Short Tutorial on eServices and Portals

eServices

Many initiatives in government and industry attempt to provide valuable services to their customers over the web. These “eservices” are exposed to the users through an “enterprise portal” which  exposes some internal business capabilities. Enterprise portals attempt to make enterprises better service providers to their customers in addition to automating internal processes.

An enterprise can, for example, decide which level of service to expose to its users. The more services are exposed to the users, the better service provider the company becomes. Several “ereadiness indices” indicate a measure of the number of eservices exposed to the users.  As shown in Figure 1, a given service can be exposed to different types of external users (customers, partners, employees).

 
Figure 1: Another View of different types of external interfaces for customers (white), business partners (dark blue) and  employees (Marooned)

Portal and Enterprise Portals

Simply stated, a portal is a Web site that serves as a doorway to a specific topic - ranging from space programs to gardening. Specifically, portals are intermediaries that offer an aggregated set of services for a well-defined (we hope!) set of users. Portals are reasonably popular in modern enterprises (they were very popular circa 1999). The oldest and perhaps still the best known portals are the Web search engines such as Yahoo and Lycos that allow users to search the Web sites for information. Over the years, the portals have evolved into Web sites that offer, in addition to Web searches, a broad array of resources such as Email, forums, online shopping malls, and personalization tools. Advanced portals combine Web documents, databases, applications, visualization tools, search engines, integration technologies, speech recognition, and natural language processing to give users an integrated view.

A portal includes a set of integrated programs designed to make it easier for a user to find information and, if needed, to conduct business or personal interest activities (e.g., shopping, setting up meetings, chatting). Typically these programs offer at least the following core features (see Figure 2):

The purpose of all these integrated programs is to provide convenience, and a sense of community to the user, and to help make the user feel more comfortable about using the portal for the purpose of beginning his/her journey. So in this sense the portal is offering a valuable time-saving service. Of course, the purpose of the portal builder is to make sure that you conduct all of your activities by using the portal, thus capturing your “behavior” that could later be used for marketing. By offering visitors a portal to a specific topic, the portal vendor can control the results the user gets when he/she searches for a keyword. The links returned are the links that the portal vendor wants to return. By virtue of the free community building tools such as email, chat and forums, it also gives the visitor a way to communicate with the portal owner and ask questions and make comments about a specific topic. The advantage to the vendor, of course, is that by addressing these questions and comments, it gives the vendor an opportunity to become a trusted expert on a specific topic. Once a portal community has been established, then many suppliers may advertise on your portal about their product or service that relates to the community. This not only produces revenue for the portal vendor but again offers a valuable service to the visitors that keeps them returning to the portal site.

Figure 0‑1: Conceptual View of Portals

Enterprise Portals. Enterprise Portals, also known as corporate or transaction portals, provide a door into an enterprise’s information, applications and processes. Enterprise Portals personalize and aggregate the corporate computing resources primarily for its employees. In some cases, enterprise portals are built for the customers and partners. The focus of enterprise portals is on improving the productivity of its employees thus they provide work related aids that may include conducting business transactions. Typical enterprise portals provide a personalized view, based on the role of the employee, of the following services: 

For example, an enterprise portal for financial analysts may provide facilities for stock analysis, trading, and settlements, in addition to the email, fax, news, calendaring, and video conferencing services. Enterprise Portals can provide integrated applications access, information management and knowledge management within enterprises as well as between enterprises and their partners, suppliers, and customers. At the time of this writing, enterprise portals are starting to integrate enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, such as SAP and PeopleSoft, through thin client access such as mobile devices. These portals are also providing support for mission-critical operations. This includes support for application integration, process and workflow management, and aggregation of resources (information, applications, services, communities) relevant to the context or task being performed.

Conceptually, an enterprise portal can support the following granularities of eservices:

An extensive discussion of enterprise portals can be found in the book by B. Kastel “Enterprise Portals”, Competitive Edge International, 2003 and the book by M. Davydov, "Corporate Portals and e-business Integration", McGraw-Hill Professional Publishing; 2001.