Introduction
Mary Schmich said it best in her Sunscreen Speech: “Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over the ugly parts, and recycling it for more than it’s worth.” Being in the technology consulting space for 20 years, this also applies to technological trends. I can still remember when I first started as an intern at a consulting firm, and everyone was talking about Enterprise Portals, Employee Portals, Customer Portals, Supplier Portals, and Partner Portals with technology like IBM Websphere, SAP R/3, Apache Tomcat, ColdFusion, and Windows SharePoint Services 2.0 (WSS). These portals were going to change the way we work together and securely share enterprise information, applications, and processes. Somewhere in 2010, all that talk faded into obscurity due to poorly implemented technology, low user adoption, out-of-control costs, and the gap between technology and business needs.
Recently, with the advent of Cloud technology, portals have reemerged in discussions about Enterprise Technology Modernization Roadmaps. This development is promising, as I have long believed—since the early 2000s—that portals possess the potential to transform collaborative work. We are currently at an opportune moment where technology, business processes, and the modern workplace converge, allowing portals to effectively bridge communication gaps and enhance the efficiency of daily operations. Below are some reasons why portals are experiencing a resurgence and how your organization can benefit from their implementation.
Unified User Experience
One of the challenges that Portals experienced in the past is the ugly and overwhelming user interface. This resulted in employees finding them hard to use and overall information overloaded and fragmented. New technology has enabled companies to empower content owners with no programming experience to easily create graphic-rich web pages. This has shifted the traditional portal building from learning complex technology to focusing on user experience. As a result, user interfaces have improved and become more united while promoting useability to reduce information overload.
Customization and Personalization
With Modern Portals technology has matured enough that the cost of customization and personalization is extremely affordable. As a result, organizations can now fully focus on enhancing the user experience and making portals more functional for the average portal user. Additionally, the cost reduction has facilitated the integration of the portal into other Enterprise Resource Planning Tools. As a result, portals now enable users to access all necessary tools and data for completing their daily tasks.
Integration of Advanced Technologies
With the introduction of Cloud technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI), machine learning, and data lakes, the portal not only provides information, but it also enables users to leverage these technologies to assist them in their day-to-day tasks. By providing them with more relevant content and automating their process (AI), enforcing policies and processes (Machine Learning), and providing forecasting capability based on existing data via data lakes, users are now able to use portals to their fullest extent. These advancements enable the user to get access to information that traditionally would take an organization years to process.
Security and Privacy
As portals handle extensive organizational data and offer user access, it is crucial to ensure security and privacy. Starting with a “zero trust” security structure, portals not only provide a security model within the portal but also carry over any data security structure from the source to ensure that data integrity is accounted for while ensuring that there is no data leakage in the process.
Conclusion
Being in the technology consulting world, we have been hearing our clients asking for “an LAX for their business process” for years. As a result, the resurgence of portals is not a surprise to us here at Bayen Group. Portals offer a unified, customizable, and intelligent interface, addressing the challenges of digital fragmentation and information overload. Embracing this trend can lead to enhanced user experiences, improved efficiency, and greater connectivity in our digital lives.
About the Author
My name is Huy Nguyen, and I am a managing partner at Bayen Group. We specialize in partnering with organizations to plan and implement the Technology Enterprise Modernization Roadmap. If your organization is starting or in the process of your own Digital Transformation, don’t hesitate to reach out to us. We would love to be your guide through the Digital Transformation journey.
