Corporate Portals Take On New Importance As Business ToolCorporate Portals Take On New Importance As Business Tool

At a time when CEOs are demanding hard and fast return on investments for technology projects, a project leader at American Electric Power Co. and an intranet developer at UnumProvident Corp. were surprised when their CEOs approved budgets to develop corporate portals without asking for ROI figures.

Speaking on a panel hosted by portal vendor Corechange Inc., James Johnson, director of communication strategy and intranet development at UnumProvident, says his group didn't have to build a case for developing a portal because the global insurance firm's CEO believes a corporate portal that could capture business practices and skill sets throughout the company is as essential to a business as chairs and computers. UnumProvident developed an intranet to move corporate data to a central location, but the intranet eventually became overloaded with information, Johnson says. "It could take anywhere from minutes to a lifetime to find the information you're looking for," he says. The company decided a portal coupled with a content-management system would increase productivity by helping employees gain access to information more quickly, Johnson says.

Karen Ball, American Electric Power's project leader, had a similar experience with her CEO. Any benchmarking figures her group would use to justify investing in a corporate portal were "likely to be fictitious," Ball says. "The executives said 'don't bring us that junk,' basically. They saw that developing a portal is what we need to do," Ball says. The next step for American Electric Power, which has rolled out its corporate portal to 28,000 employees across 11 states, is to give mobile workers access to it.

More companies are turning to corporate portals as an alternative to outdated intranets, which are becoming as difficult to navigate as the Internet, says Yankee Group analyst Robert Perry. "Today, portals are white-collar worker applications," Perry says. "Companies need to figure out how to connect with shop-floor workers and employees with PCs outside the corporate network." In a recent M-Business Research study, personal information management ranked highest at 92% among the wireless enterprise applications being considered by businesses.