Situational Assessment:
Enterprise Portal Solutions

If you're considering an enterprise portal solution, then take the first step with a Situational Assessment from Daman Incorporated. Your Situational Assessment will include an independent appraisal of your current environment and your portal needs, as well as a complete outline of portal planning activities and project tasks.

Approach and Deliverables

• Off-site data gathering, including the completion of an initial survey document by the client.
• A three- to five-day onsite visit culminating in a presentation and discussion of findings.
• Within one week of the visit, the delivery of a recommendations document listing strategies or tactics regarding the development of a portal solution, including the recommendation of a specific portal product and a more specific recommendations document that explains the actual portal solution design and deployment.
  

Assessment Discussion Topics
Rationale: Why are you planning to implement an enterprise portal? What information needs, business opportunities or issues will be addressed by the portal? What competitive advantage might be gained? What are the expectations and requirements concerning a return on investment? How would a portal influence productivity, user effectiveness, and collaboration? What impact will a portal have on the cost of information for your organization? What is the entire spectrum of possible approaches for the delivery of the portal solution? How will a portal solution support access to enterprise information resources? What are the time, budget, and resource constraints?

Scope: What is the number and diversity of information resources supporting the portal? What is the relatedness of both structured and unstructured data referenced by the portal? How many documents and data sources will support the portal? How many users will be supported on a daily average? How many server-quality machines will be required to process documents? How many Web-server machines will be required to support portal browsers? How many machines will be required for data storage?

Taxonomy: How, in general, should the content structure be defined? Will the structure be defined by a non-exclusive hierarchy (common meaning/topic, common usage or common source) or by content groups (categories or channels)

Roles: What specific roles will be required for deployment and who will fill these roles, both on the client side and the consultant side? Daman's roles may include those of architect, design specialist, and developer.

Communities: How will user communities be defined? Criteria can include group membership, information category, and role.

Architecture: What server configuration will be used? What technical components will be required? How will this architecture relate to and impact the overall, enterprisewide information architecture?

Image: What will be the overall "look and feel" of the portal? Why will this approach be chosen? What will be the layout framework?

Assessment Process
Interviews and Discussion (onsite activity): Individuals and groups will be interviewed to complete the picture of the proposed portal solution and its relation to your computing environments. Int
erviewees will include a variety of probable constituents in the user community, key decision makers and stakeholders in the user community, managers familiar with the business objectives of the portal, and managers of the major IS functional areas who have, will or should participate in these efforts.

Interim Impressions (onsite activity): Most of the time is spent gathering information. Throughout the process, we offer feedback and suggestions as issues come up. Before leaving, we will provide an organized response in the form of an informal presentation, interim impressions, and preliminary recommendations.

Discussion of Interim Findings (onsite activity): The presentation of interim findings serves to ensure there are no surprises in our recommendations and to afford an opportunity for us to discuss the meaning and implications of the findings. Often, this discussion provides added depth of understanding which enhances the value of the assessment as a whole.

Recommendations (remote activity): The recommendations will come in the form of a short document recapping what we learned, the pros and cons of your current practices relevant to a portal deployment, and advice regarding alternative strategies or tactics.

Task Outline (remote activity): We will outline recommended project tasks involving but not necessarily limited to areas such as —

• Installation and configuration of portal product software
• Identification and indexing of initial content
• Implementation of page design
• Development of connectivity methods
• Creation and embedding of "tools" or gadgets
• Administration of users, groups, roles, security, etc.
• Final rollout to communities

Follow Through: Daman Incorporated is committed to following through on the recommendations we make. We are interested in establishing a long-term relationship with our clients. Our goal is to transfer knowledge to our clients’ teams through mentoring them on the principles, guidelines and techniques necessary to implement and maintain a successful enterprise portal solution.