CMS Watch’s 2nd Edition of the Enterprise Portals Report finds that enterprise portal solutions are still very difficult to use and that customers must invest substantial resources to create usable and accessible user interfaces (thanks to Jane McConnell for reminding me about this).

The report not surprisingly cites portal vendors for usability challenges, including complicated, dashboard interfaces, as well as tools generating non-standard code that fails common accessibility tests.

"Most enterprises blindly adopt the default 'building block' approach to layout found in contemporary portals -- a leftover from the early days of public portals." according to Lead Report Analyst, Janus Boye. "Today, this de-facto standard can mitigate against adoption in the enterprise," adds Boye.

WEBINAR: Measuring Intranet Value: Proving & Delivering ROI is a 75-minute webinar that will teach you how to measure ROI.

Major portal vendors such as BEA, IBM, JBoss, Microsoft, and SAP are investing heavily in AJAX-based interfaces, but buyers find that "super user" screens still predominate. Getting adequate value from the portal experience typically requires substantial training and technical acumen.

Other Report findings include:

·         IBM's WebSphere Portal product is under pressure from Microsoft on the departmental side, as well as other Java-based offerings at the enterprise tier. However, IBM has reworked its product UI with a more accessible interface.

·         Microsoft portal customers are presently engaged in a potentially expensive waiting game: enterprises deploying the extremely popular Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 face a massive upgrade to the much delayed MOSS 2007.

·         Oracle will shortly join BEA as an infrastructure vendor with multiple enterprise portal offerings.

Based on hundreds of interviews with enterprise portal customers worldwide, the 2nd Edition includes detailed comparisons across 16 key feature categories, as well as evaluations of product suitability for 7 enterprise portal scenarios.

Vendors covered include:

·         ATG

·         BEA

·         Broadvision

·         Microsoft

·         Oracle

·         Vignette

·         Red Hat/JBoss

·         SAP

·         Sun

·         Apache,

·         eXo

·         Liferay

·         Plone/Zope

None of this is surprising of course. I’ve never seen a portal product I was fond of and we’ve yet as a company to ever recommended a portal product over a content management system (CMS) for a client. That’s not to say though that a portal product doesn’t have value.

I think that portal products can be very helpful for some enterprises. Mind you at this point in time, given the problems with portals, l believe very few companies (and almost exclusively limited to very large companies with sprawling intranets and heavy integration needs) would benefit from a portal product. However, the vendors are trying and the lines between portal products and CMS products are becoming more and more fuzzy. Things will improve though... but it may take some years.

Take a look at what I had to say about portals at the beginning of the year... The future of portals.

RELATED READING:

Portals have stalled

Enterprise portals require a lot more work than you think

The hype of personalized portals

Visit the GM intranet portal

More immaturity… from CMS to portals

See www.IntranetReport.com for more news. 

Measuring the return on investment (ROI) of your intranet is actually pretty easy. It does however require some time to do the measurement, some knowledge of what to measure, and the cooperation and involvement of the data owners for what is being measured (e.g. costs of the IT help desk).

Firstly though, you have to want to measure the value of the intranet. I can say with almost 100% certainty, even though they may not have explicitly stated so to you, your senior management wants to know that the intranet is delivering value. But can you prove it?

Measuring Intranet Value: Proving & Delivering ROI is a 75-minute webinar that will teach you how to prove it.

Date: November 28, 2006

Time: 1:00 pm EST

Location: From your computer (webinar)

Cost: $95 (yes, it is that cheap, but far more valuable)

This informative 75 minute webinar will teach you:

Ø       How to measure return on investment

Ø       How to identify very specific measurable benefits

Ø       Priorities for building a business case

Ø       Best practices & case studies that measure ROI

Here’s a sneak preview of one case study… Prescient measured the dollar value of one client’s intranet by measuring 12 specific benefits over a two-year period. The two-year value was more than $1.5 million. Their investment in the intranet was less than $200,000. Therefore the 2-year ROI was more than 700%. Some of the measured ROI benefits included software distribution, phone directory, HR forms, and content management savings.  

To measure and increase the value of your intranet, please dowload the free white paper, Finding ROI.

Register now for Measuring Intranet Value: Proving & Delivering ROI.

The intranet requires content and tools that are mission critical – information and knowledge critical to the success of the business.

Most intranets, however, are not fully utilized by the employee population at large. Raise your hand if you wish you could only attract more employees to use the intranet. More than 90% of you just raised your hand.

Intranet value begets intranet use. But it also requires education and promotion. As I like to say, “If you build it, they will not come…”

Adding non-mission critical content and tools can be a gold mine for driving traffic – and winning permanent and frequent users. Some of my favorite non-critical intranet tools include:

• Cafeteria menus
• Quick polls
• Weather forecasts
• Classifieds (buy and sell)
• Job announcements (anniversaries, promotions, etc.)

These tools are ‘killer’ – if you have some or all of these tools on your intranet, you no doubt enjoy very high traffic amongst your connected employee population (those with access).

Another goody and employee favorite: employee discounts.

Employee discounts are all but expected in some industries -- retail being a prime example. According to a poll by Maritz Research, 89 percent of people looking for retail employment want their companies to offer discounts on its products or services.

Employers have even started offering employee discounts to the general public. In 2005, Ford, Chrysler and GM all offered all of America the chance to cash in on the discounted automobile rates paid by their employees.

"(Offering employee discounts) definitely improves retention," says Bob Schiff, senior vice president of YouDecide, a company that helps employers provide voluntary benefits and discounts for their workers. Schiff says that after his company puts all of an employer's benefits on one portal on its HR intranet, "it increases intranet traffic by 300 to 400 percent."

