Focus on Business Processes

Portals hold many advantages over delivering stand-alone applications in mainframe or client/server environments, but unless the portal deployment is in service to specific business processes, those benefits will not be realized. Organizations should introduce portals to solve specific problems—they should not introduce a portal and then look for a problem. As counterintuitive as it sounds, this practice is all too common. It has even gotten to the point that portal vendors are asking customers and prospects, “Is your portal as empty as a dorm-room fridge?” [Plumtree Software 2003]. The first step in deploying a proven portal is defining the business problem to address.

What constitutes an appropriate problem for a ...

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