Information Kaleidoscopes

Enterprise portals allow users to view everything from performance and financial metrics to benefits and logistics information. The best also aggregate information from the Internet and extranets linked to outside partners.

If there's one universal truth about the burgeoning Information Age, it's that there's simply too much information for most people to manage. Every day, employees are inundated with news, reports, statistics, business indicators and HR data. In many instances, the resulting infoglut exceeds employees' ability to process the information and put it to good use.

Intranets and the Internet have only exacerbated the problem. "Frequently, workers find themselves trying to keep track of where everything resides and how to find it; that's not a productive use of time," says Hadley Reynolds, director of research at Delphi Group, a Boston-based industry analyst firm specializing in e-business and the new economy. "Workers need a single point of access to corporate information and resources. They need a tool that manages and simplifies things."

The solution? An enterprise portal. Just as Internet portals from Yahoo! and Excite@Home allow individuals to filter through mountains of content and make sense out of the chaos of the Web, enterprise portals provide an interface that aggregates and channels content so that individuals receive only the information most relevant to them. "It's a way to leverage technology and the Internet to greater advantage," states Reynolds.

Over the last couple of years, enterprise portals have blazed their way into corporate consciousness and paved the way for streamlined information management, delivery and retrieval systems. Portals allow many processes that previously required human intervention to be completed electronically. The best not only collect data from within the organization, but also aggregate information from the Internet and from extranets linked to outside partners. Employees can view everything from performance and financial metrics to benefits and logistics information through a quality corporate portal.

What makes portals so powerful is that they can be customized to the needs of an individual or department. For example, a CFO or finance director could see information about sales, profits and operational expenses, while a recruiting manager could use the portal to track hiring information and performance indicators. At the same time, both employees would be able to view the generic company news feed and access a page where they could manage their 401(k)s.

The popularity of enterprise portals is clearly on the rise. According to a study conducted by Delphi Group, 16 percent of organizations used portals in early 1999. In early 2001, that figure is expected to rise to over 80 percent. Most portals, according to Delphi Group's report, provide knowledge and learning support, business process support, customer-facing services, and self-service opportunities.