TABLE OF CONTENTS To answer the above question by saying "fame, fortune, and kudos" seems trite, but it certainly does capture the upside rewards of implementing a corporate portal. The downside risks involved with implementing a corporate portal, given today's technology and expertise, are small, definable, and, as such, confinable. The upside rewards will always outweigh the downside risks by a wide margin. Franklin Delano Roosevelt's well-known restatement of a sentiment originally expressed by the Duke of Wellington "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" always appears to be apropos when discussing the need for corporate portals.
Given that the tangible and intangible advantages of corporate portals have been already discussed in some detail, it is best to reprise some of the key factors using credible, external sources. SAP, the ERP giant with 36,000 installations and 10 million users of its various software offerings, identifies the following as the real business benefits of implementing an enterprise portal:
Increased productivity
Accelerated resolution of business issues with reduced effort
Improved user experience and individual efficiency because of rolebased information
Improved customer, partner, and supplier relationships thanks to collaboration within and beyond organizational boundaries
Streamlined, single point of access to important data regardless of time, location, or device
Improved queries through federated searches that allow users to extract relevant results much faster and to see results in context
You can, of course, get similar confirmations from other major vendors such as IBM, Oracle, Computer Associates, and BEA. But it is...
