Managing Portal Craze - Georgetown University



Managing Portal Craze

Introduction

• Portal strategy, not technology

• Technology’s easy, people are hard

• Not going to talk about basic things like “what is a portal?”—how many of you read the portal article in the most recent EDUCAUSE Review?—start with the assumption that you already know a good bit about portals and are looking for ideas for “Managing Portal Craze”

• Presentation covers some key strategies

• Plenty of time for discussion after presentation-- I’ll just play moderator and let you share ideas with one another

• Therefore I’d prefer to have you hold questions until the end

• Overview of strategies

o Participation—who should be involved in portal planning and implementation, and why

o Purposes—what are the best reasons for portal implementation, and what are the dangers of not having a strong portal?

o Planning—suggested structure for planning a phased implementation

o Patience—managing expectations

o Phases—the advantages of a phased approach

o Issues/Concerns/Questions—running through a variety of issues and questions for which I don’t necessarily have the answers, leading into time for discussion and the opportunity for you to learn from one another

Participation

• Get as many people involved as is reasonably possible in the crucial “if,” “why,” “what,” “how,” “when” questions—if we are thinking about implementing a portal, why are we doing so, what will it be like, how will we do it, and when will it be available?

• Why so many people? Because effective portal implementation involves organizational change, which requires buy-in at all levels, esp. at the top

• Senior officials must be involved in decision-making process and invested in (and ready to invest in) change

• So top-level buy-in is crucial, but you’ll also need a shared vision at other levels, even though different players may have different angles on that vision

• Who are the key constituents at your institution? How will you represent different audiences?

• List of typical key constituents and some insights into their perspectives to help with achieving their buy-in:

o President—interested in institutional reputation and good sound bites—likes good PR

o CIO—interested in demonstrating that the institution can implement cutting-edge technology and build a strong reputation—wants to make effective use of existing resources—champions seamless integration of systems, cost efficiencies—understands the big picture of support and maintenance costs for inefficient and redundant systems

o Technology architect—same concerns as CIO, and also can provide clear vision of long term scalability and cost effectiveness

o Registrar—interested in streamlining processes to cut costs and provide better services—will want to put real-time core transactional services in portal, such as registration, degree audit, online advising and registration approval, grade submission, etc.—therefore very concerned about security and authentication/authorization processes—very concerned about integrity of data—wants single path for updating data

o Provost—will want to know how these systems will benefit faculty

o Deans

o Faculty governing bodies—will want to know how easy these systems are to use and how much control faculty will have over their own areas of concern (teaching, research, and collaboration tools/environments)

o Student governing bodies—students are increasing the pressure for portal tools and services—they will threaten to develop their own portals if the institution doesn’t do it, and/or they will vote with their feet and go elsewhere by spending more time in other portals (probably commercial) and less time with institutional Web materials

o Technology support providers—easier to support a single set of tools in a uniform environment—wants to decrease costs and improve services, including real-time transactions such as applications for accounts, hardware and software purchases, etc.

o Public affairs office

o Alumni affairs—build loyalty, keep alumni in touch with institution, increase giving, increase other after graduation contributions to the institution and its students (such as student career networks and mentoring)

o Student affairs—improved student services and communications, keeping student communities at the institution rather than at commercial sites

o Financial affairs

o Bookstore

o Athletics

o Different schools, programs

o Distance ed, continuing ed—interested in how effectively services can be provided to learners at a distance—want strong branding and promotion of their offerings—often have opportunity to increase institutional reach and bring in additional revenues if appropriate tools and services are available

• Effective communication and project management

o Meetings

o Email list

o Discussion forums

o Document sharing

o Presentations (including demos/presentations that anyone in the institution can use to help keep communications open)

o Status documents

o Clearly defined roles and responsibilities

o Clear processes and sign-off procedures

o Strong project management

o Collaborative teams

• Everyone included in one portal? Need to address the complexities of multiple portals for different schools, departments, audiences?

Purposes

• Once you get all these constituents working together, you’ll have many different perspectives and a great deal of experience to apply to figuring out what the best uses of a portal would be at your institution, what your priorities and timeline would be, and how to plan the implementation

• Why build a portal?

o Give your constituents everything they need in one place

o Increase stickiness and keep your constituents’ attention—as portal use increases, so does its value

o Stickiness => loyalty

o Build long term relationship with constituents

o Aggregate content from different sources (internal and external)

o Deliver content, announcements, services, tools, etc. to constituents much more effectively when you know that they are “always there”—even time-sensitive materials can be delivered with reasonable confidence that they will see them

o Increase efficiency and productivity-- the Web has become a common environment for everyday educational activities (teaching, research, communication, business transactions, etc.), and better online services and tools aggregated in one place enhance these gains in efficiency and productivity

o Achieve institutional goals such as improved retention and outreach

o Enhance institutional mission-critical activities by providing an improved online environment for teaching, learning, research, communication, and collaboration

• What’s driving it?

