Economical Aspects when Deploying Enterprise Portals

Abstract

Enterprise portals have become the backbone for the integration of a large number of different applications, content, and services (Smith, 2004). Nowadays, electronic business can hardly be imagined without the use of these portals as central entry points. At the same time, companies become more and more aware that portal projects are complex, timeand cost-consuming, with a high risk of failing. Costs and benefits to build up and operate an enterprise portal have to be weighed up in a systematic manner, including makeor-buy decisions with regard to packaged portal platforms vs. open source developments, individually developed vs. purchased standard portal components (Hazra, 2002). However, often clear figures describing the economic impact of portal solutions are missing. Furthermore, there is still uncertainty which methods are suitable, at which stage of the implementation process they have to be used, how they have to be adapted and customized, and which preconditions have to be set in order to assess the economic impact of enterprise portals. In addition, enterprise portals can be deployed across a broad range of industries and application areas, thus enabling the implementation of such different portals like knowledge portals, employee portals, ERP portals, collaborative portals, process portals, and partner portals. All these types of portals need a specific and individual approach to evaluate the economic impact. The goal of this article is to contribute to the decision of how to analyse and evaluate the economic impact when deploying large enterprise portals. For that purpose, we present a framework that can be applied by carrying out the following steps: At first, important preconditions and assumptions concerning the portal solution have to be collected. Then, key factors, derived from the results of the previous step, can be identified. Finally, these factors have to be evaluated and, if possible, quantified and measured. Consequently, these steps have to be embedded in the development process of the portal solution. We describe a procedure model, based on the stages of the PDCA-approach (plan, do, check, act), which can be used to carry out a structured analysis taking into account the whole life cycle of the deployed portal solution. As foundation of the framework, we provide a classification, where measurable key factors of portal costs, benefits, and risks are collected and structured (according to the main portal types B2E, B2B, and B2C). In particular, qualitative factors play an important role in portal projects. Even though these factors are hard to measure, they are urgently needed to draw a complete picture of the profitability of a portal project. Based on this classification, existing methods to measure the economic impact are reviewed and assigned to the corresponding items of the classification.