Web portals growing once again

Citation

(2005), "Web portals growing once again", International Journal of Productivity and Performance Management, Vol. 54 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ijppm.2005.07954aaf.001

Web portals growing once again

Web portals are of two main types – those designed mainly to allow external users to access parts of an organisation’s web site, and those specifically aimed at internal corporate communications, particularly in finance and human resources. Such internal portals have been growing in fits and starts over the last few years as major components of workforce-management strategies. Portal development experienced a surge in 2000 and 2001 but has slowed along with the global economy. This now seems to be changing.

A META Group trend report shows that 46 percent of the companies it surveyed spent more on portals in 2003 than they had in the previous year, with strong spending predicted for the next three years. Those findings were borne out in interviews with some of the leading players in the field – PeopleSoft, Authoria, SAP, Softscape and Workscape.

“Investments in these products were definitely put on the back burner for a while,” says Christopher Faust, vice president of global strategy for Softscape. “Human resources executives are now seeing that portals are a strategic piece of their human capital management systems.”

Tod Loofbourrow, president and chief executive officer at Authoria Inc., a fast-growing technology company with a human resources focus, says the company had a “huge second quarter.” Interest in the firm’s employee adviser and manager adviser products, which can be accessed through portals, is particularly strong, he says. The employee adviser answers workers’ questions about a variety of issues such as health benefits. A pregnant employee might message the system that she is having a baby and ask for advice. She will get back a list of steps to take to access available services and benefits.

Just what is a portal? The term is often used interchangeably with corporate intranet. The most highly evolved portals offer significant additional functionality over an intranet, which often have an impersonal bulletin-board or storage-room feel to them. Intranets dispense the same general information to all employees, from senior managers down to entry-level clerical workers, a one-size-fits-all approach. They are places where someone can order up an expense form or check out health-care providers but may not be able to get the kind of customised and personalised information available through a portal – it is this customisation and personalisation that marks as portal.

Portals should also offer benefits such as single sign-on, simple navigation and advanced search facilities; the aim being to offer information that is easily accessible with an ease and speed of use that matches the big portal/search players such as Google and Yahoo! Bells and whistles include real-time information flow in both directions and useful, helpful services, including internal company communications, employees’ personnel records, access to training programs, job-performance rankings, benefits updates and personalized plug-ins to search engines.

Some of the push for portal development is coming from a generation of employees that grew up with the Web and sign on to commercial portals like Yahoo! and Amazon as easily as their parents open a newspaper. “Companies are realizing that in order to retain and attract the younger generation, they have got to provide an online environment that is not in the dark ages,” says analyst Michael Rudnick, national intranet and portal practice leader at Watson Wyatt. He says that widely-used portals like Yahoo! and Amazon have spoiled people:

• •

  People complain that when they go on their corporate intranet, it doesn’t work like Yahoo! They expect such facility and are frustrated when they don’t get it.