ENTERPRISE PORTALS: STRATEGIES AND BEST PRACTICES

by Paul Allen

An enterprise portal (EP) in effect represents the vehicle to integrate and extend an entire business by delivering solutions and services over the Web. It must support your e-business strategy today and be flexible enough to accommodate future business requirements and objectives. To satisfy such requirements, most EP initiative teams are considering some of the following strategies and best practices:

• Alignment of the IT organizational model to achieve strategic business goals by taking advantage of emerging technologies, building an environment and architecture that support a component-based approach, and avoiding proprietary solutions or single vendor lock-in
  
  
• Formalization of a road map to deliver enterprise-level business solutions by transitioning or integrating tactical solutions to the EP initiative so that the initiative produces a seamless enterprise portal
  
  
• Commitment to communicating, coordinating, and cooperating with other ongoing initiatives (this eliminates cultural as well as political issues in an organization and can help you adopt a set of frameworks for enterprise-wide use)
  
  
• Periodic review and prioritization of identified business measures to determine the cost of implementing the business strategies against their values to the enterprise; this ensures buy-in from all parties involved and will lead to:
  
  
  • Taking preemptive measures to provide balanced resource allocation and planning to execute your EP initiative on time and within budget
    
    
  • Ensuring compliances to industry standards while evaluating or selecting technologies; adopting guidelines (modeling, designing, or coding); and formalizing frameworks, reference models, or patterns
    
    
  • Incorporating the organizational culture with viable prospects of the initiative to establish a partnership between the business users and your developers
    
    
  • Streamlining the initiative lifecycle process to merge the best practices known to the team with a component-based approach
    
    
• Progress and quality measurement of the initiative by stipulating effective quality assurance/control strategy (this establishes a norm to be followed across the organization)
  
  

In most cases, businesses interested in deploying EPs either have most of the above-mentioned strategies or best practices already in place or have considered them while delivering other application integration initiatives. Although the integration of business applications with the EP would be a step up from your corporate, customer, or employee portal initiatives, you may revisit these strategies and best practices to formulate a cohesive approach to achieve the most benefits for your EP initiative.

--Paul Allen, Editor, Component Development Strategies