Give Your Portal Programs A Health Check

Enterprise portals have long been essential infrastructure for the information-intensive enterprise. Since their advent in the late 1990s, portals have provided audience-focused access to information and applications for employees, business partners, and customers of the world's largest enterprises. Yet like related long-lived information management investments — including collaboration, business intelligence, and content management programs — identifying and capturing business value has been a challenge for program directors leading portal programs. Now that the portal software market is reaching its 12th year of maturity, some of the most elite IT shops in the world are appropriately asking the question, "Will further consolidation across employee, business partner, and customer-facing audiences help us eke out additional business value from our portal investments?" But before you can answer this, you must give existing portal programs a thorough health check.