Business Intelligence Lowdown: Corporate Portals for Small Businesses

December 08, 2005

Corporate Portals for Small Businesses

While large enterprises effortlessly customize information management solutions and systems by using vast staffs of programmers and developers, small businesses cannot always afford to do so. As a result, they may end up with a jumble of desktop applications that may frustrate users. You can learn from public portals about creating more effective information systems within your organization. Besides the basic accounting systems that every business needs, the rest of the information systems in a small business constitute highly individualized content and applications. Since formal IT group definitions of applications may need constant revisions / updates, the continuity of users' tasks is disrupted. Also, tasks are disrupted when employees leave and new ones are not able to comprehend the jumble of applications that the previous employee had used. Corporate portals make it possible to both create personalized work environments without extensive IT support and share these work environments with colleagues. Corporate portals let you integrate information sources, applications, and Web resources from nearly any source into a single comprehensive desktop. Currently, there are forty separate corporate portal products on the market to pick from. With a corporate portal in place, any employee can create a personal view of the processes, tasks, customers, and market conditions that are most important for executing their tasks. No programming is required for doing this - you only have to click or drag the mouse a few times. CRM Today reports:

Most portal products also come with a large library of what are called gadgets, nuggets, or components, which are already programmed to work with most popular applications, from spreadsheets to databases. Users simply check off the components they want to use in their portal.

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December 8, 2005 in BPM | Permalink