Despite the advances in technology and the cries and demands for more and better quality, portal solutions – more specifically their use in corporations – have barely evolved in the past few years. The same challenges that existed at the turn of the millennium continue to dominate today.

Continued corporate intranet challenges include:

• intranet sprawl; renegade development
• competing ownership and political issues
• limited or no personalization
• too many passwords; single sign-on not realized
• low user take-up; usage not living up to expectations
• complex, unfriendly publishing
• poor search engine performance (lack of consistent meta data)
  

Nielsen Norman Group has issued another analysis on the state of corporate portals. Though author Jakob Nielsen does not indicate how many portals he and his colleagues actually studied, there are some 25+ organizations listed in the analysis (see Intranet Portals Get Streamlined).

Nielsen also believes there has been little progress in the past three years since his last analysis: “In fact, none of the forty-five best practices documented in the report's first edition have changed. Yes, we've gained many new insights, but what was good three years ago continues to be good today.

Of the biggest challenges and disappointing findings, Nielsen cites several:

• Portal solutions still don't offer satisfactory usability out of the box. This is more of a disgrace now than it was in the past, because we now know so much more about intranet usability. Vendors need to integrate this knowledge into their software.
• Single sign-on is still more a dream than a reality. It's one of the most desired portal features and creates huge savings in help-desk calls, but most companies are not yet there. Users still must log in again and again. Multiple sign-on does offer one usability benefit, however: it can help employees feel more comfortable about information privacy when accessing highly sensitive data.
• Personalization for individual users is still rare. Organizations continue to find role-based personalization more useful and to use it more frequently. For example, some companies present certain information or portlets only to people with a particular job title or people who work in a particular location.
• Governance has always been more important to portal success than technical issues, and this finding was even stronger in the new study. One popular approach is to create a steering group representing various business areas. Projects also need to establish firm rules for enforcing design consistency and migrating content and applications into the portal.
• ROI is woefully under-documented. Too few portal projects collect good productivity metrics, though some companies are now beginning to measure themselves against our intranet testing report's time-on-task benchmarks and using this data to compute their savings relative to average intranets. More typically, portal projects measure user satisfaction and usage. For example, Fujitsu Siemens Computers in Germany found that its intranet use tripled after the portal went online. (Doubled use is more common across the projects we've studied.) Since intranet use is completely voluntary, increased use is a strong indication that a portal helps employees do their work, though it's still an indirect metric.

These Nielsen Reports are not bad – they provide some decent insight. Companies more-or-less volunteer their information in the form of case studies in the hope they’re chosen and singled-out as a success. These ‘case studies’ are mostly candy –they’re screenshots and sanitized looks at the current state of the intranet. Rarely do you get the real story and understand the real challenges, problems and shortcomings. But Dr. Nielsen provides a lot of salient insight, findings and recommendations.

Yesterday on the Intranet World Tour featuring IBM’s W3, Liam Cleaver was exceedingly frank about IBM’s challenges – despite having one of the best intranets in the World. Case studies such as IBM’s are the real, true value case studies – where you are given insight into not only the successes but the challenges and problems (stay tuned for the next Intranet World Tour stop: Microsoft).

And there’s the rub: portals haven’t advanced much in the past three years and it’s because of many, many problems – some of which are cited above.

RELATED FEATURES:

Intranet World Tour: IBM leads the World (discussion below)

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3