Smart Advice

Editor's Note: Welcome to SmartAdvice, a weekly column by The Advisory Council (TAC), an advisory service firm. The feature answers three questions of core interest to you, ranging from career advice to enterprise strategies to how to deal with vendors. Submit questions directly to [email protected]

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Question A: We don't have an enterprise portal, and with budget-pressure starting to ease, are wondering if we should. What factors should we consider before starting a portal project?

Our advice: It's not surprising that budgeting pressures have stood in the way of your implementing an enterprise information portal. Our research shows that among companies of all sizes, budget limitations are by far the highest barrier to implementing EIP solutions. Now that that problem has eased, however, the questions are whether you should move forward with an EIP project, and if you do, what must it do and what requirements must it meet. The same research tells us that the relative importance of other projects, and the difficulty in assessing ROI potential up front, are the next largest barriers to enterprise information portal adoption. Gaining a clear understanding of EIP benefits is therefore an essential first step.

Direct Benefit
The direct benefits of an EIP solution fall into three major categories: