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Intranets and portals Some current issues

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Recognition of scale-up issues from department to organisation-wide ... Brio, Informatica, Viador. Search. Hummingbird/Fulcrum, Sopheon, Verity. Document management ... – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: Intranets and portals Some current issues


1
Intranets and portalsSome current issues
  • Martin White
  • Managing Director, Intranet Focus Ltd.

2
Intranet adoption
UK DTI International Benchmarking Study 2000
3
Intranet/extranet comparison
UK DTI International Benchmarking Study 2000
4
Intranet penetration, Europe
International Data Corporation Global IT survey
2000
5
The lessons so far
  • Recognition of scale-up issues from department to
    organisation-wide
  • Importance of a focus on business benefits
  • Development timeframes are longer than
    anticipated indeed development never stops
  • Extranets and e-commerce have to be considered in
    an intranet development strategy
  • Managing staff involvement is now recognised as a
    major issue
  • Issues of corporate culture have to be recognised
    and addressed

6
Categories of intranet deployment
  • Category 1
  • Well-developed corporate-wide intranet
  • Intranet manager(s) and identified support team
  • Largely build with in-house IT expertise
  • Set up in 1997/1998
  • High level of staff participation
  • Links to external information and DM systems
  • Management consultancies, telecoms and IT
    companies, pharmaceutical/biomedical companies

7
Categories of intranet deployment
  • Category 2
  • Multi-site/multi-national company with intranets
    deployed in a number of locations
  • Working language is English
  • Now trying to integrate the intranets onto a
    corporate platform
  • Running into issues with differences in corporate
    culture
  • Major content management issues appearing

8
Categories of intranet deployment
  • Category 3
  • 1999 launch - intranet not fully deployed
  • Limited range of content
  • No dedicated intranet manager, often sponsored
    by corporate communications or marketing, or the
    library/information centre
  • No formal budget
  • Static or declining use as content does not
    support business decisions and processes

9
Categories of intranet deployment
  • Category 4
  • Central government
  • Often developed by library and information
    departments
  • Uses the e-Government initiative as a focus for
    the work
  • Intranets not formally recognised by Government
  • Some are effective, most are not

10
NAO report some findings
  • Making intranets central to the life of
    organisations requires considerable commitment by
    top management, significant investment on a
    larger scale than for external Web sites, and
    firm but creative management of the information
    and facilities made available
  • In comparison with private sector companies and
    overseas government agencies UK departments
    remain very cautious in making the investment
    necessary to build cost-effective and well-used
    intranets

National Audit Office report Government on the
web, Dec. 1999
11
Intranet effectiveness
Source www.governmentontheweb.org
12
Frequency of use
Source www.governmentontheweb.org
13
Categories of intranet deployment
  • Category 5
  • Local authorities and not-for-profit sector
  • Very limited intranet deployment, often on a
    pilot basis
  • Poor IT infrastructure
  • Unable to make an effective business case
  • Have no idea how to meet the 2005 e-Government
    agenda

14
Intranet market development
  • Companies are now recognising the emerging demand
    for mid-range content management solutions
    tailored for the intranet market
  • Examples include Active Intranet (UK), Spectral
    (Sweden), IntraCS (South Africa) and some ASP
    entrants such as Planet-Intra and Intranets.com
  • Web content management companies will also move
    into this sector

15
Corporate portals
  • Corporate portal structured integration through
    a user-customised browser interface of internal
    documents, databases and applications, together
    with external information sources and resources
  • Enterprise information portal as above

16
Corporate portals/EIP
  • Kick-started into life by the November 1998
    Merrill Lynch report
  • The report contains the often mis-quoted forecast
    of a 14 billion EIP market by 2002
  • In fact this was the total enterprise management
    forecast, and only about 3 billion was EIP
    software
  • In the even the portal market has grown much more
    slowly than this forecast
  • Why?

17
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18
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19
Intranet cf portal
  • Intranet
  • Communication of internal information
  • Limited database connectivity
  • Standard user interface
  • Limited, if any, access to external information
  • Limited flexibility
  • Low initial cost
  • Corporate portal
  • Information to support business decisions and
    e-business applications
  • Extensive database connectivity
  • Customised interface
  • Links to external information
  • Flexible
  • High initial cost

20
Corporate portal vendors
  • There are currently around 60 vendors of
    corporate portal software
  • Most are US-based, though there are a number of
    European vendors, including
  • Appsolut, Autonomy, Comintell, Insight
    Technologies, KMS, Linq, Sopheon
  • Most have migrated from other application areas
  • It is important to understand the extent of this
    migration in evaluation products

21
A confused market and industry
  • Considerable confusion between
  • Corporate portal
  • Enterprise Information Portal
  • Knowledge Portal
  • Business Portal
  • Enterprise Application Integration etc.
  • The blame for this resides with vendor marketing
    departments, the Gartner Group, the Meta Group
    and the Delphi Group!

