Integrating Business Applications with Enterprise Portals

Leader: Tushar K. Hazra, PhD, Senior Consultant, Cutter Consortium

General Overview:

Cutter Consortium's Enterprise Portals workshop will help you gain knowledge of the benefits, challenges and issues related to enterprise portals. This workshop, developed and delivered by Cutter Consortium Senior Consultant Tushar Hazra, can also be customized by choosing from one to all six of the interactive and comprehensive discussion sessions that address various enterprise portal integration related themes, ranging from facilitating a broad strategic vision to formalizing a successful deployment roadmap. You can also add one-on-one free form sessions to discuss your enterprise's specific portal concerns.

An enterprise portal adds versatility to the business applications and information of an organization by integrating and extending them beyond the boundaries of the enterprise. This portal extends the organization's capacity to provide a single window for customers, suppliers and staff - enabling a unified and consistent view of the whole organization. Despite the ubiquity of technologies and techniques used today in enterprise integration initiatives, practitioners encounter various challenges and issues in deploying enterprise portals successfully.

Leader: Tushar Hazra

Workshop Goals:

The sessions in this workshop will give you a clear understanding of the benefits of enterprise portals. You'll gain knowledge of the potential challenges, issues and facts related to portal features and you'll learn:

• How to formulate a business-focused strategy and prepare a business case for an enterprise portal
  
• The critical success factors and business imperatives for enterprise portal initiatives and the best practices for managing or resolving associated risks
  
• How to bridge the inherent gap that occurs between corporate business strategy and IT strategy alignment when undertaking an enterprise portal initiative
  
• The roles, responsibilities, and approaches to building an enterprise portal
  
• Basic integration techniques and proven approaches for resolving technology selection, implementation and deployment issues
  
• How to communicate the benefits and limitations of portal-related technologies to all levels of the enterprise
  
  

Intended Audience:

• Vice Presidents of IT/e-Commerce
  
• Directors and Managers of Application Development
  
• Enterprise, Technical and Application Architects
  
• Technical/Business Project Managers
  
• Application and Systems Integrators
  
• Business Process Analysts, Modelers, and Consultants
  
• Data Warehousing and Business Intelligence Specialists

Outline/At a Glance:

Session 1: Portal Strategies for an Enterprise

This session establishes the practical concepts and roles of an enterprise portal. It focuses on identifying the primary elements that define a portal strategy for an enterprise. Key topics include:

• Definitions: Relevant terms and terminologies
• Why does your organization need a portal?
• Enterprise portal as a collaborative environment: An EAI initiative
• Industry trends: Where is the portal and enterprise integration industry heading?
• Elements of portal strategy and your benefits

Session 2: Business Modeling to Technology Evaluation and Selection for Portals

An enterprise portal integration initiative is an iterative and incremental combination of a few specific-purpose portal deployment projects. However, we still face two prominent issues: (1) ensuring business sponsors realize positive ROI; and, (2) the build, buy or lease decision-making process. This session explores these issues in-depth, and offers a roadmap to follow the strategy promulgated during the previous session. Key topics include:

• Elements for transitioning from the strategy to portal integration planning: A roadmap
• Business modeling: Visualizing the "big picture" using Model Driven Architecture (MDA)
• Tracking and evaluating return on investment: Measuring the value of an initiative and its impact on the existing infrastructure
• Technology evaluation and selection: Buy, build or lease criteria for success
• Business drivers and their significance in defining the evaluation matrix
• A survey of technologies: "best-of-breed" and integrated solution suites
  
  

Session 3: Primary Components of an Enterprise Portal

Building portals presents challenges in ensuring that all the common requirements are identified and collected at the enterprise level. In most cases, identified requirements may have distinct priorities and significance to different business users. The solution for the portal may be, justifiably, a trade-off between these requirements. However, in general, these requirements can be categorized into five common key elements or components. This session addresses each of these components and their related issues in-depth. Key topics include:

• Security and entitlements: Developing a single sign-on strategy
• Content Management: Providing an integrated and personalized Web-based interface to business data and applications, strategies and principles
• Knowledge Management: From taxonomy to organization of information in a repository
• Collaboration: Managing and improving business efficiency
• User Experience and Relationship Management: Establishing and managing user expectations

Session 4: Aligning Enterprise Architecture and Infrastructure to Portal Initiatives

A flexible and scalable integration framework is required to form the foundation of enterprise architecture and infrastructure. In general, organizations exploit their portals and evolving technologies to optimize business performance and efficiency. This framework supports integration of enterprise portals at data, application, business process flow, and user interface levels. As a result, an organization must evaluate its current status and determine the path it should take in aligning its architecture and infrastructure to its portal initiatives. This session examines various aspects of the integration framework. It also elaborates the role and impacts of the framework in aligning the architecture and infrastructure to portal initiatives. Key topics include:

• Surveying your existing business services, applications, and technologies
• Gap Analysis: Where are you in terms of the integration framework?
• Value proposition: Steps for the alignment
• Getting Started: Impacts of the integration framework
• Evaluating business performance and efficiency and measuring user interactions
• Architecting portals using J2EE and .Net frameworks -- practicality of portlets
• Formulating a scorecard to measure the progress of portal initiatives
  
  

Session 5: A Component-Based Approach to Portal Integration

A component-based integration approach can address most of the challenges of portal development. A robust, flexible, and pragmatic approach can define a roadmap for various phases of building an enterprise portal. It unifies enterprise components, technology, and resources. This session presents the essence of this approach. Key topics include:

• Capitalizing on the business values of your organization
• Capturing business requirements for portals
• Transitioning your business components to services
• Scope and limitations of traditional SDLC processes
• A pragmatic component-based approach
• Formalizing a roadmap: scope and benefits

Session 6: Deploying Enterprise Portals

Deployment activities connect the newly developed and legacy software components for your business applications with the enterprise architecture and infrastructure. During this process, a team uses the integration framework to build and deliver the enterprise portal as an effective business solution. However, it is important to emphasize the integration options, techniques, and steps as they offer the flexibility to adopt or incorporate various industry standards, best practices and software solution delivery models. We can build portal interfaces that support Web services and the associated standards by focusing on the usage of portals and user metrics. As Web services technology standards mature, a component-based portal integration will create a new vision for your organization. Key topics include:

• Portal integration steps and techniques
• Enterprise integration options and solutions
• Case studies reviewing observations from the trenches - patterns, best practices, and standards
• Focus points for portal initiatives: Defining metrics for success
• Sharing lessons learned: Recommendations and suggestions

For more information on bringing this workshop to your organization, contact Dennis Crowley by phone at +1 781 641 5125, by fax at +1 781 648 1950, or by e-mail at sales@cutter.com.