February 8, 2005

A Line56 study estimates that companies plan to launch an average of 120 Web and B2B applications in 2005. These solutions consist of everything from a simple database display to complex business process software and apps.

The ability to provide a simple, personalized user interface to many of these applications and reduce development costs by sharing web services have been the promise of the enterprise portal. Many are finding however, even portal deployments used to consolidate applications and web sites can contribute to complexity rather than reduce it.

To complicate matters further, some organizations have deployed multiple portals for various requirements without clear direction for how they relate to one another.

Gartner reports that many enterprises "find themselves dealing with 'a jungle' of multiple portals that compete for the same resources and audiences and, in some cases, prevent each other from achieving success."

Many organizations make the mistake of treating the enterprise portal deployment like other major back-end system deployments.

In the case of an ERP system for instance, most business requirements are gathered over a long period of time and then programmed into the business logic of the system.

End-Users interact with the system through the programmed business rules and add information into the backend database.

Over time, the back-end database grows and requires maintenance, but the business logic remains fairly static. This allows companies to support the system with a fixed number of IT administrators that manage users, assign security rights, backup the database and monitor the system for growth.

Since the business logic only incorporates infrequent changes, the system is as scalable as its back-end database. If the database grows too large, additional hardware may be needed.

In an enterprise portal environment, however, not only does the back-end database grow, but the rules change rapidly as well. Business stakeholders must be continuously engaged in managing the applications, users and content to ensure a useful and relevant experience.

Cross-functional IT engagement is also critical since the enterprise portal is the foundation for many composite applications that access diverse and distributed systems. As the entry point of choice for enterprise applications for end-users, the portal can become increasingly complex as each of the back-end systems are integrated and as stand-alone applications are built on the framework.

Moreover, mature portal deployments bring additional complexities. Some struggle with sprawling portlets, sprawling communities that go unmanaged and not updated, sprawling collaboration projects, sprawling content that has no requirements for time-based reconfirmation or updating.

Rogue projects are initiated and applications developed that never get used. Few repeatable processes are instituted for application development, deployment and support. Communication and branding standards lack compliance in the portal environment and the user--interface becomes complex and unwieldy. Often there is a duplication of effort as several groups try to solve the same business problems with different applications.

These issues are very common in many organizations and yet, according to a 2003 META Group survey, only 20% of Global 2000 companies have formal IT governance practices. If reasonable governance practices are not instituted, the same diseases that plagued your corporate intranet can quickly consume your portal deployment but with more severe business consequences.

Enterprise portal governance provides some very important benefits that become necessities as the deployment matures. It is critical to have a governing body to assure timely and effective decisions.

Otherwise, critical application priorities and user interface decisions tend to take a long time to resolve since so many interested constituencies are involved. The governance team also has a central role in assuring that the portal strategy is aligned with critical business objectives.

This is very difficult to accomplish if the deployment remains exclusively under the guidance of the IT organization. Moreover, the governance team puts policies in place that can reduce the portal, portlet, community and content sprawl issues that become common with mature deployments.

The governance team should be formed as early in the envisioning and planning of the deployment as possible. If early enough, this team can participate in the discovery process for identifying and prioritizing the key applications to deploy. Normally led by portal program manager, the governance team is comprised of six to fourteen organizational stakeholders representing a cross-section of interests in the organization.

The program manager works with the executive sponsor to engage business stakeholders in the governance team. In commercial enterprises, the governance team might include representatives from human resources, finance, marketing, legal, communications, IT, manufacturing and key product lines.

The team should include individuals who are enthusiastic about the use of information technology in the business and are willing to actively engage in a process to identify the key opportunities and manage the governance issues. In most cases, this will be manager-level employees. While team members may rotate off every year or according to another schedule, the team is perpetual and should always represent cross-functional business engagement.

An effective team model also includes an executive steering committee led by the key sponsor of the initiative. In most organizations, the sponsor is the CIO or CTO. This executive meets occasionally to review the portal strategy and status of high-level issues. The primary objective for this team is to ensure that the strategy aligns with the key business imperatives of the organization. This team might also be involved in reviewing other key IT initiatives as part of a general IT governance and strategy team.

The executive steering committee should also be cross-functional with key business executive involvement.

Another aspect of a successful governance team model is the involvement of sub-teams to address specific issues and to provide detailed recommendations to the governance team. These sub-teams often include a technical team and a content team.

The technical team addresses issues such as infrastructure, networking and development standards and makes recommendations to the governance team on plans to resolve these issues. The technical sub-team is often comprised of representatives from the IT organization with responsibilities for development, infrastructure, networking, security, etc.

The content sub-team would address issues related to taxonomy, metadata, content expiration, Content Management System (CMS) training and community training. In some organizations, this team might also make recommendations concerning portal navigation and branding changes. This team is often comprised of representatives from communications and marketing departments.

Initially, the governance team is likely to meet every two weeks to develop the processes, policies and publish them in a governance document. The team might then revert to monthly meetings to review issues, new ideas, portal metrics, requests, etc.

The team meetings are generally organized and managed by the portal program manager.

The portal manager sets the objectives and agenda for the team and follows-up on the tasks.

The initial priority for the governance team should be to resolve the most immediate governance issues for the stage of deployment. The team should do this by publishing the policies and processes as part of the portal governance document. The governance document is a living document that is in constant review and revision to reflect the needs of the deployment.

The General section of the document usually includes the portal vision and objectives, governance team model and team objectives. This section might also include the purpose and process for managing the governance document.

This Design and Navigation section would address the major navigation elements and nomenclature used for those elements. Some documents will include screen shots of the key page templates. This section should include any design standards that are required and an indication of which are optional. Style elements should be clearly defined in this section.

The Community section of the document might include the process by which stakeholders can request new communities and the process for approval. It might also address the process for measuring community activity and determining when communities will be inactivated. This section might also include the responsibilities for community owners.

A section on Content and Taxonomy would generally address the process and tools for managing content. Many organizations include considerations for content expiration and the process for notifying content owners that content needs renewal. The content section would also address issues of taxonomy development and management. Some organizations will include required and optional metadata for each type of content.

The Application Development section would include all the processes for developing and managing portlets and applications in the portal. It would generally include the requirements for changes to the production environment. It would also provide guidelines for code management and preferred development tools. Some organizations include detailed infrastructure and network management issues. An appendix might include the Service Level Agreements for portal infrastructure services.

A Security section of the document would address the group hierarchy and portal roles. It would include information about which groups community managers would be able to access for their communities. It should also include information about the preferred directory system that will be used for user information. Information about Single Sign-on (SSO) should be included. It might also address the process by which users can request access to objects that are not visible to them.

Many other sections might be included based on the distinct organizational requirements. Some include a Legal section with portal usage Terms and Conditions and privacy guidelines. Some will include a section on the use of personalized My Pages, the use of sub-portals or sub-communities, and training policies.

Portal governance has become increasingly important as deployments mature and as the portal technologies mature to become a framework for delivering rich applications, content and collaboration services.

An effective governance model and active governance process can have a profound effect on successful portal deployment.

Source: Line 56