An intranet portal is the one gateway that unifies access to all enterprise information and applications. In reality, stuff often still lives outside the portal, but at a minimum, the portal ought to organize everything that’s accessible on the intranet.

Portals can help employees better find information and perform their jobs, though few portal designs are out-of-the-box optimal. In fact, especially in smaller companies, designers can realize some features found in off-the-shelf portal software through simpler (do-it-yourself) means.

Regardless, at all the companies we studied, the key issues when building a good intranet portal were political and organizational—not technical. Hence just buying portal software doesn’t guarantee you a good portal; you must also manage internal-company politics. Indeed, back-of-the-envelope math from successful portal launches suggests technology accounts for roughly one-third of the work, and internal processes account for the rest.

Overall the primary challenge for creating a successful portal is getting contributors from individual departments to comply with portal standards, ensuring they enter decent metadata, and keeping them from launching their own, maverick intranets outside the portal’s scope. To succeed, many of the portal teams we talked to successfully employed standard tricks for generating project buy-in, such as establishing an advisory group with representatives from important departments, and getting this group involved early in the project.

From our interviews, we discerned other standard tricks, such as securing senior-management backing. Also, make it easier for departments to join the portal than to do their own thing. Indeed, providing a carrot in addition to the stick aids adoption, since departments will relish the opportunity to save time and money they might otherwise spend running their own intranet sites. As one portal manager says, “They don’t have money to spend on intranet development, and we’ve already done it for them, so why would they sit there and gnash their teeth about how to do it for themselves?”

Also remember: securing users’ acceptance will require the portal team’s explicit attention. For example, a large company interviewed for the report (it participated on condition of anonymity) had its portal project fail completely. Portal performance was miserably slow, usability was poor, and users simply refused to use it. In fact, employees chose to visit pages on the old intranet more than eight times as much as on the new portal. Ultimately, the portal project was in vain and it was retired after less than a year, in favor of the existing intranet.

Most other projects will have a happier outcome, especially if they emphasize user needs from the beginning, and employ various tricks to enhance user acceptance. For example, we’ve started seeing good use of multimedia and video clips on portal homepages. Even seemingly frivolous features, such as a user poll, can help make the portal more fun and appealing for users.

Problems Solved by Portals

One benefit of creating this consistent look and feel is users need less time to learn how to use the environment. They also more-easily recognize where they are in the portal and where they can go—no small feat when navigating a large information space. By integrating services and presenting personalized snippets on the initial screen, intranet portals also reduce the need for users to browse far and wide to obtain needed information, thus making it easier for them to perform their jobs.

Ideally, that philosophy extends to include a unified security environment, including single sign-on, that frees users from constantly having to enter usernames and passwords. Realizing this approach pays dividends: today most help desk calls concern lost passwords. Furthermore multiple logins disrupts users. Yet while almost every interviewee stated they want a unified security environment, most have not yet achieved it. 

Internet vs. Intranet Portals

During 2000 and 2001, several services—such as Octopus and OnePage—let users create customized portlet views that were screen-scraped from individual websites. The goal was to spare users from having to visit multiple sites to satiate their information needs: viewing the one portal page would suffice. These services are now dead as well.

Given the poor track record of Internet portals, why would intranet portals offer any hope? The answer lies in the fundamental difference between the public Web and an internal company intranet: Internet portals’ weaknesses are intranet portals’ strength.

Business model

Here’s why: Internet portals rely on advertising, which doesn’t work well for informational websites, where users focus on content, not ads. Advertising does work very well for search engines, however, because they are the only type of website that people visit to find someplace else to go. Thus Internet portals that originated as search engines have flush income streams today, while non-search portals quickly ran into trouble.

Intranet portals, however, are funded by productivity increases. If they can enable employees to do their jobs more efficiently, then the company pockets the gains and can use them to pay for the portal project. (In contrast, an Internet website gains nothing if it helps users complete their tasks faster.)

While few intranet portal projects today actually measure productivity boosts, we have started to see some companies measure themselves against the time-on-task benchmarks in our intranet testing report, then use the results to compute their savings relative to average intranets. More typically, however, portal projects measure user satisfaction and usage. For example, Fujitsu Siemens Computers in Germany found that use of its intranet tripled after the portal went online. (Across the projects we’ve studied, however, seeing use double is more common.) Since employees’ intranet use is completely voluntary, increased use of the portal is a strong indicator that it’s helping people do their work more effectively, though that’s still an indirect metric.

