Intranets and portals Some current issues

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Intranets and portalsSome current issues

• Martin White
• Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd.

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Intranet adoption
UK DTI International Benchmarking Study 2000
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Intranet/extranet comparison
UK DTI International Benchmarking Study 2000
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Intranet penetration, Europe
International Data Corporation Global IT survey
2000
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The lessons so far

• Recognition of scale-up issues from department to
  organisation-wide
• Importance of a focus on business benefits
• Development timeframes are longer than
  anticipated indeed development never stops
• Extranets and e-commerce have to be considered in
  an intranet development strategy
• Managing staff involvement is now recognised as a
  major issue
• Issues of corporate culture have to be recognised
  and addressed

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Categories of intranet deployment

• Category 1
• Well-developed corporate-wide intranet
• Intranet manager(s) and identified support team
• Largely build with in-house IT expertise
• Set up in 1997/1998
• High level of staff participation
• Links to external information and DM systems
• Management consultancies, telecoms and IT
  companies, pharmaceutical/biomedical companies

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Categories of intranet deployment

• Category 2
• Multi-site/multi-national company with intranets
  deployed in a number of locations
• Working language is English
• Now trying to integrate the intranets onto a
  corporate platform
• Running into issues with differences in corporate
  culture
• Major content management issues appearing

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Categories of intranet deployment

• Category 3
• 1999 launch - intranet not fully deployed
• Limited range of content
• No dedicated intranet manager, often sponsored
  by corporate communications or marketing, or the
  library/information centre
• No formal budget
• Static or declining use as content does not
  support business decisions and processes

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Categories of intranet deployment

• Category 4
• Central government
• Often developed by library and information
  departments
• Uses the e-Government initiative as a focus for
  the work
• Intranets not formally recognised by Government
• Some are effective, most are not

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NAO report some findings

• Making intranets central to the life of
  organisations requires considerable commitment by
  top management, significant investment on a
  larger scale than for external Web sites, and
  firm but creative management of the information
  and facilities made available
• In comparison with private sector companies and
  overseas government agencies UK departments
  remain very cautious in making the investment
  necessary to build cost-effective and well-used
  intranets

National Audit Office report Government on the
web, Dec. 1999
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Intranet effectiveness
Source www.governmentontheweb.org
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Frequency of use
Source www.governmentontheweb.org
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Categories of intranet deployment

• Category 5
• Local authorities and not-for-profit sector
• Very limited intranet deployment, often on a
  pilot basis
• Poor IT infrastructure
• Unable to make an effective business case
• Have no idea how to meet the 2005 e-Government
  agenda

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Intranet market development

• Companies are now recognising the emerging demand
  for mid-range content management solutions
  tailored for the intranet market
• Examples include Active Intranet (UK), Spectral
  (Sweden), IntraCS (South Africa) and some ASP
  entrants such as Planet-Intra and Intranets.com
• Web content management companies will also move
  into this sector

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Corporate portals

• Corporate portal structured integration through
  a user-customised browser interface of internal
  documents, databases and applications, together
  with external information sources and resources
• Enterprise information portal as above

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Corporate portals/EIP

• Kick-started into life by the November 1998
  Merrill Lynch report
• The report contains the often mis-quoted forecast
  of a 14 billion EIP market by 2002
• In fact this was the total enterprise management
  forecast, and only about 3 billion was EIP
  software
• In the even the portal market has grown much more
  slowly than this forecast
• Why?

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Intranet cf portal

• Intranet
• Communication of internal information
• Limited database connectivity
• Standard user interface
• Limited, if any, access to external information
• Limited flexibility
• Low initial cost

• Corporate portal
• Information to support business decisions and
  e-business applications
• Extensive database connectivity
• Customised interface
• Links to external information
• Flexible
• High initial cost

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Corporate portal vendors

• There are currently around 60 vendors of
  corporate portal software
• Most are US-based, though there are a number of
  European vendors, including
• Appsolut, Autonomy, Comintell, Insight
  Technologies, KMS, Linq, Sopheon
• Most have migrated from other application areas
• It is important to understand the extent of this
  migration in evaluation products

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A confused market and industry

• Considerable confusion between
• Corporate portal
• Enterprise Information Portal
• Knowledge Portal
• Business Portal
• Enterprise Application Integration etc.
• The blame for this resides with vendor marketing
  departments, the Gartner Group, the Meta Group
  and the Delphi Group!

