By extending business processes across the enterprise, intranet-based portals create efficiencies that are unobtainable in other connected environments; but organisations must be prepared to walk the talk if they want to deliver optimally functional corporate portals. When Meta Group looked into organisational use of portals recently, its research made clear enterprises were struggling with defining portal requirements due to high-level portal exposure, the combination of business and technical functionality, broad capabilities, and far-reaching implications.

The research company advises portal owners to educate business sponsors and users before soliciting portal requirements and engage in prioritisation after initial requirements gathering. For each step, portal owners should define their own responsibilities and those of business sponsors, end users (for example, employees, partners, customers), and IT staff. These requirements should feed the request for proposal (RFP) process and portal test plans.

To that end, brainstorming sessions were already proving their worth at the Commonwealth Bank's Investment Management group at the time of writing. With the project initiation stage just complete, informing business requirements, functional specifications and the proof of concept, the bank was heading into the implementation phase of Plumtree's portal software and Semio's document management software. Even at the very preliminary stage, Casey says the main issue for the bank is understanding the business requirements and translating those into a workable solution.

"We've run brainstorming sessions which most people have attended, although we've made it voluntary," Casey says. "Most people are interested and attended and gave us ideas about what they want, how they think things can work better, and how we can automate and streamline procedures like HR procedures and work functions. What we plan to do, as you can do with something like an intranet, is to interpret what we think they now want and then provide it to a select group of users to road test."

Casey confidently predicts a significant evolution from the initial requests the business people made to what they find themselves wanting in the end, but says the changes will be relatively easy with the Plumtree software.

Likewise, at GuinnessUDV, Tabell found ensuring the information delivered was in the form users required was a major issue. "I would say the largest complexity we had was trying to get our business to agree to a standard set of drill-downs or a hierarchy for the two major elements of our information, which are our products and our customers," he says.

To reach consensus, consultant Rob Worthington visited every GuinnessUDV state office, all of which had previously acted autonomously, to get them to agree standard hierarchies within the business. "Basically a lot of it was getting people together in one room," Worthington says. "But at the same time, a colleague and I went to each state and worked out what they actually were trying to do with the information, and came out with five alternate ways of looking at product hierarchies.

"Essentially we came up with these standards we're rolling into every cube. Where there is a product hierarchy we're going to make sure they are the same, because that's where a lot of the problems we had across the business were: over time, hierarchies were moving around. That meant people were looking at some financial information and then they were going back and looking at some sales information, and the numbers wouldn't match. The hierarchies were different. It sounds pretty simple: to fix it, all you have to do is make the hierarchies the same. It's getting that agreement and actually doing it that counts. That was one of the biggest wins as far as our users were concerned - making sure the numbers were the same," Worthington says.