Enterprise Information PortalE I P

GM IB R A I N W O R K S

History Of EIP

Portals originally came to exist to help users to find information on the World

Wide Web. As more and more information became available on the World

Wide Web, it became very difficult to find useful information without knowing

first where to look. The early web portals consisted mainly of simple search

engines. These tools returned a list of web sites containing user-specified

keywords and/or phrases. Soon after the creation of web- enabled search

engines, it became obvious that users needed more than an unsorted list of

thousands of web sites containing the specified keywords. This need led to the

development of web portals. The early portals were essentially web search

engines containing various categories that could be searched and explored

independent of the rest of the web. Many search engines today still have this

feature.

The next step in EIP development came as businesses tried to use web

technology to bring order to their own internal information. Businesses created

internal web sites or intranets. Typically, these sites consisted of static

information such as policies and employee manuals. The first true corporate

portals were those that integrated both internal information and external

information via the World Wide Web. These early sites linked internal

information with various sources of external information from the web—

anything from stock quotes to news feeds to maps and personal finance

services.

History Of EIP

Concurrent with developing corporate portals, Enterprise Resource Planning

(ERP) systems helped to manage the relationships among standard business

applications including inventory, ordering, financial systems, production

systems, and human resources. ERP systems integrated these information

resources into a single system to better track the relationships between the

applications. Before ERP systems, a company typically had completely

different systems for taking an order from a customer, generating an invoice,

and completing the work order. By implementing an ERP, the natural

relationships among these information entities could be defined, maintained,

and used for analysis.

While ERP systems were able to integrate standard business information into a

single system, a significant source of knowledge was still missing. This missing

information was not as readily quantifiable as the information stored within

computer databases. It represents the knowledge of the enterprise and is

found in a wide variety of places within the enterprise. Enterprise Information

Portals provide the glue that holds all of the preceding ideas together. They not

only allow the integration of various sources of structured and unstructured

information, but they also allow separate applications to be integrated into the

single entry point of the EIP. This allows existing legacy systems, ERP

systems, and future systems to be connected within a single place.

Need Of EIP

Need Of EIP

An EIP provides a single point of access to all information that is relevant to

the individual and the enterprise. Currently, many organizations use a number

of different systems to provide different types of information. To a certain

extent, ERP systems address this issue by consolidating and relating data

related to basic business operations—shipping and receiving, production,

inventory, and financial data. Even with a single ERP system, users may

sometimes need to log into various points of the system to gain access to all of

the information that they need. Additionally, there are a large number of

systems that individuals may need to access to find other types of information

such as e-mail, Internet sites, and document management systems. An EIP

can provide a single point of access for all of this information and can also

aggregate it into a single location. This allows the user to save enormous

amounts of time previously spent accessing various systems and finding

relevant and useful information.

An EIP also provides a tremendous capability in managing knowledge.

Structured and unstructured information can be aggregated in a single place

where it is explicitly related. In general, an EIP system is web-based, which

allows hyperlinks to be used. Thus, one view of the system may show financial

information about a project and include links to the specification and design

documentation, the project plan, and the human resources working on the

project. This allows the user to find all costs, schedule, and personnel

information related to the project quickly and easily. In addition, one can link

Need Of EIP

this information to the e-mail system. By doing this, the user can find and track

relevant email threads that address issues normally outside of the boundaries

of formal project tracking techniques. These insights may have taken hours to

research and find using other methods—if they were found at all. The EIP also

assists users to find additional relevant information; this allows the system to

continue to stay relevant to the user over time and allows the user to change

with the system.

An EIP is able to provide customized information to each group of users and

each individual. A user is not required to conform to a system's default

information settings. Each user determines which pieces of information he or

she needs and determines how he or she wants to see them.

An enterprise can also extend the EIP beyond the normal bounds of an

enterprise. In the past, a system was generally confined to a group of users

within an enterprise. An EIP allows select portions of information relevant to

external users to be shared outside of the enterprise. This allows for greatly

enhanced communication between the enterprise both up and down the supply

chain. Suppliers will be able to see when new supplies are needed. Customers

will be able to place new product or service orders and track the progress of

these orders. This concept goes beyond e-commerce (ordering things via the

Internet). This is e-businessenhanced communication along the supply chain

and appropriate and timely sharing of information.

