Portal Product
People use the word "portal" to describe a very wide variety of things. In State government, we have a lot of different initiatives that use the word indiscriminately: Utah.gov portal, Payment Portal, Homeland Security Portal, Utah Enterprise State Employee Portal, etc. So, what is a portal? And what does ITS, the agency I work for, have to do with any of them?
Those are fine questions. As the product manager for ITS portal services, they are mine to answer, at least for ITS. First of all, let me tell you what I think a portal is. A portal is a web site that:
- Aggregates conent from different content providers
- Provides customization and personalization options to users
- Is dynamic in content, and connects users to related services available through the web
A site with a collection of links is not, in my opinion, a portal. Niether is an online payment collection service. The fact that the word portal is used in conjunction with both link collection sites and payment services obscures what I think a portal really is.
ITS is faced with several questions regarding portals. The following paragraphs describe those issues.
A couple of years ago, ITS built the "Innerweb" which is the current employee portal. In my opinion, it meets the definition of a portal. It is not widely used and is somewhat of an orphan, but it is a portal. It was built on an application server platform that we would like to stop supporting in the next year or so, which gives ITS an incentive to figure out what will replace it. Last year we headed an effort to create an enterprise employee portal. This was done in conjunction with the Teamsite projcet. The problem was that we were building it the same way we built Innerweb, without any clear business ownership. The project was stopped without completely resolving the issue of ownership. In my opinion, ITS should not be the driving force behind the next employee portal.
Another question facing ITS regarding portals is what is our role in creating them for agency business owners? Should we provide a portal development product? I would say a tentative yes, but it remains to be proven out. If we develop a portal development product, then we can offer packages that connect the portals we develop with other State IT infrastructure, such as authentication and UMD. I am working through a plan to figure out exactly what ITS should do about this opportunity.
Finally, let me say that I don't think that every site has to meet the definition of a portal described above. In a lot of instances, it is perfectly appropriate for a site to simply be a collection of links. In other cases, increased value to the user could be possible if sites moved towards my definition of a portal.
7:40:54 AM 
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