Read the full article Great part-time jobs for discounts (CNN.com)

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Some organizations have turned to the kiosk as a communications solution for bridging this digital divide, but the results are usually unimpressive. Rarely are kiosks ever used to the extent management hopes or expect.

“In practice, it may be impractical (or prohibitively expensive) to reach all staff using just kiosks,” writes James Robertson of Australian-based Step Two in his article Intranet kiosks or remote access? “Staff may also be reluctant or unable to make effective use of the kiosks during their work breaks.”

I recently conducted a client focus group at a remote field office with workers that work outside and don’t have a dedicated computer, but they do have a shared computer workstation (kiosk). Not surprisingly, these employees have intranet access but the workstation kiosk is not well used. “We don’t use the intranet much and don’t really care… but I would if I could access it from home.”

READ THE FULL ARTICLE: Intranet kiosks vs home access

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It’s a buyer’s market. There is a shortage of skilled workers and we all know it. In fact, while the shortage is estimated at a couple of million workers in the U.S. alone, the shortage is increasing rapidly and expected to grow to 14 million by 2020.

Is it any wonder why so many HR professionals are completely and totally obsessed about employee retention? Retention has become such a hot issue for executives that even The Economist dedicated an issue last month (October 2006) to “The search for talent: Why it’s getting harder to find.”

Despite the need and focus on employee retention Spherion Corporation’s IT Employee Confidence Index dropped 4.3 points to 54.1 in the third quarter, according to the latest IT Employment Report (conducted by Harris Interactive). However, some 73% of IT workers say they feel it is not likely to lose their job. So job confidence is not a factor in affecting their job confidence and satisfaction.

“On the surface, this quarter’s data may seem contradictory, but the tech sector itself is operating counter-intuitively,” said Brendan Courtney, senior vice president of Spherion^® Professional Services. “IT workers are still being enticed to stay with their current employers through a series of retention efforts which may explain why even more of them are confident in their own job security.”

So employees are not worried about their jobs, but their confidence and job satisfaction is declining – and the market is screaming for skilled workers with a massive shortage that is dramatically on the rise.

What’s the problem?

Read the entire article: The intranet as an employee retention tool 

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Paul Strassmann, the creator of the Information Productivity metric, makes his 5 key recommendations (5 Steps to Improve Your Information Productivity) for improving information enterprise management (www.BaselineMag.com):

1 - Make the tough decisions. Since costs are a key factor in Information Productivity, companies need to know how to cut their losses on projects that aren't delivering. If management spends too much time trying to fix a project, the time and costs involved will quickly add up and eat the savings the project was expected to generate.

 

The solution is to either eliminate the project or scale it down to something manageable and less expensive. Either solution will save money.

"Cutting your losses is the quickest way to improve Information Productivity," Strassmann says. "That rule accounts for everything."

 

2 - Cut the fat. Information Productivity is calculated by taking a company's Information Value-Added—the value added to a company's economic performance by good information management; it equals profit minus the cost of capital invested by shareholders—and dividing it by sales, general and administrative (SG&A) costs, or the expenses related to managing information. So if your costs are out of line, your Information Productivity will be, too.

 

Strassmann recommends looking at your company's expenses to find out what's weighing it down.

Benchmark those expenses—looking out for pricey plants and factories, excess inventory and bloated SG&A costs—against those of three competitors. That exercise will give you some clues about where the fat can be trimmed. Technology projects can then be aimed at inefficient areas, say, high inventory levels, through automation or the streamlining of processes such as shipping and receiving.

 

3 - Evaluate outsourcing. While your company's revenues may be climbing, the value-added of your employees may be declining. You may be outsourcing (that is, purchasing) an increased share of your production costs to subcontractors.

 

When that happens, you may still be keeping the same overhead (SG&A) as before, while the base that requires administrative and general support starts to shrink. Revenue-based ratios (such as the ratio of SG&A to revenue) will be telling you that all is well, whereas value-added ratios (SG&A divided by costs minus purchases) will in fact suggest that you have too much management trying to supervise a smaller workforce. To keep Information Productivity growing, you will have to cut your overhead costs or increase the value-added.

 

The "shrinking corporation" is a widespread occurrence as companies make less while reporting rising revenue. This approach is particularly marked in information-technology companies that purchase most of their components from others and only assemble them for sale.

 

4 - Focus on people. Retaining quality managers is vital to improving Information Productivity. To Strassmann, technology has largely become a commodity that you can outsource to India, Bucharest or anyplace in between. But people with solid corporate knowledge—especially the ability to see where technology will help a company seize a new business opportunity—are priceless.

 

What's the best way to keep your best people? Challenge them by giving them big goals and projects. Give them the opportunity to grow their knowledge and build their careers. If you don't do these things, it's highly likely they'll leave for greener pastures.

 

And weed out people who have no interest in developing their careers. Why? Ultimately, these hangers-on will become obstacles for your company as pay rises and their technology skills don't.

 

5 - Innovate. The way to go about innovating is to find a function or key business goal—such as faster checkout in a retail store, millisecond response time or near-100% system reliability—and then see how you can use technology to reach that goal.

"You need to look at the organization from the top down," Strassmann says. "Then when you go into your financial review, instead of looking at the information-technology operating budget, you can look at the company overall."

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Keep in mind this is more enterprise information management as opposed to employee information retrieval and management. Different issue altogether and the focus of a future blog.

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