ROI of Portal Deployment

Portals Showing Measurable ROI

Corporate portals provide your staff, your customers and your business partners with quick access to company data and business information. And portals can lower costs and enhance the bottom line. A recent Delphi Group study reports that it’s difficult to measure the ROI of portals, but it’s not impossible. Here’s how to find the ROI.

ROI of Portal Deployment Within First 24 Months

While it’s true that few companies have seen a complete return of their portal investment, companies are getting measurable returns. According to Delphi’s study of 250 portal implementations, 18 percent of companies saw a 100 percent return on their portal deployment. A little more than a third (38 percent) measured a zero to 20 percent return.

source: “Enterprise Portals: Total Market Perspective,” December 2002, Delphi Group. Percentages Based on responses of 250 companies.

Best Practices

Create a strategic blueprint. Right from the start, align the critical objectives of your portal with strategic goals of the organization. For example, an objective to migrate purchases from suppliers to the portal can result in centralized purchases and greater volume discounts.

Link soft benefits to hard dollars. While reducing an employee’s intranet search time is a soft dollar benefit, in the case of a salesperson searching for inventory data, it can result in a shorter sales cycle and faster inventory turns, which can be clearly demonstrated on a balance sheet.

Build a multitasking portal. Successful portals provide a variety of capabilities, such as community development, search functions and internal-expertise location, rather than providing only static information to employees.