How HR Can Shape Corporate Portals - Brief Article

When it comes to launching a portal initiative, HR is mission control.

What exactly is a corporate portal, and do you really need one?

Even though corporate portals are a hot topic, there is considerable confusion about them. You've probably heard terms such as business portal, intranet portal, enterprise portal and reporting portal, among others. These describe everything from simple online job postings on a company intranet to highly advanced enterprisewide applications.

To clear things up, a corporate portal is a secure, browser-based gateway to internal and external data. It typically offers these elements:

* A single point of access to personal information, benefits, content, web-based applications and legacy systems.

* Sophisticated search capabilities.

* Integrated workflow across multiple databases.

* Role-based information delivery. (Content and access privileges are automatically managed depending on the employee's role in the organization.)

* Single sign-on with unified password for easy, secure system use.

Think of the corporate portal as providing a dramatic new level of sophistication in corporate intranets. Speed, efficiency, reach and an unprecedented level of collaborative interaction all flow from a well-designed portal, making possible dramatic gains in productivity. Do you need a corporate portal? More to the point, since such a tool is the key to leveraging human capital in the global economy, can you remain competitive without one?

As an HR professional, you can shape the corporate portal initiative to substantially transform your organization. And in so doing, you will boldly affirm your strategic role.

HR is the ideal starting point for moving ahead with portal development, because it is the one function that touches every person in your organization. Implementing employee and manager self-service solutions can engage people quickly with a valuable portal experience, which builds support for expanded portal applications. If there is already a portal initiative under way, it is crucial that HR be fully included, not only for HR-specific applications, but also at the enterprisewide strategic level.

Portal Technology Today

The best corporate portals mirror well-known Internet portals such as Yahoo! and Netscape. Keep a close eye on the evolution of portals on the Internet. They set the standards for portal functionality, and, to some extent, they dictate users' expectations for your corporate portal. It's also important to engage in ongoing market research across your organization. Such research can save you from implementing technologies that do not provide the fully engaging user experience necessary for the portal to deliver on its promises. (For a case study on corporate portals, see "Taking the EHR Plunge," on page 96.)

Remember that a portal is not the product of a single technology; it is a synthesis of many applications. In today's market, there are a number of "portal players" such as Plumtree, Lotus, Yahoo! and iPlanet. The major enterprise resource planning (ERP) companies such as PeopleSoft, SAP and Oracle also have extensive portal offerings. Product types vary widely. Those with a vertical focus deliver information to a particular type of user such as sales, marketing, project managers or HR. Transactional products are designed to provide employee and manager self-service, e-business transactional support and workflow integration. More complex products provide knowledge management and business intelligence functions to enable sophisticated data search and analysis. Comprehensive products include all of these elements.

Portals, which can be practical for small and large organizations, often incorporate elements of the organization's existing systems, so costs vary widely.

Positioning HR

HR departments have an important role to play in portal implementation. After all, your department often harmonizes and balances interests in your organization. Use the strategic phase of the portal process to build understanding of how your organization' s resources are working together, to determine whether they encourage or discourage growth. It's also important to show how a corporate portal enhances employee satisfaction and productivity, extends the organization's reach globally and frees HR professionals from routine transaction and compliance duties to focus on higher value and strategic activities such as recruitment, retention and organizational development.

You must demonstrate how a portal can sharply reduce administrative costs as well as deliver an acceptable return on investment. Once you know what you want your portal to accomplish, you can get a very accurate picture of the type of returns various technology investment choices will produce. At Cedar in Baltimore, this ROI analysis with web-appropriate metrics for new technologies is a critical component of successful client engagements.

Educate yourself about portals and build an early, strong alliance with your IT department. You need to know what technology can do; your IT colleagues need to know as much as they can about big picture HR concerns. Do not assume that IT is automatically biased toward the newest, fanciest and most complicated systems. They have to see that your solution is implemented efficiently, and they will want it to perform as expected.

HR is the intellectual catalyst for these discussions.

Delivering Value

As you move through the portal development process, it is very important that your consultant helps your team evaluate every product and service in terms of your organization's objectives and culture. In this way, applications can be prioritized so those with the highest value are done first. On the surface this appears to be a simple concept, but it takes a great deal of skill to keep everyone involved focused on the results.

