Regardless of their moniker – corporate portal, enterprise information portal, or horizontal portals – enterprise intranet portals are relatively new in a fairly green market (late 1990s). Despite its age however, the market offers extraordinarily complex solutions that tout advanced user personalization, out-of-the-box application integration, and development platforms or framework for building composite applications.
In The future of portals at the turn of the year, I espoused the need for portal vendors to make it easier for organizations to implement personalization. All portal products offer user employee personalization options. In short, personalization allows users to configure elements of their home page and subscribe to different buckets of content or tools (portlets). The alternative to individual personalization is role-based personalization or segmentation (see James Robertson’s Personalisation vs segmentation) or employee profiling where personalization options are determined by your role within the organization and delivered to you based on that roll.
However, very few organizations have actually enacted or properly implemented user personalization once they’ve purchased a portal product. Most employee portal implementations feature customization. The difficulty with personalization is that it requires a phenomenal amount of work and planning; the technology component is relatively simple. Organizations that roll-out personalization have to identify and define multiple roles and content and then map all the content to those roles and ensure that the content is provided on an ongoing basis (writing, updating, publishing, formatting, etc.). Even more troublesome is that while employees like the idea of personalization, few will ever use it.
“I am highly skeptical about the value of personalization at an individual level, whether on a website or an intranet,” writes Martin White in his EContent article, Portals Show Sign of Sanity. “My experience, which is entirely anecdotal, is that after the initial excitement of being able to manage the flow of information to the desktop, the user refreshes the personalization profile on an increasing ad-hoc basis, until the time comes when they abandon it altogether. The result is that from that point on, the user is no longer seeing all the information that is relevant to his or her needs, and is likely to make seriously flawed decisions.”
Find a company that has implemented a personalized portal for their intranet and you’ll find a company where a majority of employees don’t use the personalization feature. In fact, when I talk about personalization at conferences and I ask web people – often a mix of communications, HR and IT people – how many people use My Yahoo! or My MSN or one of the other personalized portals – less than 5% put up their hands. And these are very web savvy people – far more so than your average employee. One client that has offered various personalization options on their intranet home page for years admits that only 5% of employees have signed-up and enabled personalization options.
Is personalization dying before it realizes its potential and all the hype?
With the heavy costs and workload for implementing and managing a portal solution, and the rise of new technology (particularly Web 2.0), some organizations are looking to alternatives than the traditional personalization for integrating different sources of content, data and tools.
On Friday I'll post the follow-up article on "Alternatives to personalization" with a look at mashups and RSS.