Planning for Web Portals
»
»
»
»
»
»
»
»
»
»

 

The Building Blocks of Portal Design

 
Portal Articles
»


Corporate Portal Solutions
»
»
»
»
»
»






Web Portal Building BlocksCorporate web portal design, development and deployment can be, and most often is, an exhaustive and very complicated undertaking. No matter how big or small your company is, spending time answering business questions, working with the end-users, developing designs and project scope, and understanding content generation and workflow all come into play. There are 2 key points to consider when planning and designing your enterprise web portal, governance and design.

First is governance. Who will govern the planning, design, development, training and overall web portal deployment? The common approach to handling governance is to create a cross-functional team led by a business champion or leader. This team may also include technical, marketing and legal team members. But the key is to have the business drive the project if the portal is to be used outside of IT.

Governance is a great way to assign ownership and responsibility for your portal. This is not to be confused with authority. Authority happens at various levels of the company. For example, a Legal department may authorize the use of trademarks and brand references, a marketing group may authorize the use of product images and copy, while IT may authorize the underlying infrastructure used to support the portal environment.

Governance for your corporate web portal should also identify where the responsibility for processes that will be leveraged falls. Processes may include a rchitecture, audiences/ownership, portal content, layout, look and feel, security and operations.

Building your portal governance team; think broader and longer term:

  1. Team composition can make or break portal efforts, keep it cross-functional, and led by those who will use the system the most.
  2. Tie this team to other governance teams if possible. Leverage existing team structures and documentation if available.
  3. Significant time requirement, especially at first. You WILL spend more time planning and designing than anything else. Be sure to have team commitment before you begin.
  4. Team composition is important. Without the right members the portal will be developed with a limited perspective on how it should be used. Include mid-level managers, reps from key business units and business functions and IT.
  5. Find a champion to lead the project, the rule of thumb is to not have a CIO sponsor the project. Have it led by business person, CEO, VP of Marketing, etc. Choose a high-level, vocal, business leader as the portal's executive sponsor. Avoid the temptation to put the CIO in that role.
  6. Meet often, set milestones, review progress and problems. Document everything as you go. This will be your project history and show the overall extent to get the portal deployed. Meet bi-weekly at first and then move to quarterly after steady state is achieved.
  7. Start with inventory of web assets and existing portals. Determine what you have to work with and how it fits into the business requirements.

The second key area is the web portal design. This can be the most difficult part of any web portal implementation. Though planning is very exhaustive in time and resources, the design consists of developing the blueprints for your portal. During this phase of the project you will be faced with identifying the persona of your company's web portal, placement and delivery of web content, integration into other applications, templates, styles and colors, etc.

What's so hard you ask? Well, for small to mid-size companies which decide to migrate their intranets to an enterprise portal environment, or for those who are jumping right in, be sure to keep the following things in mind during your planning phase to enable more effective designs:

  1. Focus on how the portal helps your business needs; clearly identified business needs drive good portal requirements definitions.
  2. When building an overall portal architecture, determine if the needs of an audience (executives and sales-oriented personnel) can be best met with a vertical portal or with a set of role-specific portal pages in a broader horizontal portal. If you determine that a vertical portal is the better solution, then don't hesitate to pursue one. But if you do, be sure to tie the vertical portal into the appropriate enterprise-wide portal, either using peer federation or an uberportal model.
  3. Explore the portal as your first step into SOA.
  4. Part of a successful portal project is creating a shared vision of what a portal is and how it will be used by, and benefit, your organization. If you don't need to create relevancy for differing user audiences, don't spend the time and money to build a portal.
  5. Listen to business users; they can make or break a project. Factor user requirements, change management and training into your portal implementation and design strategy.
  6. Designers Florida Web Design - Myrtle Beach Web Design

<< back to Step 8: Design a Winning Corporate Portal >>