22
Industry segmentation
  • Knowledge management
  • Net Perceptions, Plumtree
  • Business intelligence
  • Brio, Informatica, Viador
  • Search
  • Hummingbird/Fulcrum, Sopheon, Verity
  • Document management
  • Documentum, Hummingbird
  • Content
  • SageMaker, Mediaapps, Factiva

23
Making a business case
  • The actual benefits of a corporate portal have
    never been easy to identify
  • All that a portal seems to do is add a layer on
    top of all the existing systems in order to
    provide integrated access to information and
    applications through a browser interface
  • But IT departments cant work out how it is
    suddenly so easy to do this
  • They are also concerned by the ownership of the
    desktop by one supplier

24
Selection team
  • Selecting a corporate portal vendor must be a
    team approach, and involve
  • Senior IT managers
  • Applications support staff
  • Line-of-business managers
  • Personnel manager
  • Business development/strategic planning
  • Board Director

25
Selection criteria - 1
  • Vendor background and ownership
  • Long term viability of vendor
  • Installed base
  • Technology alliances
  • Commitment to the UK in terms of development and
    support
  • Reliance on key staff

26
Selection criteria - 2
  • Database support
  • Document support
  • Thesaurus development
  • XML support
  • Scalability
  • Customization
  • Indexing process

27
Selection criteria -3
  • Cost ( range from 500 to 40000 per server)
  • License basis (Server, users, support costs)
  • Learning curve
  • Approach to proof of concept
  • Administration procedures
  • User group
  • External information access links

28
Limited awareness of information
  • Most companies still have little, if any, idea of
    what information their employees actually use in
    their daily work
  • They therefore find it extremely difficult to
    create a specification for an EIP product
  • In particular they have no view of the
    scalability issues if they start at Department A
    and then deploy throughout the organisation
  • Portal vendors cant afford much pre-selling

29
Budget issues
  • Getting any idea of the potential cost of portal
    software is all but impossible
  • Vendors realise that even out-of-the-box products
    will need customising, and in any case they have
    not got enough experience yet to understand what
    are the key parameters that are going to affect
    the performance and utilisation of the portal
  • Who owns the budget, and which doors does a
    portal vendor have to knock on to secure a
    contract?

30
Vendor expertise and longevity
  • Very few vendors are pure-play portal vendors,
    and bring with them particular skills which they
    are then trying to leverage into a generic
    platform
  • They are mainly small, privately funded companies
    with limited (if any) presence outside of the USA
  • This makes any multi-national company very
    concerned about stability and support levels
  • The current US economic woes are having a
    disastrous impact on the smaller US vendors

31
The Autonomy effect
  • Although Autonomy lacks the full functionality of
    an EIP the visibility of the company in the UK
    market makes it a benchmark for IT directors and
    others
  • Autonomy comes across as providing the ultimate
    solution mainly by black magic and Bayesian
    statistics
  • Many IT directors would not want Autonomy
    anywhere near their core business and that goes
    for all portal vendors

32
EIP success factors
  • A successful EIP vendor will need to have (inter
    alia!)
  • A demonstrably scalable business model
  • A very clear business proposition
  • Business process analysis capability
  • The ability to sell against the competition
  • A strong content management module
  • Understand the need for access to the external
    information environment with single log-on
  • Patience!

33
Forecast
  • 2001 is going to be exit-year for a number of
    vendors
  • Already many have share prices at rock-bottom,
    such as Sopheon and Knowledge Management Software
  • US companies faced with a stagnant market
  • Severe shortage of development staff
  • Still a long haul to the close of a sale
  • The big players are still to make their move,
    notably IBM/Lotus, Microsoft (Tahoe), Computer
    Associates, Sybase, SAP

34
Intranets and portals
  • The initial view of business was that a portal
    would be able to replace a poorly functioning
    intranet
  • Know they are realising that excellent intranets
    are needed to provide information food for a
    portal
  • Since the cost of intranet enhancement looks to
    be less than a portal application, they choose
    the intranet route
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