Introducing Enterprise³

For some time now you've probably noticed our linking to a new sister blog titled Enterprise³. As we've grown from our original event of Portals, Content and Collaboration, our partners and participants have helped us to realize the unique combination of disciplines and expertise within an organization as they develop and manage a strategy for these unique tools in the enterprise. Now that we've established this corresponding blog we want to officially invite you to join us and subscribe to our feed as we shut down this PCC blog.

We’re welcoming you to our new service, Enterprise³. Companies are currently in the stage where they are releasing the second round of tools to be used in their enterprise. In the past, there has been a lot of confusion about the reasons for such functionality and this has often lead business leaders to move slowly or incorrectly as they invest and adopt in these new capabilities within their organizations. Therefore, this is a new stage in the evolution to the PCC community focused on in-depth perspective into the world of portals and collaboration within the enterprise.

As members of PCC we were focused on bringing you:

Seminars on scripted language
Workshops for developers
Intranet building 101
Out of box versus customized
Taxonomy for Taxonomists
Case Studies addressing technical failures

Now with our new focus of Enterprise³, our goal is to expand beyond these offerings and bring you:

Collaborative workshops for business users and developers
Seminars for business uses about IT agility
Business user ad customer driven portal project plans
Helping IT get ‘the buy in’ from upper business management for new tools
Social media hot topics like Second Life and Virtual Worlds seminars an dhow they apply to business users and business needs
Creating dynamic content
Aligning technology with business strategy
Portal user interface and design
Breaking the communication code between IT and business

As you've already seen, we've been building up the Enterprise³ blog with the same quality content that you find here. Beginning today, this will be our last post on this blog but you can join us on the Enterprise³ blog, where we hope you'll join us there and continue to actively participate as you have here. Thank you and we look forward to seeing you at Enterprise³.

http://enterprise-3.blogspot.com/

Subscribe to the feed here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Enterprise3

Introductory Portal Strategy Questions

I was recently pulled in as an advisor to a portal strategy consulting project and came up with a quick five-minute questionnaire to get a feel for the situation before our first meeting. I thought it would be helpful to post these questions up as anyone being thrown into a portal strategy project should have these answers lined up before the initial meeting or get to them in the first five minutes.

There are tons of question one could ask of course, but in my experience these are the ones that result in the most useful answers most often. So if I only have five minutes to do a kind of end-user portal request for information (RFI), this is what I would ask. Once I have the answers to these questions I can engage in a useful conversation about any number of portal strategy dimensions (product selection, infrastructure impact assessment, portal timing and roadmap, portal requirements gathering, portal pricing, portal consolidation and rationalization, portal business justification, etc.).

For information gathering about a portal strategy project I want to know:

Introductory

• What do you mean by portal? To Burton Group, portal products are website factories that aggregate a wide variety of content to deliver dynamic, contextual websites. They provide their users (website builders) with a common set of back-end integration and front-end contextual, dynamic displays that can be used to quickly create websites on a similar foundation. All the websites will share the same infrastructure integration, look and feel, development tools, and management UIs. (from the CCS document “Communication and Collaboration in Portals: Half the Battle”)

Business

• What is the scope of the portal in question (e.g., just intranet, just a dealer extranet, just as a front end for Oracle Applications, intranet for Division X, intranet for the whole company except our subsidiary ABC which was just acquired) and where does it fit into the other portals the company has?
• What is driving you to revisit your strategy at this time? Pain points? New initiatives that need to be supported?
• How much funding have you been given to support the new strategy? Or is the current project being undertaken to determine the funding required?
• Are there specific metrics that you are aiming to improve? Have they been benchmarked before starting on this project?
• What products are currently in use today (describe what each is being used for and number of users) and which are being evaluated for the future?
• What is the timeframe for the portal project (or is determining the timeframe part of this project)?
• Is this project dependant on any other projects underway or being planned? Do other projects underway or being planned depend on this project?
• Is there a need to build Web 2.0-type end-user content creation and feedback loops into the portal?