Finally, the EIP is scalable. It can be built in stages and expanded to all areas

of the extended enterprise. This particular aspect of the EIP enables it to be

created in workable stages. Unlike the ERP system, which typically requires

years to create and costs millions of dollars, an EIP can be created in weeks

and costs much less. The system can then be scaled up over time to

accommodate the growing needs of a growing organization.

Need Of EIP

In te l l igent Enterpr iseEIP

In te l l igent Enterpr ise

Enterprise information portals are bringing together the worlds of business

intelligence and knowledge management into a new, centralized desktop

environmentthe knowledge portal. In the millennium, the knowledge portal will

play a key role in empowering the virtual enterprise and employees by

providing a personalized single point of access to all relevant information

enabling better, faster-decision making. EIPs, or knowledge portals, are also

beginning to help organizations capture and leverage their intellectual assets

by facilitating assembly of communities of interest, best practice, and expert

systems within a single, intuitive, Web-based user interface. The EIP should be

viewed as an evolving technology platform, and in the future EIPs will

incorporate streaming video and audio to include e-learning and e-training

components, thereby potentially reducing overall organizational training costs.

EIP

In te l l igent Enterpr iseEIP

There are a variety of technical issues involved in the creation of a portal.

Some of these are generic, such as scalability and performance, while others

are more specifically associated with portals, such as web crawling. Security is

somewhere in between, because considerations such as firewalls, digital

certificates, use of the Secure Sockets Layer and LDAP directories are

generic, while single sign-on and role-based permissions have a substantial

impact within the portal infrastructure.

The following diagram (which was actually put together by Sybase) illustrates a

typical, generic EIP architecture. There are, of course, variants on this

approach (for example, Microsoft's Digital Dashboard supports Outlook 2000

as an internal client) and different nomenclature is used by both vendors and

analysts, but this comprises a reasonable working model from which to begin

discussion of the technical issues involved.

In te l l igent Enterpr iseEIP

Critical Features Of EIP

EIP

Application Integration & Connectivity

Functional Support

In theory there are three ways in which applications can be activated from an EIP.

If an application is web-enabled then it can be integrated into the portal by means

of a portlet or similar mechanism. Secondly, applications may be fired up by the

portal. That is, an icon for that application is included within the portal and, when

you click on it, the application is started up, though you leave the portal

environment when you do this. The one advantage provided by the portal in these

situations is the single sign-on capability that allows you to start these applications

without having to go through further access control strictures. Thirdly, green

screen software such as CICS applications, may be supported directly within the

portal through screen scraping and similar technology. Some EIP vendors provide

this facility directly.

By functional support we mean support for the major functions of an EIP. That is,

content management, business intelligence, search capabilities and

collaboration. Support for transactional applications is considered as a separate

issue. One important trend that is becoming clear is that different search engines

are better suited to different tasks. Thus, however good a particular search engine

may be, whether it is built into the portal, or available from a third party, then it will

not be ideal for all customers. Indeed, even a single customer may prefer to have

different search engines for different purposes. It is therefore an advantage if a

portal vendor has a strategy of supporting multiple search engines. Where

Cri t ica l Features Of

multiple search engines are in use it will be helpful if a metasearch capability is

provided that allows you to combine the results of multiple searches.

The implementation of an EIP can be a major undertaking and it is important

that it can be achieved as expeditiously as possible. Moreover, on-going

support and administration of the portal and its underlying infrastructure should

be as easy as possible. Some of these features, notably profile management

and security, are considered as a separate rating, but there are a number of

other valuable features that are provided by some vendors.

If a user has the ability to set up his own portal page then the way that he sets

it up and what he puts on it and, indeed, how he eventually uses it, are all

implicit reflections of the way that that individual performs his job. In other

words it captures that user's experience of how to perform the various tasks

that make up that job. If this information can be captured as a part of the

creation and use processes (as it is by appsolut), then this knowledge can be

used as a part of a knowledge transfer process to new or experienced staff.

