8. Strategy and Implementation
You know your company needs an Enterprise Portal Implementation, but how do you implement it and what technology will you need? When properly implemented, a Portal Solution provides a personalized, single point of access to critical information and services, from both internal and external sources. An overall, flexible enterprise architecture plan is required to enable seamless integration of a Portal Solution. Topics important to planning and implementing a successful Portal are described below:

Strategy - Investigating, implementing, measuring, and maintaining your Portal solution should all be factored into your company's overall business strategy. Properly understanding the corporate strategy can allow you to place the correct functional components in the appropriate phases of your implementation to allow your enterprise to derive as much business value as these phases are delivered.
Trends - Portals have emerged in many markets as strong component of any solution delivery. Understanding the new and noteworthy directions affecting the portal market are an important step of defining the solution for corporate strategy for deployment for any project manager or technologist working with or planning for portal solutions.
Planning and Investigating - Just getting started? The first stage involves research, business case writing, metrics setting, etc. This section contains articles and research papers regarding vendor's solutions and the methodology.
Business Case - The business case consists mapping business drivers to user requirements, along with a financial impact if the requirement can be met. The financial impact can come in multiple ways, but must be related to hard, quantifiable results.
Feasibility Study - In the case of portals, it is highly beneficial to embark upon a feasibility study. Such a study targets specific objectives; 1) accessing and prioritizing business requirements, 2) determining the feasibility of the fundamental concept, 3) identifying and weighing the issues surrounding the implementations, 4) identifying critical success factors, and 5) determining the likely cost of meeting the business requirements based on the priority scheme. Feasibility for an enterprise wide implementation can typically be demonstrated via a prototype or pilot of the proposed solution.
Critical Success Factors - Enterprise wide portal implementations are giving rise to a new set of Critical Success Factors (CSF's). Most implementations have standard success factors such as the following: well understood requirements, top management support, business area representation and a culture that supports collaboration and teamwork. Additionally, there are more refined success factors specific to Portals implementations that involve striking an important balance between items such as centralization and decentralization; ease of use and security, and pure technology vs. pure business focus.
Return on Investment (ROI) - A calculation of how much money will be saved or earned as the result of an investment in a Portal Solution. ROI Calculations should be used in developing a business case for a given proposal; be sure to factor in investments of both time and capital. Typically in Portal implementations, streamlining business processes commonly returns ROI, however for each implementation of a portal the detailed ROI can be calculated.
Information Requirements - Understanding the business information usage is the first major step involved prior to selecting the Portal technology. Conducting a business information study to understand how information is used within an organization, the objectives of such are to understand the following: 1) who uses the information, 2) how the information is used, and 3) how it flows into, within and out of each of the business areas.

Typically as part of this discovery phase, 3 generic types of usage will be revealed.
- Internal use for an application area- internal user communities (B2E)
- Business-to-business trading community (B2B)
- Business-to-consumer (B2C)

Upon further understanding each of the broad categories of use the implications for security, availability and scalability are derived. Within these user classes and communities, the next step is to identify what information (including business intelligence, documents, Web pages, live feeds, etc.), applications and tools these communities need to access via a portal to do their jobs.

Business Process/Workflow - The general understanding of the business process of all consumers of the portal (individual, department, division or entire company) can be leveraged within you portal solution to provide additional business value via timesavings or general cost reduction.
Enterprise Architecture - This architecture includes the plans, methods, and tools aimed at providing a single point of access to information and applications from across an enterprise. Enterprise architecture defines the technological blueprint for how all the technical components of the enterprise fit together.
Implementation and Deployment - Now that you have defined your portal strategy, reviewed your business requirements and validated the ROI for your solution, this is where this information helps you plan for a successful implementation and deployment. Portal implementations are unique enough in the speed to market components and others to understand the unique issues for consideration when developing your implementation and deployment plans.

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