Portals for the People

A B2E portal is a centralized starting point for everyone in an organization. It uses the Web to bring together a wide range of applications, services, content options, and e-commerce tools, and it allows users to personalize those offerings in ways that make sense to them. If you've got 5,000 people in your company, you might have 5,000 different "start pages," with each one based on what people need to do their work, what they need in order to track developments in the outside world, and what their outside interests happen to be. A real B2E portal has three characteristics. First, it has one point of entry -- one and only one URL. Second, it gives you not just company propaganda, but everything that you want. And third, it is uniquely your own. You decide what you see and how you see it. You influence both the substance and the style of presentation.

Paint a picture for us. I work in a company with a people portal, and I arrive at the office at 8 AM. What's on my desktop?

The first thing that you see is your start page -- your personal window into the company and into the world. On your start page, you see a bunch of modules: "My Company," "My Department," "My Stuff." The content of each module -- information updates, links to key sites -- is based on choices that you've made about what you need to do your job. Your company may support hundreds of R&D projects, but you may be personally involved in just five of them. Instead of having to navigate a generic intranet site for your R&D group, you can create links and sign up for updates that relate only to those five projects. You may be in sales and need to track what your three biggest competitors are doing. So you choose an information service and a stock-price service for just those companies. You may have a four-year-old daughter whom you worry about even more than you worry about your competitors. So you arrange for your start page to include a link to a video feed from her day-care center. People have different needs, different interests, different worries. Their start pages should reflect those differences.

But the really important thing about a B2E portal isn't what's on each person's desktop. The really important thing is what B2E portals say about the future of work -- and about the way that people relate to their company and to one another.

So what's the logic behind a B2E portal?

Here's the first point: B2E portals have to be compelling to the people who use them. Every day, companies are competing for the eyeballs of their employees with eBay, Yahoo!, and thousands of other Web sites. We all know that a huge percentage of traffic to consumer Web sites comes from people who are connecting to the Net at the office. That actually makes sense. We think about work when we're home, and we deal with our lives when we're at work. So a portal needs to address the whole person -- as an employee, as a colleague, as a consumer, as a parent, as a community member.

Why pretend that people are one way at home and another way at work? Let them use a B2E portal to meet all of their needs. With many of our installations, users can choose modules that feature news headlines, sports scores, stock updates, and weather reports. We even offer a horoscope module. You have to think about your employees in the way that Yahoo! thinks about its customers. You may not be competing for their business in the way that Yahoo! is -- but you are competing for their attention.

I suppose that you can try to "stop" people from checking on their eBay auctions while they're at work, and then you can put out an email memo about your latest HR applet and urge people to check that out instead. In reality, of course, it's virtually impossible to force anyone to do anything these days -- especially on the Web. The way that you persuade people to spend their time on your B2E service is by creating a service that's so useful, so relevant, so compelling, that they actually want to spend time there.

That's an appealing vision, but I can already hear the objections: The inmates are running the asylum!

A B2E portal reflects a new view of the relationship between an organization and its people. You can't force people to look at your company the way that you want them to. It makes no sense to spend millions of dollars on a Web-based application, only to discover that no one uses it. At the same time, it's entirely reasonable to have certain expectations of your people. The workplace keeps getting more democratic, but people in a democracy still have certain responsibilities.

Here's a relatively minor example. Our stock-quote module allows users to choose the stocks that they want to track. But a company can also provide a list of stocks that must be on every employee's tracking list -- its biggest competitors, for example, or its best customers. That's perfectly fair: Companies have a right to expect their people to be well informed about that kind of thing.