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Industry segmentation

• Knowledge management
• Net Perceptions, Plumtree
• Business intelligence
• Brio, Informatica, Viador
• Search
• Hummingbird/Fulcrum, Sopheon, Verity
• Document management
• Documentum, Hummingbird
• Content
• SageMaker, Mediaapps, Factiva

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Making a business case

• The actual benefits of a corporate portal have
  never been easy to identify
• All that a portal seems to do is add a layer on
  top of all the existing systems in order to
  provide integrated access to information and
  applications through a browser interface
• But IT departments cant work out how it is
  suddenly so easy to do this
• They are also concerned by the ownership of the
  desktop by one supplier

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Selection team

• Selecting a corporate portal vendor must be a
  team approach, and involve
• Senior IT managers
• Applications support staff
• Line-of-business managers
• Personnel manager
• Business development/strategic planning
• Board Director

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Selection criteria - 1

• Vendor background and ownership
• Long term viability of vendor
• Installed base
• Technology alliances
• Commitment to the UK in terms of development and
  support
• Reliance on key staff

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Selection criteria - 2

• Database support
• Document support
• Thesaurus development
• XML support
• Scalability
• Customization
• Indexing process

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Selection criteria -3

• Cost ( range from 500 to 40000 per server)
• License basis (Server, users, support costs)
• Learning curve
• Approach to proof of concept
• Administration procedures
• User group
• External information access links

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Limited awareness of information

• Most companies still have little, if any, idea of
  what information their employees actually use in
  their daily work
• They therefore find it extremely difficult to
  create a specification for an EIP product
• In particular they have no view of the
  scalability issues if they start at Department A
  and then deploy throughout the organisation
• Portal vendors cant afford much pre-selling

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Budget issues

• Getting any idea of the potential cost of portal
  software is all but impossible
• Vendors realise that even out-of-the-box products
  will need customising, and in any case they have
  not got enough experience yet to understand what
  are the key parameters that are going to affect
  the performance and utilisation of the portal
• Who owns the budget, and which doors does a
  portal vendor have to knock on to secure a
  contract?

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Vendor expertise and longevity

• Very few vendors are pure-play portal vendors,
  and bring with them particular skills which they
  are then trying to leverage into a generic
  platform
• They are mainly small, privately funded companies
  with limited (if any) presence outside of the USA
• This makes any multi-national company very
  concerned about stability and support levels
• The current US economic woes are having a
  disastrous impact on the smaller US vendors

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The Autonomy effect

• Although Autonomy lacks the full functionality of
  an EIP the visibility of the company in the UK
  market makes it a benchmark for IT directors and
  others
• Autonomy comes across as providing the ultimate
  solution mainly by black magic and Bayesian
  statistics
• Many IT directors would not want Autonomy
  anywhere near their core business and that goes
  for all portal vendors

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EIP success factors

• A successful EIP vendor will need to have (inter
  alia!)
• A demonstrably scalable business model
• A very clear business proposition
• Business process analysis capability
• The ability to sell against the competition
• A strong content management module
• Understand the need for access to the external
  information environment with single log-on
• Patience!

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Forecast

• 2001 is going to be exit-year for a number of
  vendors
• Already many have share prices at rock-bottom,
  such as Sopheon and Knowledge Management Software
• US companies faced with a stagnant market
• Severe shortage of development staff
• Still a long haul to the close of a sale
• The big players are still to make their move,
  notably IBM/Lotus, Microsoft (Tahoe), Computer
  Associates, Sybase, SAP

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Intranets and portals

• The initial view of business was that a portal
  would be able to replace a poorly functioning
  intranet
• Know they are realising that excellent intranets
  are needed to provide information food for a
  portal
• Since the cost of intranet enhancement looks to
  be less than a portal application, they choose
  the intranet route