Portals for the People

Here's a more significant example, one that comes up often. Companies care a lot about their brands. And, when it comes to branding, we know that design matters and that projecting a corporate brand within a company is no less important than projecting it through external marketing materials. So lots of companies say, "People can choose the content that they need, but everyone's page has to 'look and feel' like the company." That's fair too, and our tools allow companies to set parameters: "No, you can't change the color scheme. Yes, that information must be displayed in three columns."

Ultimately, the user has to win. People have to be able to get the resources that they need to do their jobs. But companies still need to control some basic issues: design, security, integrity. This isn't about anarchy; it's about shared control.

One beef about intranets is that they take so long to deploy. IT departments don't exactly work in Internet time. Don't you worry that if you conjure up a compelling vision of a B2E portal, people are going to get frustrated as they wait for it to materialize?

The biggest question that we face from our Fortune 500 clients is "How can we act more like a dotcom company? How can we become a faster company?" Our answer is that they need to embrace a B2E portal. The deployment cycle for traditional enterprise software can last 9 months. The deployment cycle for a portal can be as short as 30 days. That's why we've developed all of these modules. You can take our packaged content modules, use our existing software, and get a portal up and running very quickly.

Our recent experience with Motorola offers a great example of how that works. Greg Goluska, vice president of customer support, was the leader of a team at Motorola that was creating a B2E portal. The team's first goal was to design a service that would treat employees like customers. Its second goal was to create a site that would become a single point of entry for all Motorolans. Finally, and most important, the team wanted the process of creating the portal to reflect the kind of organization that everyone at Motorola wants the company to become.

So the design process had to be not only fast but also democratic. We holed up for three days at the Chicago Institute of Technology, with 60 Motorolans from around the world, along with engineers from Epicentric. We were there all day and most of each night. There weren't any fancy dinners; we just sent out for pizza. The group broke into small teams, and people talked about the really basic questions: What's on the minds of our customers -- in this case, employees? Who's best at doing this stuff already, and what can we learn from those people? Then teams created prototypes and subjected them to review. We called this process "Building the Straw Portal Review." We debated during the day, did the builds at night, and reviewed the results the next morning. At the end of the three-day exercise, the plan was presented to Motorola's CIO. Greg said, "This isn't just trying to change the company. This is trying to change the way that we change."

And this isn't one-shot change. Once you've got a portal in place, small groups of people -- teams, departments, business units -- can make changes on their own. Do the people in your group want to work together more seamlessly? We have a module that enables users to create discussion groups. We also have a collaboration module that supports interactive chat.

How else do B2E portals change the way that you think about people and technology?

We're playing with lots of different ideas. For example, maybe you can change how you budget for investments in technology. Once you've got the basic portal infrastructure in place, you can have various departments "buy" advertising to "pay for" the portal. Big companies have lots of services that they provide to their employees: HR initiatives, a company store, a day-care center. A thriving B2E portal becomes a "channel" by which departments can promote those services, and the technology department can charge them for the opportunity to advertise there. Why does it always have to be a cost center? Why can't it be entrepreneurial too?

Here's another idea: As I said earlier, any CEO who is honest about it knows that people are spending some time at work buying books from Amazon.com or bidding on memorabilia on eBay. That happens everywhere. Rather than complain about people shopping from their desk, why not turn it to your advantage? We offer an e-commerce group-buying module that features a series of pre-packaged deals with online vendors. All you have to do is sign up for it, and your employees will get discounts on all sorts of stuff. That option could become a new kind of employee benefit, and it would encourage people to keep working within the framework of the portal. If people come to the portal because they want to get a great deal on a gift, and if the page containing that deal also contains a quarterly financial report that your CFO wants everyone to read, then the chance of that report actually getting read will go up dramatically.

Eric Ransdell (ransdell@well.com), a Fast Company contributing editor, is based in San Francisco. Contact Oliver Muoto by email (oliver@epicentric.com), or visit Epicentric Inc. on the Web (www.epicentric.com).