Technology vendors always paint a rosier picture than what reality otherwise proves. Ultimately, technology vendors want you to buy. That’s why free webinars are almost always sales pitches that have little to do with reality, and everything to do with selling you software and hardware.
CMS Watch’s 2nd Edition of the Enterprise Portals Report finds that enterprise portal solutions are still very difficult to use and that customers must invest substantial resources to create usable and accessible user interfaces.
The report not surprisingly cites portal vendors for usability challenges, including complicated, dashboard interfaces, as well as tools generating non-standard code that fails common accessibility tests. In short, the author of the report, Janus Boyle, alludes that he does not recommend buying and implementing a portal product for the vast majority of organizations (he confirms this in a recent presentation conducted in Europe).
I agree. I’ll tell you why at the end of this article, but for a minute, don’t take my word for it, rather keep an open mind and listen to what one of the portal vendors has to say. BEA is one of the big portal vendors and leaders. In a webinar last week, State of the Portal Market 2006, BEA provided a “synthesis of New Original Survey Results and Recent
Analyst Research on the Portal Market.”
Now, you may be familiar with the phrase, “we can develop a survey to produce whatever results you want.” Truer words were never spoken by a research house.
Here are some of the findings from the analyst research on the portal market:
- 53% of companies have intranet or internal portals on their IT project lists this year (Information Week)
- 51% reported being fully operational with portal software, and 52% companies already have mandated portal framework standards. Budgets rise to a mean of $5.1M in 2006 (AMR Research)
What a load of… pardon me, what did the colonel on MAS*H like to say, horse hockey?! Not only do 51% of companies not have fully operational portal software, I venture to guess it’s barely 5%. How do they get away with such a statistic? Well, they don’t provide the sample details for starters. But I’ll bet it was a sample of CIO and IT executives in a larger companies that have volunteered for an online survey and therefore the survey results are highly skewed (not representative of the business population).
This is the difference between sales and reality – perception and the truth. Beware the study and survey that doesn’t denote the sample size, sample make-up and process for deriving the sample.
Now, not all of the study is horse hockey, some of its more realistic and balanced:
- Business users have a less than rosy view of IT
- Projects average an 18month
- delivery time
- Existing systems are too rigid and inflexible to adapt to business
- changes
- Project costs do not match returned value
- Customers use of portals are evolving into a foundation for
- larger IT strategy
- Portal’s play significant role in SOA
- Customers see real, concrete benefits to portals and related
- technologies
- Portals learn from the modern Internet and are adopting Web 2.0 technologies such as blogs, wikis and social bookmarking
Portals represent a nascent and developing market. The technology has evolved greatly but it’s not what it could be. I’ll be honest, I’ve never seen a portal product I was fond of and we’ve yet as a company to ever recommended a portal product over a content management system (CMS) for a client. That’s not to say though that a portal product doesn’t have value.
I think that portal products can be very helpful for some enterprises. Mind you at this point in time, given the problems with portals, l believe very few companies (and almost exclusively limited to very large companies with sprawling intranets and heavy integration needs) would benefit from a portal product. However, the vendors are trying and the lines between portal products and CMS products are becoming more and more fuzzy. Things will improve though… but it may take some years.
My point as always is caveat emptor – buyer beware. Do not let technology vendors make your decisions for you. Make technology purchases based on sound planning and requirements analysis, not on vendor sponsored research and technology demos (dog-and-pony shows). Spend the necessary time (a number of weeks) to define and document the requirements and needs of the business, key managers and end users before looking at technology solutions. Make the vendors work for your business by issuing an RFP. If you don’t know how to do a thorough and proper RFP (oh my goodness I’ve seen some bad ones so really make sure you know what you’re doing, don’t just let purchasing prepare and run the RFP), then hire someone that can help.
