Not only has it not lived up to the hype, but personalization via the corporate intranet portal is massively expensive to implement.
In The future of portals at the turn of the year, I espoused the need for portal vendors to make it easier for organizations to implement personalization. All portal products offer user employee personalization options. However, very few organizations have actually enacted or properly implemented user personalization once they’ve purchased a portal product. Most employee portal implementations feature customization (e.g. choose the type of color or position of a content portlet or gadget) or role-based personalization that is pre-configured by the administrator (e.g. sales role page or site).
More portal companies should try to make it easy for organizations to roll out and implement role-based personalization – something that largely relies a lot on offline planning and process. The technical implementation will be better and be augmented by enhanced consulting services not previously focused on by the portal vendor.
Martin White is a leading intranet mind in the United Kingdom and offers a similar opinion of personalization in his EContent article, Portals Show Sign of Sanity:
“I am highly skeptical about the value of personalization at an individual level, whether on a website or an intranet. My experience, which is entirely anecdotal, is that after the initial excitement of being able to manage the flow of information to the desktop, the user refreshes the personalization profile on an increasing ad-hoc basis, until the time comes when they abandon it altogether. The result is that from that point on, the user is no longer seeing all the information that is relevant to his or her needs, and is likely to make seriously flawed decisions.
What I do see is that organizations can provide a lot of benefit in customization at a role level. So, for example, all marketing staff would see an intranet desktop that contains most (and I emphasize the word most) of what they need, derived from an intranet manager having developed personas into scenarios and tasks. Their view would also provide ready access to other sections of the intranet that complement the marketers’ specific information. SAP is very adroit at this in its portal implementations, but it does not need portal technology to deliver customized pages.”
Find a company that has implemented a personalized portal for their intranet and you’ll find a company where a majority of employees don’t use the personalization feature. In fact, when I talk about personalization at conferences and I ask web people – often a mix of communications, HR and IT people – how many people use My Yahoo! or My MSN or one of the other personalized portals – less than 5% put up their hands. And these are very web savvy people – far more so than your average employee.
The bottom line on personalization: it requires a phenomenal amount of time and money to implement and it is rarely used and therefore delivers very little value. In fact, it might be one of the biggest intranet money pits available. If you’ve got money to burn, then personalization is something to consider.
Personalization will continue to flounder and deliver very little value until it is easier to implement – with an emphasis on role-based personalization (customization).