Implementation & Administration

Knowledge Management

EIPCri t ica l Features Of

Personalisation & Customisation

Profile management & Security

There a lot of different features included within this one rating, which are really

aimed at three levels: administrators (or suitably authorised end users), end

users themselves, and dynamic capabilities. At the administrative level it will be

helpful if templates (or themes) are provided out-of-thebox and, in principle, the

more varied the supply of such templates, the better. It is likely in the future

that we will see a substantial growth in the creation of relevant vertical themes

and Hummingbird, for example, already has a couple of these with more

planned. However, templates cannot be expected to meet every company's

needs and the ability to modify these will be necessary. It will be better if

inheritance is supported and, ideally, multiple inheritance. There should also be

a tool provided that will allow an administrator to create a new template,

preferably using wizards and other ease-of-use aids. It should be noted that

not all products currently provide a template builder.

Profile management consists of role-based security, single sign-on capabilities

and the management of the notification, publication and presentation

requirements that are unique to that user. While most of these management

capabilities have already been mentioned and do not need to be discussed

further, put together these form a profile of each user and his requirements.

The key to this aspect of the portal is the role-basis of these profiles. In our

EIPCri t ica l Features Of

view, roles should support inheritance and, preferably, multiple inheritance, in

order to minimise the administrative effort in setting up and maintaining these.

Most companies do not support either of these mechanisms.

This excludes the single sign-on and role-based security, which is included in

Profile management. Here we are concerned with authentication and

authorisation, use of Secure HTML and SSL and so forth. We have also

awarded stars where products have built-in capabilities to support anti-virus

and similar features.

Ability to scale up to the very largest numbers of users is very critical for any

Enterprise portal. Major features under scalability would include dynamic load

balancing, a multi-server architecture and sophisticated distributed processing

capabilities.

Security

Scalability

EIPCri t ica l Features Of

GMIEIP Approach

GMI EIP Approach

Understanding the impact of EIP on architectures in a static enterprise as well

as a transforming enterprise and narrow this discovery to architecture

models/patterns is the bottom line of a typical EIP engagements. We

understand the complexity of this process and therefore have invested

resources in constructing Matrices to evaluate enterprise shortfalls that are

needed to define opportunities in translating to an EIP situation.

Our EIP design model called the Five-force model stipulates five steps:

1. Enterprise modeling Gap analysis2. Service Identification ROI Definition3. Portal application - Portal component mapping4. Architecture Planning Foolproof design 5. Technology Mapping - Integration

EIP

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GMI EIP ApproachGMI EIP Approach

By understanding the value proposition of portals we can understand not just

the technology, but also the business benefits that can be realized by

enterprise information portals. And it doesn't stop at this point, because the

technology in and of itself won't produce benefits. Using the technology to

enable context, we can derive business benefits by creating a corporate

semantic through the integration layers, resulting in meaningful business value

for every knowledge worker. The requirements for achieving this goal are to

provide knowledge workers with role-based content and task-based knowledge

to improve business processes. Additionally, the quality of context and

standardization must be considered to produce increased operational

efficiency. The combination of these requirements results in a unified,

collaborative work environment. The benefits of the portal are not just inherent

in the technology itself, but can be found to produce business value and

benefit by creating business context and meaning through a planned, strategic

infrastructure.

Authors Prof i le

Jayesh leads GMI Enterprise team as

Director and he has vast experience in

designing and implementing Enterprise

Information Portals for fortune 2000 clients. He

has over 5 years of experience in IT industry

specializing Enterprise Web enabling and

related issues. Jayesh can be contacted at

jayesh@greymatterindia.com

Bus iness Contact

Shrinivasa SharmaBusiness Development Manager

Grey Matter India Technologies Pvt.Ltd, First Floor, Sai Darshan Towers, Plot No. 31, Opp. Suvidhya School, Gorai - I, Borivali ( W ) , Mumbai - 400 091. India.

+91 - 22- 28685623 +91 - 22- 28685660 sshrinivas@greymatterindia.com

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