SUPPORTING LARGE SCALE ENTERPRISE PORTALS
Enterprise portals have the potential to provide companies a flexible infrastructure that integrates and extends all business applications while offering secure, personalized access to information from different sources, wherever and whenever it is needed. Large scale enterprise portals enable core business processes by running employee portals, collaborative portals, ERP portals or knowledge portals, just to name a few. Enterprise portals bring many benefits to companies but we should take into account that these portals are complex projects, time and cost-consuming. In large scale projects, benefits and costs of implementing and operating a portal should be carefully weighed up and companies should keep a close eye on critical success factors. From our experience, these are the most important factors that are critical for a successful implementation of large scale enterprise portals: Key Decision Makers’ Commitment and Support: Decision makers from all departments and locations must cooperate in order to design and implement an efficient large scale enterprise portal. Project Management: Project management covers the entire life of the project and should involve planning stages, milestones definitions, resources allocation, clear business and technical objectives setting, and critical paths. All these aspects should be mutually agreed and understood by both company representatives and the implementation team. In order to ensure that the implementation runs according to the plan, there must be a project manager able to monitor and control the time and costs at each stage. User Acceptance and Training: A successful portal implementation relies on the acceptance of the end-user. Since large enterprise portals provide a completely new interface, it is extremely important to train all your employees on how the portal works and how it can help them do their daily activities. Preparing the employees and creating an environment for cultural change is a mandatory process for successful implementation. High user involvement in the early stages of the development of the project is one way to ensure that users will be aware of the portal’s benefits. Team Competencies and Skills: The skills, knowledge, abilities, and experience of the project manager mixed with the right team members are also an extremely important factor of a portal implementation project. Your team needs both technologically competent members and business oriented staff that clearly understands the company’s objectives.
Enterprise portals provide companies and their staff a window to the critical information, processes and colleagues across the entire organization. These portals should be focused on improved information access, better communication, improved collaboration and reduced operation costs, while reducing the complexity of IT operations. Trough our expertise in IBM Websphere Portal, the IT Green Light team poses the capabilities to provide a composite application or business mash-up framework and the skills to build flexible, SOA-based solutions, in a perfect scalable environment required by large size organizations.
ABOUT IT GREEN LIGHT IT Green Light is an IT consultancy company, focusing mainly on special IT projects and technologies. Headquartered in Romania, the company develops IT projects worldwide through its offices in Munchen and Dubai. For over 10 years, IT Green Light designs and implements collaboration solutions, business intelligence, corporate intelligence and knowledge management solutions. Contact details: Address: 28, Cameliei Street, Bucharest, district 1 E-Mail: office@glit.ro office@itgreenlight.ro Web: www.fanica.ro www.itgreenlight.com