The term Enterprise Information Portal means different things to different people. So we thought it would be interesting to get some clarification on this. What we found was that the definition for most respondents revolved around data visibility, integration, personalization and amalgamation. Specific functionally defined facilities, each represented 5% or less of those surveyed. Heavy marketing of portal component technologies, such as Business Process Automation, Content Management etc. may change this focus from these high level business goals  to more of the web-based facilities in the coming period.

LEVEL OF EXPERIENCE IN BUILDING PORTAL APPLICATIONS

 Surveyed sites reported a low level of experience in building enterprise level Web Portal Applications that involve complex technologies at the Web Application Server  level. Greatest level of experience is in the area of Web e-Commerce applications with 9% of sites claiming experience in building Enterprise applications and 49% having no experience at all.. Experience levels are even lower when it came to building other types of portals such as business intelligence, content management, data mart/ data warehousing and data management portals. These low numbers should not be surprising given the difficulty in finding qualified personnel in today's markets and the newness of the technologies involved. Clearly this creates opportunities for consultants and third party portal technology vendors.
 

TIME FRAME FOR IMPLEMENTING PORTAL APPLICATIONS
 
The time frame for implementing portal applications varies by the type of portal. Almost half the respondents indicated that they “did not know” or were not going to implement portals. These responses may indicate some unfamiliarity with the term “portal”. Employee Portals lead the currently implemented portal technologies (25.3%). Business Intelligence, Data Mart/Data Warehousing, Data Management portals are the next highest (13.3%, 15%, 13%), presumably reflecting the targeted marketing efforts of the vendors of these products. Consumer, Supplier and Sales portals show somewhat higher growth in the next year, reflecting the growing focus on external portals as a more robust implementation of the Extranet technology surveyed in the 1999 study.