements of a portal

• User interface
• Harvesting Engine
• Recommendation Engine
• Security

• Role-based interface
• Publishing
• Collaboration
• Expertise profiles

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User Interface

• Role or functional interfaces
• User sees information allocated and displayed by
  functional role
• Personal tabs for non-work related information
• Ease of use makes the portal a place users want
  to go

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Harvesting engine

• Collects information from a variety of sources
• Spiders index http servers
• Channels mining groupware
• Supports XML

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Recommendation Engine

• Profiles the users interests
• Analyze user selections
• Find similar content that may be of interest

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Role-based interface

• Functional groups
• Account teams
• Project teams
• Customers
• Security is critical

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Interactive Portals

• Beyond content aggregation
• Select groups of individuals publish and share
  content to the corporate knowledge
• Apply document management features to user
  contributions
• Security and/or human switching

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Publishing

• Via email
• Publish from a browser
• Drag and drop

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Expertise profiles

• Implicit - built from what a user reads or
  contributes
• Explicit user-defined expertise

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Collaboration

• Discussion forums
• Ongoing
• Impromptu
• Asynchronous
• Real time
• One to one
• Multimedia

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Security

• Granular level
• Role-based
• Single login authentication
• User access levels make administration easier
• Customization vs open architecture

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Scalability

• Pilot test
• Start departmentally and grow

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Portal Software Market segments

• Collaboration
• ERP
• Knowledge management
• Business intelligence

• Internet
• Document management
• Search
• Information aggregation and publishing

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Knowledge management

• Killer application
• Portal tools make contribution to the
  organizations knowledge pool easier
• Allow collaboration with experts and peers on
  specific issues
• Launch common office applications

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Resources
Berners-Lee T, Hendler J, Lassila P. The semantic
web. Scientific American 2001 May
http//www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-le
e.html Brown, JS, Duguid, P. The social life of
information. Harvard Business School Press,
2000 Kounadis, T. How to pick the best portal.
E-Business Advisor 2000 August30-35.
http//www.advisor.com/www/e-BusinessAdvisor Picke
ring, C. A look through the portal. Software
Magazine. 2001February/March http//www.softwarema
g.com/archive/2001feb/Content.html. Roberts-Witt,
SL. Knowledge everywhere. Knowledge Management.
2001 June 4(2)36-40
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Contact info

• squinn_at_acpe.org
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• Keying into Portals