Question: I have circulated a proposal to our senior management group about implementing a CMS, but our CIO says that what the organization needs is a portal that enables staff to personalize the information they need to access. What are your views?
Answer: As you walk around a gallery or a museum the door to each room holds a wonderful collection of paintings or artifacts, each labeled and placed in context. Yet few people ever wonder about the skill and effort involved in creating the display. A few years ago, enterprise information portals (EIP) were all the rage. Circa 2000/2001, there were over 100 vendors, and everyone was forecasting the death of the intranet. Luckily for my consulting business they were wrong, and, as it turns out, Plumtree is about the only independent portal vendor left standing.
An intranet and a portal solve different business issues and, as with all IT investments, achieving an acceptable ROI requires careful consideration of user requirements. Let me deal with a portal first. Yahoo! styles itself as a portal because it aggregates content from a wide range of sources. An EIP aggregates applications rather than information. Typically the desktop is a series of windows providing access to email, stock quotes, instant messaging, collaboration platforms, and much more. In general, portals work well with structured data, rather than text. Looking at text in a small window is very tiresome and if you open up the text window to full size, the other windows are concealed or reduced to a fairly useless minimum.
A feature of most portals (Yahoo! is a good example) is that a user can select those applications/feeds/ windows that are of greatest benefit. This is a valid objective in principle, but it does require the user to have an in-depth knowledge of all the resources available. In addition, the dynamic nature of business means that a given "user profile" may need to be changed on a cyclical or ad hoc basis, which takes time and effort to accomplish. How many of us change our Yahoo! profiles on a regular basis? And if we don't, as the product becomes less relevant, are we then less likely to use it?
An intranet is about the networking of information. The objective is to enable employees to gain access, through a Web-based network, to the organization's information and knowledge resources. Since the intranet is hosted on a Web server, it rarely includes a substantial degree of access to applications other than databases. Email, for example, is rarely integrated within the intranet desktop. Some degree of personalization can be provided but usually at a role level, such as sales or departmental administrators.
There is no reason why an intranet cannot be one of the applications accessed through a portal, which is a good solution for many organizations. But how does the content get into the intranet? In the case of a portal much of the content displayed comes from databases that are updated through a pre-existing business process, like sales or customer service. Intranet content needs to be hand-crafted. At the Intranets 2003 conference there was a presentation from a company that was rolling out its portal to all employees internationally but, when questioned, admitted that there was no investment being made in content management for the intranet component of the portal. (Bringing to mind the text written above hell's gate in Dante's Inferno: "Abandon hope all ye who enter here.")
It is important to appreciate that the CMS components of most portal products is currently quite light weight and that the problems of providing integrated search across a portal are quite taxing because of the mixture of structured and unstructured content. Getting back to your question, it could well be that and the CIO are in fact both correct. The nature of the organization may be that staff would benefit from application integration and information access through a portal desktop. However, it may be that an intranet would be the core application, in which case a CMS would enhance the relevance and currency of the intranet content.