• Change in Web culture and technological capabilities, therefore changing expectations, esp. among students who have grown up with the Web

• Web used to be flat, “brochureware”

• Now, the Web is a “rich service delivery environment” (PWC)

o Qualities of the Web:

o Transactional—complete tasks online (register for a course, pay a bill)

o Performance—achieve personal goals (pursue a degree, do research)

o Marketing—connect potential customers/constituents to available goods and services (advertise a degree program, promote a student organization)

o Connectivity—shared information (exchange research documents, consult online jobs database)

o Borderless—global (have an international experience at your own desk, connect with people from around the world)

o Communicative—many types of communication tools (participate in a special interest discussion forum, chat with someone in real time)

• In making use of these qualities of the Web, the business world is setting the standards, not higher ed—students will compare your portal to Fidelity, Amazon, or Yahoo, not to other institutions

• But higher ed doesn’t need to follow the business world just because they’re setting the standard for interactive portals—rather, we need to analyze how higher ed can learn lessons from the business world and apply these technological opportunities to our own goals and purposes

• Key opportunity of portals: focus on people—shift from institution-centric to user-centric

o Empowering users

o Customizable for the individual and/or the audience type (students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents, donors, prospective students, visitors)

o Personalized by the individual

o Allow the user to create a “home base” they can return to, with relevant content, links, and services aggregated for the user and by the user

o Excite executives claim that a user is 5 times more likely to return to a Web site they can customize (EDUCAUSE article)

o The same but different—a common interface and shared entry point that also addresses the different needs of specific audiences and individuals

o A more personal face on the old stand-by institutional Web pages

• Portal as a powerful project to drive institutional change—this is not just another technology project, but potentially a transformative experience

• Shift from silos of data to models for data integration and interoperability of systems

• Shift from old service models, staffed by service professionals, to new model where the service level is determined by the quality of the Web site (PWC)

• Shift from producer-centric model to consumer-centric model (PWC)

• What are the implications of NOT having a portal?

o Possibility of losing your constituents’ attention—turn to commercial portals, take their “stickiness” elsewhere

o Possibility of never gaining your constituents’ attention—students may begin to choose institutions based on the quality of online services

o Lost opportunities for new markets—distance learners and others who will come to you only if you have appropriate online services

o Greater chance of portal chaos if departments and programs develop their own in the absence of a strong, centralized portal initiative

• Engage, empower, retain (EDUCAUSE article)

o “Should a campus develop a portal? Increased efficiency alone suggests yes, but there are other benefits that make a personalized campus portal not only desirable but imperative… the value of a portal to a campus is that it can be used to engage constituent groups, empower them with access to information resources and communication tools, and ultimately retain them by providing a more encompassing sense of membership in an academic community” (Looney, 33).

Planning

Patience

• Managing expectations—both users’ and your own

• Difficult to encourage patience, esp. in students, as the rest of the Web world is evolving online portal services and customizable content very quickly, with extremely large investments

Phases

• Phased approach, so you and your users can see progress

• Transition from static Website to portal

• Gradually add services and customization

• Difficult or impossible to “go back” and turn off services once they are available

• Buy/build options

o Probably not either/or, but rather both/and

o No such thing as “off the shelf” for an integrated portal, because even pre-built portal technologies involve significant integration costs if you expect the portal to be tied to relevant institutional systems, resources, content, etc.

o Choose corporate partners who can provide services to help with integration

o Think of “corporate partners” not “vendors” since you’re not looking at a simple buy transaction

o Some parts of portal can be done with ASP, some in-house with existing systems, some in-house with new systems

• Important to test scalability and sustainability at each phase

• When you take a look a the bigger picture of how higher ed Web development has evolved and will continue to evolve, it’s clear that there’s no simple “buy technology” solution—the needs of higher ed are extremely diverse, and the technology practices of higher ed are too idiosyncratic to fit into any vendor’s box

• Which is not to say that there aren’t good pre-built portal tools out there, but that no matter what you buy, you’ll still need to do a great deal of local work to integrate with your own systems

• Phases of transformation

o Misc. Web development—everyone doing their own thing—Webmasters scattered around the institution—basic institutional information available on Web, but not well organized or comprehensive—typically organized from the perspective of whoever put it up, not organized from the user’s perspective-- therefore hard for users to find what they need

o Brochureware, institutional branding

o Web pages customized for audiences

o Online transactions (general)

o Online transactions (authenticated)

o Portal dynamically customized for audience

o Portal dynamically customized for individual

o Portal personalizeable by individual

o Portal fully interactive and transactional

Issues/Concerns/Questions

• Advertising/sponsorship/branding

o Internal and external options

o ability to promote local activities

o potential ability to reduce or recoup costs—banner ads, sponsorships, “bounties,” partner retailers, fee-based services, direct marketing campaigns, targeted advertising, revenue models that haven’t been worked out yet—potential B2B opportunities--don’t give away future opportunities without knowing what they are

o institutional autonomy

o institutional branding, development of consistent look and feel, messaging

o value of the institutional brand

• ROI

o Efficiencies, cost savings

o Extending institutional reach

o Qualitative analysis (EDUCAUSE article)

• Support

• Legacy content and Web sites

• Legacy practices

• Integration

o Need to bring together silos, either actually (through re-architectured systems) or virtually (by bridges among systems or a separate repository/data warehouse for shared data)

• Data management

• Security

• Privacy

o Opt in/ opt out communicated clearly to users

o Exp of “observation center”

• “Critical success factors” (Handberg, PWC)

o Operational efficiency: use of the Internet as a low cost channel to generate cost savings

o Enterprise: involvement from multiple units to meet customer demands by utilizing core competencies of service providers

o Innovation: experimentation with emerging technologies for continuous improvement

o Service excellence: development of world class customer service over all channels

o Electronic communities: design of value-added content and functionality for strengthening relationships

o Virtual customer intimacy: collection and intelligent analysis of user data for forecasting user needs

• Big picture, long-term considerations of scalability and sustainability

SOURCES:

Handberg, Price Waterhouse Coopers ()

Looney, EDUCAUSE Review (July/Aug 2000)

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