Enterprise Portals Are Popping

The Nielsen Norman Group has released the 3rd edition of their study on the Usability of Intranet Portals. The analysis is based on 48 actual portal case studies and focuses on what works in real deployments. The 343 page report itself is well worth reading, and there are some nice highlights posted in the Executive Summary and in Jakob Nielsen's column about the study.

Here are some interesting excerpts:

At all the companies we studied, the key issues when building a good intranet portal were political and organizational—not technical. Hence just buying portal software doesn't guarantee a good portal; you must also manage internal company politics. Indeed, back-of-the-envelope math from successful portal launches suggests technology accounts for roughly one-third of the work, and internal processes account for the rest.

I can't resist quoting portal vendor BEA, which stated that the portals market is "positively popping" and projected an estimated $1.4 billion in annual sales in 2011. While I can't speak to the sales prediction, I can confirm that we saw significant growth in portals uptake.

We again found that role-based personalization is the way to go. People very rarely use corporate portal customizations, however much they ask for them. (Yet another great example of why you shouldn't listen to what users say.) An interesting exception here is with university portals, where many users do engage with customization features. Why? Possibly because university staff has a tendency to tinker and to value exploration for its own sake.

Single sign-on is the Loch Ness monster of the intranet world: People hear about it and even believe it exists, but they've yet to see it for real.

Few portal teams collect solid numbers to estimate their project's return on investment. The one honorable exception this time was Dell, which computed annual productivity gains of $36 million from its portal. Dell's ROI number comes from its standard process improvement methodology, which is based on Six Sigma.