Portal Power: How Enterprise Portals Benefit Users
Buckley believes personalization drives the return on investment for so-called business-to-enterprise portals. She reports that 45,000 employees have customized their My.ford.com page, which already beats the Gartner industry benchmark of 25 percent. "The more we can provide a better set of tools, the more the personalization will increase," she says.
There are potholes on the road to enterprise portals, but these early adopters agree that the trip has been worth it. "When we show people how we can put all the information?including information from competitive websites?in one place automatically, they get very interested," says Hyperion’s Antalek. "People hugged me the day after we put it up."
Beyond the extra affection, Hyperion’s portal payoff lies in soft benefits like increased productivity for the sales staff and harder ones such as reduced mailing costs for distributor materials. Antalek’s team did not put together a formal project justification, if only because the investment required to move from the preexisting intranet to an enterprise portal was not great. "For a company that had nothing to build on, the justification process might have been different," Antalek says. "It was pretty clear that for us, it was worth it."
