Portal Development and the Exodus from Egypt
- Omer Ben Yehuda
- May 1, 2005
- 4 min read
During the last Passover, my family read in the Haggadah about the Israelites (the poor souls...) who walked 40 years in the scorching desert to the Promised Land. Had they known what they were getting into, would they have done it?!?!
It seems that if they had known they would walk 40 years in the heat just to reach a land flowing with milk and honey that was barely ready to receive them, they would have tried to think of other solutions... Perhaps they wouldn't have given up on the Promised Land but would have planned the journey differently.
The same applies to organizational portals. Many organizations interested in a portal don't always know what they're getting into. Many perceive it as a 3-4 month project, and then voilà, the portal is live. But that's not how it works. A portal with a strong infrastructure and a chance to serve its users long-term requires much hard work classically:
Define the target audience: The user groups the portal will serve. Even defining a group doesn't mean they are the target audience. Within any group, there may be different target audiences.
Define the content on 3 levels:
Define business goals - not in terms of knowledge sharing but of the profit that will grow for the organization from the portal and prepare a list of items that will serve this purpose (through interviews and listening to consumers).
Identify Killer Applications: Incorporate "beloved," "intriguing," or useful content that will make users want to make the portal part of their work. Usually, these will be general applications such as a directory, information about internal tenders, and information about the cafeteria.
Prepare a content inventory: Collect existing content from the previous portal or existing systems.
Plan and organize the content:
Design a framework: A fixed anchor for the portal that will allow quick orientation and include a logo + return to the homepage, search, feedback, navigation menu areas, and hot buttons.
Design navigation menus: Define them from the user's perspective. They are usually divided according to work processes or content topics, maintaining a proper balance between the depth and width of the content tree.
Design the homepage: Combine functionality and marketing. Include information important for the user to see at every entry and content that will make them want to dive deeper and return.
Appoint role holders:
Assign a content expert for each window and item that does not update automatically and appoint an overall portal manager responsible for the quality and continuous activity of content experts and the portal. This population should be structured and nurtured, as the portal's success mainly depends on them.
Set up the portal:
Technological and infrastructure setup, including input and display information templates, permissions, etc.
Prepare content items: collect, improve, structure, and input documents.
Market, guide, and implement the portal on three levels:
Initial marketing with the portal launch: creating "noise" to make people curious.
Ensuring freshness and updates to create a desire to enter the portal, not just on a one-time basis.
Creating teasers and other means to cause the user to dive into the portal.
Measure and learn lessons:
Measure the level of use, but more importantly, the level of response to the defined goals.
Despite this being the right way to establish an effective portal, many organizations wouldn't get into it if they knew this in advance. Other organizations abandon the project midway because they feel it's "too big for them" or doesn't justify the investment.
By deciding not to establish it, these organizations risk losing the portal and its enormous potential for business development.
So what do we do? How do we establish a portal that delivers results reasonably and is built with methodologies to ensure survival and quality over time? Or, borrowing from Passover, how do we reach the Promised Land without walking 40 years in the heat of the desert?
The solution is integration between the classic development path and the fast track:
Identify the core group for whom the portal will provide the greatest value and classically establish a portal for them, as well as research and development work, which will ensure a quality portal with added value for its users. For the rest of the groups, build a portal on the fast track:
Define goals with unit managers and a representative group of employees.
Conduct quick research to identify the main knowledge needs (focus group) and who will contribute to them (recruiting content experts). Emphasize existing things or new ones that are quick and easy to develop—don't reinvent the wheel.
Give up on complex specifications and build a description of the portal's structure and content based on an existing technological tool in the organization.
Insert content into the portal, emphasizing converting existing content and creating a small amount of new content.
Launch the portal with an official announcement.
The result: The organization receives a relatively quick product (2-3 months at least with intensive work) that presents ROI in a reasonable time, and in parallel, a stable and strong portal is built behind the scenes using orderly methods for the core group.
The fast and classic tracks are not contradictory but complementary. Organizations should aspire for every portal to be of the quality of a portal built the classic way, but this doesn't mean that all portals in the organization must start that way. The purpose of the fast track is not a shortcut but to produce interim results with relatively low investment and prepare the organization procedurally, "mentally," and culturally for "the real thing." Additionally, this solution may be suitable for improving processes in peripheral units over time.
Had the Israelites combined the classic and fast ways, likely, the 40 years of walking in the desert would not have been spared from them, but perhaps they would have found ways to ensure that the land waiting for them at the end of the route was indeed a land flowing with milk and honey.
Don't ask me why I thought about this during the Seder night. It's probably too much wine.
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