Enterprise portals are key to dealing with the information access and management challenges facing most large business organisations.
This was the thrust of the presentation by visiting French Gartner Consulting director Pascal Hureau to Microsoft partners and customers in Bryanston yesterday.
"Enterprise portal technology is now mature enough to help organisations meet the need of getting access to the right information, managing the flood of information, finding the right expertise for projects, and increasing productivity by improving business processes," said Hureau.
Gartner research has found that improving access to information is a primary concern in enterprises because many employees do not know how to find the right information they need to make business decisions.
"Another, perhaps lesser know problem, is that information becomes useless and tends to overwhelm employees if they have no means to sift out the information they need for business decision-making processes," said Hureau.
User productivity is another key objective of business that Hureau says is directly linked to the explosion in the number of e-mail messages. "Gartner predicts that in the next three to five years, the volume of e-mail will create a big problem in companies if this issue is not addressed."
Gartner Consulting has identified enterprise portals as a likely solution to both problems because portals provide an alternative means of basic communication as well as giving users access to personalised internal and external sources of information needed to make business decisions.
As described by Hureau, current fourth-generation enterprise portals provide an infinitely customisable view of an organisation`s information, applications and processes, making it possible to attain the highly sought-after goal of integrating key business processes.
Gartner says the trend is for organisations to move from internally-facing portals aimed at improving productivity, to externally-facing portals that bring the added benefit of business development.
"In order to develop new capabilities to meet all the challenges facing business today, organisations need a good infrastructure and a good portal solution using a robust platform that can deal with high data volumes," said Hureau.
Hureau listed the top benefits of enterprise portals as being rapid return on investment if used correctly, increased revenue, reduced cost by decreasing dependency on support services, and various "intangibles" such as faster time to market, increased customer satisfaction and improved brand image.
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