Web-Site Sprawl Calls For Clearance And RenewalWeb-Site Sprawl Calls For Clearance And Renewal

Are you afflicted by Web sites that are multiplying without coordination or control at your company? Welcome to a rather large club, says Documentum VP Peter Tait.

Just 2-1/2 years ago, Tait was a customer of Documentum, the document-management software vendor that's now part of EMC Corp. He pointed out the disjointed experience customers were having on its Web site--or, more precisely, sites. "Fix it," Tait was told after being hired as VP of E-business strategy, a position created in response to his critique.

Among other faults, he pointed out that customers had to log in each time they came to one of the six sites created by different Documentum business groups. A company business analyst, asking if site visitors were customers, might get six different answers.

"Developers had a different way than business managers of determining if the person creating an account was a customer or not," Tait says.

AMR Research has been following what is sometimes called "site sprawl." Last June, analyst Colleen Niven issued a report titled "A Four-Step Process to Application Rationalization," outlining four steps to eliminate sprawl: Inventory the apps used on each site; Evaluate how many people use each app and how long they use it; Compare the value to the business of the application versus its maintenance costs; and Rationalize which apps are to be decommissioned or phased out. Tait's first decision at Documentum was to consolidate site construction around BEA Systems Inc. middleware, primarily BEA WebLogic Application Server and BEA WebLogic Portal. Different apps could still be associated with different sites, but the software was consolidated on a server cluster instead of disparate machines, which gave all sites fail-over protection. BEA WebLogic Integration Server began to link applications that previously were separate and associated with different sites. That meant that one identification and authentication application could be used for all six sites, allowing for single sign-on, he says. The independent nature of the sites wasn't eliminated in this process, he adds. Rather, the consolidated servers and common infrastructure can present what are now three unique sites that present five different faces to users. For example, CustomerNet has two faces, or "personalities," both customer technical support and external developer support. PartnerNet is for business partners and MarketingNet offers two more personalities, a sales-force portal and a marketing site for internal use. All but CustomerNet now sit atop a shared infrastructure, he says, and that one is under construction. The power to update a particular site remains in the hands of the business group responsible for it. "It used to take five days to update a site; now it takes five minutes," Tait says, because the middleware is geared to work with Documentum's own Enterprise Content Management application. Marketing, for instance, can create and upload content to the MarketingNet portal by proceeding through a short workflow of sign-offs and approvals. Documentum has been able to cut one IT staff position previously dedicated to site maintenance and has eliminated the need to recreate the same content for each site, Tait says. For example, much of the content on Documentum's PartnerNet, the partners portal, is content shared by MarketingNet, he says. BEA Systems said this week that in addition to its WebLogic middleware, it now has a site-sprawl consulting service designed to help a firm consolidate sites. Two BEA software architects will spend 10 days at a company inventorying sites and recommending a consolidation plan. Nils Gilman, senior director of marketing, acknowledges that relationships with existing WebLogic customers would be "deepened" if a BEA analysis showed them how to operate less expensively on their existing set of middleware. And efficient operations would tend to keep them buying as BEA customers, he adds. However it's attained, reversing sprawl is a virtue, says AMR Research's Niven. "An overall reduction provides a chance to standardize on applications that are stable and currently supported," she says. "As a result, employee productivity increases" and future application development is more closely tied to business strategy.