Technology

• How are the portal products you’re currently using working? Are there problems?
• Portals pre-integrate with a collection of infrastructure services that are surfaced through the portal UI. These services include security/identity (authentication and authorization via single sign-on and directory), content management (document management and web content management at a minimum), search, business process management and workflow, and application server and development environment (J2EE server or .NET). What do you currently use for these infrastructure services and are they expected to change?
• What is the political context that drives usage of the portal products (particularly with regard to overlapping capabilities of multiple incumbent products) and may affect attempts to change the mix? Are there certain products that must automatically be on the shortlist or are not allowed on the shortlist?
• What is the mix of development skills (Java, .NET) available for the portal effort?
• Of the many features that portals can provide or integrate (e.g., collaborative workspaces, discussion groups, document libraries, workflow, access to enterprise applications, search, document management, end user web content creation), which are being used? Which are needed for the future?
• Personalization and context are a foundation of portals. What are the main categories of roles that the portal addresses? Will need to address? How is personalization utilized?
• Which enterprise applications will need to be surfaced through the portal?
• Are mobile or offline capabilities important for your user population?
• Where do you stand with service-oriented architecture? Composite application development methods?

Note: This is a cross-posting from my KnowledgeForward blog.

Are Car Manufacturers Finally Getting it?

There’s no doubt that the German luxury car market is quite competitive; how do you improve efficiency in the enterprise with car giants like BMW, Mercedes Benz, and Audi? The latest article in PressMediaWire describes Audi’s most recent announcement that it would be using a new portal platform based on IBM Websphere Portal in an effort to improve upon collaboration between employees.

All Audi employees also have a single-sign on, and can easily access information they need. This new platform presents individualized information to each employee tailored to their roles within the organization. This makes assigning tasks in the enterprise workplace so much simpler! Sebastian Krause, Vice President of the Software Group in IBM Germany voices his opinion on the matter:

"The new employee portal puts a flexible information and communication platform at the disposal of Audi that allows all business processes to be integrated independently of their respective application platforms. This enables the company to optimize the working, information and knowledge processes that are indispensable to keeping up with the relentless pace of change in today's market."

How long will it take for competitors to follow suit in their collaboration efforts? For now, Audi seems to be standing alone in its efforts to innovate enterprise 2.0 applications, but I’m sure industry giants will begin to play copy cat once it realizes Audi’s success in evolving its portal strategy.

Sharing is Caring

As we transition ourselves to new ways of acquiring information on the web through Enterprise 2.0 applications, we realize that the trend of finding information on the net has shifted from browsing to searching and then to sharing within a network of relationships. David Sacks’s blog explains how portal giants like MSN and AOL are experiencing declining pageviews because of their ancient browsing philosophies.

Web users are no longer interested in browsing the web; they want to be able to search what they are looking for and be able to subscribe to the ever-changing content via RSS feeds and news alerts. We are living in a user-generated era where web-savvy users want easy and fast access to information. Unlike Yahoo and AOL, Google’s platform makes it possible for this type of aggregation. Even though the iGoogle platform is fast-growing, it does have a potential flaw. David Sacks mentions:

“But iGoogle has a serious limitation: it doesn’t involve sharing; each user has to make an individual investment in set-up and can’t benefit from the work of others. It’s not really a Web 2.0 product.”



Lying on the other side of the spectrum is Facebook with its information sharing platform. Facebook’s developer platform makes it relatively effortless to access information on their network of friends and business contacts. While browsing and searching requires work, a web user can do nothing and receive a constantly streaming array of information tuned to their exact specifications. Where will this sharing application take Enterprise in the future when users want to learn about news instead of updates on their friends and contacts? Facebook and other portals clearly have their work cut out for them as the trend is constantly evolving.

Yahoo seems to be making the right move with its sight on Facebook, but will it take advantage of its sharing capabilities? Will Google finally launch its long awaited networking platform to keep up with Facebook? Even though its popularity has declined, browsing and searching will never go away. The portal that can utilize all three methods will most definitely remain on top…

A New Day

What a week. While we haven’t blogged from the event, that’s not to say there isn’t so much going on and even making headlines. If you haven’t seen the press release or the newswire, Day’s new software project, Communiqué Advanced Collaboration (CQ AC), was introduced this week at our very own Portal, Collaboration and Content Conference. Day, who leads the way in global content management in infrastructure software, introduced this new package, abbreviated as CQ AC, which focuses on the management of Enterprise 2.0 tools. The software allows business social computing to come easier to a company by introducing a Wiki, blog, and calendar capabilities in one software package. It’s exciting to have in attendance companies who make a major announcement like this. There’s so much happening it’s hard to stop and take it all in.