TABLE OF CONTENTS "As soon as possible," is the short and quick answer to the above question. However, it is unlikely to be that simple; if it was, you would most likely already be in the throes of implementing your portal. Implementing a corporate portal is not an undertaking to be taken lightly on a whim. A corporate portal will change your company's business model. These changes will percolate through the company and impinge upon many groups within the company. In addition, sustaining the portal will require active cooperation from multiple departments ranging from accounting to sales. Consequently, you should not even think about implementing a portal until you have a clear and concrete mandate from the highest management levels of your company.
Such a mandate will be the culmination of what will inevitably be an iterative, protracted justification and rationalization process. Senior managers, though appreciating, viscerally, that the company's long-term future is indeed contingent on having a successful portal, will require constant reassuring as to its technical and economic viability. Although they would have heard, seen, and read about the success other organizations have had with portals, they will still be anxious and edgy and want guarantees that the risk exposure is minimal and accounted for. They will want to see what the competition is doing and demand various presentations and reports from in-house and external experts as well as the key vendors.
More than likely you will end up having to create a...
