According to a new Gartner report on portals, “Portals Are the Swiss Army Knives of Enterprise Software,” more than 50% of portal deployments (70% probability) are first generation portals with technology and features developed in the late 90s (no personalization, and little or no application integration).
The report outlines five generations of portals to date with a sixth generation to come in the near future. In short, the report says that while portal technology has advanced considerably in the last 7 or 8 years, most organizations are not taking advantage of the advanced technology.
No surprise there. But client organizations and companies are not to blame. Portal products are highly complex and extremely difficult to use with all sorts of problems. Most companies that implement these technologies use hard core technies and pay little or no attention to processes and people issues required behind the scenes to make a portal work. Not to mention the usability problems.
Gartner cautions, “Enterprises that have never deployed portals should focus on the features that will focus on their business requirements, not just on the most recent-capabilities mentioned in vendor marketing materials.”
If the portal companies would better instruct buyers on the requisite planning steps required prior to implementing a portal solution, and made their solutions more user-friendly, then more customers would deploy advanced portal technology – including personalization. But this of course completely ignores the fact that the vast majority of employees don’t care to have personalization and wouldn’t use it. Trust me, I see and hear it all the time in countless surveys and focus groups from average employees from banks to energy corporations to government, and all sorts of industries in between. Management thinks that personalization is neat, employees don’t give a dam.
It’s not surprising then that only a small minority of medium to large organizations have deployed and enterprise portal solution. The portal solutions have a long way to go in their evolution before more companies buy their solutions and adopt their technologies.
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