For example, does the portal help you win the "war for talent"? Finding and keeping dedicated, capable people is the top organizational challenge today. For busy employees who see time as a resource, anything HR does to make life easier for them contributes to their job satisfaction, and consequently to organizational performance.

Self-service and portal solutions give employees more opportunities to manage both work and home activities. Perhaps your employee portal links to services that help parents find local pediatricians, or that assist employees with aging parents in finding suitable living options. It may even help employees find the best rates for mortgages or car loans. While encouraging portal use for seemingly unrelated personal matters might not appear to be in the organization's interest, enabling people to simplify their lives and reduce stress can provide significant boosts to effectiveness and productivity.

Greater employee satisfaction leads to reduced turnover, which in turn leads to reduced cost of employee replacement. For the past 10 years, Organizational Diagnostics, a management consulting firm in Mountain View, Calif., primarily serving high-tech companies, has tracked the effect of employee satisfaction on retention. It found that for every 2 percent increase in employee satisfaction, there is a 1 percent hike in employee retention. The Workplace Resource Learning Center reports that replacement-hiring costs are approximately $14,000 for an employee with a high school diploma and $66,000 for an employee with a college degree. With that in mind, if your corporate portal can increase your company's employee retention efforts, it can very quickly pay for itself.

Competent, loyal long-term employees are certainly important corporate assets, but as HR professionals, you've seen first-hand how the new, highly mobile workforce is changing the old reference points. People are increasingly expected to come to you with a particular skill set and they are expected to be able to add value from day one. A well-designed portal helps you integrate these people into your organization as quickly as possible. This same portal also helps you connect with part-time workers and the expanding world of independent specialists who can add significant value to a particular project.

One strategic HR tactic is forming teams of people from different disciplines to accomplish a specific objective and disbanding the group when that goal is met. The teams can include people within the organization, as well as independent contractors and other outside specialists. In this way, strategic HR professionals operate much like Hollywood producers do. For each movie, producers assemble the best available talent--actors, writers, directors and cinematographers. When the production is finished, people move on and the process starts over. The corporate portal becomes the central point of contact and the nerve center of such HR team activities.

Usability Is Key

The Corporate Leadership Council (CLC), an organization providing best-practices research and education to human resource executives, reports that usability is often a major problem when it comes to corporate portals. "Our research indicates that one of the most overlooked challenges is making the web useable from an employee perspective," says David Williams, a senior consultant with CLC, based in Washington, D.C. "The web can provide sophisticated benefits and decision support and can present content in a way that allows it to serve as an end-to-end solution. But you have to take the employee's perspective into account every step of the way or it will be for naught."

To avoid these problems, it is important to constantly communicate the reasons behind the portal initiative, and to continually seek buy-in at every level of your organization. By viewing employees as customers and doing the necessary market research to understand their preferences, you will help design the kind of portal that fulfills its potential to be effective and save money. The portal is also a powerful vehicle for your organization's internal brand. The look, feel and quality of the content matter enormously. Remember that people in your organization will be measuring your portal against those of your partners and competitors. Yours shouldn't suffer by comparison.

Achieving Portal Success

Your organization's corporate portal represents a significant investment. This is not the time to improvise. You'll want the best advice you can get, and skilled people with knowledge of the best industry practices to implement your solution.

Above all, do not shortchange strategic planning and change management needs. It is tempting to gloss over these vital phases and focus on technical functionality--it's also a big mistake. In fact, it's pointless to even discuss specific technologies without considering planning and change management issues.

Communicate your portal's capabilities and its value across your organization. Focus on transformation, not transition. Your portal should not be merely a vehicle for transitioning current practices and procedures to the web. At its best, your organization's corporate portal is the launch pad for new ways of working and building sustained competitive advantage in a new economy--and HR is mission control.

David A. Link is vice president of the eWorkplace practice at Cedar, formerly known as the Hunter Group, a global consulting firm with U.S. headquarters in Baltimore. Link holds an executive master of science degree in information systems, with honors, from George Washington University, and a bachelor of science degree in computer science from the University of Wisconsin.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Society for Human Resource Management
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group