The most compelling ROI argument, for many teams, comes from eliminating duplicate efforts—both in the technology infrastructure, and when placing and managing content and services on the intranet. Sprint estimates it saves $15 million per year purely from the hardware, software, and maintenance contracts previously required to run its five biggest intranet sites. Verizon saved 15 million emails per year by making reports available through its portal, instead of mailing them to users three times per day. These infrastructure savings are tangible and persuasive, but we can’t help also mentioning one intangible benefit: reducing users’ inbox clutter also boosts productivity.

The actual ROI from eliminating duplicate efforts will of course vary. Overall, telephone companies report the most impressive numbers—no surprise since they tend to be large organizations. Even smaller companies, however, also benefit significantly from eliminating duplicated efforts and streamlining information and services delivery.

User profile

The differences between Internet and intranet portals persist when it comes to dealing with users. For example, Internet portals rarely deliver very targeted information, even on their “my” pages. This is predictable for two reasons. First, a website doesn’t know much about its users, and for reasons of privacy and laziness, people are reluctant to spend much time customizing their views. Second, a general website must offer generic services that will appeal to many users. Truly specialized services are rarely available on an Internet portal, despite the fact that people benefit more from services that meet their exact interests than from those that are the same for everybody. World news is less valuable than news about hog farming in Ohio—that is, if you’re a hog farmer in Ohio.

By contrast, intranet portals already know a lot about their users, even if users don’t perform any additional customization. For example, role-based personalization can reference existing databases of user information and serve users information relevant to their job, department, and specific location. For multinational corporations, role-based personalization can also provide country-specific information, delivered in a user’s preferred language.

It’s an open question whether additional personalization is sufficiently useful to be worth the effort. Most of the portal teams we interviewed had decided against additional personalization. Those portals that did offer individual personalization (beyond role-based personalization) found most users didn’t bother to use it.

The differences between Internet and intranet portals persist when it comes to applications: intranet portal applications are much more valuable to users than applications found on Internet portals. In general, applications on Internet portals offer users features that are entertaining, or nice to have. By contrast, intranet portals can target individual users with mission-critical applications they need, such as their own, personal employment benefits information.

Search

Internet portals depend on the Web for much of their value, especially regarding their all-important search capability. Even Yahoo is not entirely self-sufficient, though it does have more internally developed services than any other Internet portal, which may be one of the reasons for its survival.

This Web-dependency is a weakness, however, because it’s difficult to effectively integrate external services into a single user interface. Search engines are thus restricted to the impoverished understanding of external sites that can be gleaned from spidering standalone pages.

Intranets, however, can tie their search engine directly to their content, and substantially improve search performance by using a more-structured understanding of the content and proper metadata users need. They can study users’ behavior—analyzing which pages users visit and how they traverse the information space—to further understand users’ needs. In domain-specific spaces, keyword indexing may also help, such as in a bank portal where users “speak banking slang,” as one Credit Suisse portal manager puts it.

Thus search has the potential to work substantially better on intranet portals, even though the portal teams we interviewed reported few success stories so far.

Design process

While intranets are the overall portal success story, Internet portals do have the advantage in terms of development processes. Internet portals tend to have big budgets and big, professional design teams that include dedicated usability professionals who perform frequent user testing.

Intranets, by contrast, have always been starved for resources, and portal teams are no exception. They rarely include full-time usability professionals, and the teams we talked to performed much less user testing than they preferred. Several teams did employ “discount usability methods” and collect valuable user feedback through simplified means. Considering the millions of dollars at stake for employee productivity, however, much more should be done for portal usability

Wild Web vs. Single Tool

Intranet portals replace this wild Web approach with a tool metaphor, where a company’s content and services work together instead of undermining each other. Portals offer a single starting point, a single overview of each user’s most important services, a single search, a single navigation scheme and information architecture, and a single set of consistent page design templates. All these things combine to make the intranet portal a more-promising corporate information infrastructure.

Buy the Report

Return to Usability of Intranet Portals -- A Report from the Trenches: Experiences From Real-Life Portal Projects

Download Report (from eSellerate) $248 for the PDF file (190 pages), single-user license. $498 for a site license to make copies and place on your intranet.