AbstractWe're living in an amazing era in which rapid progress of science and technology leaves no room for old methods of doing things including marketing. In the past, small and medium businesses depended heavily on intimate interaction with local customers and outside contractors, while the emergence of new electronic media changed the story drastically so that new ways of communication for marketing were introduced to companies and businessmen. Doubtlessly no other media has had a key role in this field more than the Internet. Online marketing systems provided more rapid and effective opportunities for marketing and this made a new and broad range of technical choices for commercial institutes. One of these technological options is "Portal". Portals, more exactly defined as Enterprise Portals (EPs) have unique and reliable capabilities for marketing. This article aims at discussing EPs implementation process in online marketing.
Keywords
Portal, Enterprise Portal, Online Marketing
1. The Beginning
Many companies have fairly simple and admittedly not very realistic plan: deploy an EP with project management, time tracking, file management, customer database and collaboration tools in less than a month, and for less than $6,000, including licenses, labor and customization.
The original plan to use off-the-shelf commercial software development tools is not usually feasible. They have small budget and their 30-day target delivery date is firmly anchored by client requirements.
They evaluate a number of hungry and aggressive application service providers and, although it may be possible to get a good price and all the features they need, they are afraid that the deadline and customization fees require will tip the budget beyond what they could afford.
It would have cost much less to use an application like Intranets.com, which offers the same basic feature-set for much less than heir $6,000 budget. Frankly, they look really hard at a number of ASP vendors. The biggest hurdle is simple "not invented here" syndrome. They want to build something and own it. And they want the flexibility to change it, if necessary.
They want the project portal to be an interactive, easy-to-use, simple-to-manage information vehicle for vendors, employees and customers. They want a simple but feature-rich portal. Other application project design goals can be:
Cheap software components.
Simple installation, configuration and training.
Standardized components and not dependent on a specific browser.
All administration, management, content creation and workflow control must be browser-based.
No dependencies on a single vendor.
Ability to host the application on our ISP's servers.
No dependencies on an application service provider.
In such cases, the best solution is to use open source software. The resulting portal and methodology used in this way to select appropriate tools usually saves tens of thousands of dollars, may be more. Within 30 days, the project can go from a blank sheet of paper to a fully deployed project management intranet.
2. How Can This Be Done?
The first task is to identify a development organization with the right. A well-known company may be selected for its work with the LAMP environment (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) as well as its experience with online community applications such as Geeklog, PostNuke and PHPNuke (all are dynamic interactive environments for portals and promoting user interaction). Plus, the company should step up to really understand your business and marketing goals. And, finally, they should tell you that they can meet your budget and your timeframe.
The second task is to work with your ISP, XNET, to make sure its co-location infrastructure could support the project. At the company's recommendation, you may first assemble a low-end, field-expedient server using graveyard parts. The first server can be built on a 400MHz Pentium PC with 128MB RAM and a 6GB hard disk. You may drop the server into company's co-location environment for testing.
Many institutes choose Linux as their server base. You then should look at other software platforms that could run on a graveyard server. By the end of the third day, you may have assembled an open source development tool suite that meets all your requirements. A prototype of the project management intranet is completely operational in five days and a final intranet is launched in 30 days. The remaining 25 days can be spent with various customizations, training and familiarizing yourself with the application. Having an experienced partner working with you significantly reduces your implementation time and learning curve.
The portal and its underlying design features have already produced important strategic results, providing everyone with a single Web focal point from which they can find client documents, key contacts and enter time against projects.
3. What You Will Gain from It?
Specific advantages realized by the portal are:
Reduced Development Cost: The tools are free. This keeps cost low. You don't need to worry about how many licenses you'll need next week. In hindsight, using any solution other than an ASP would have been time-consuming. The time required to shop for the right vendor, define your requirements to multiple vendors and go through a vendor selection process would have been too costly.
Reduced Per-Seat Fees: Of the commercial licensed (non-ASP) portal and database applications reviewed, most had per-seat fees, which are sometimes based on the total number of employees rather than the actual number using the application. The per-seat fees for one application reviewed by experts is $10/month per seat, another is $52 per seat. Since all of your customers and most of your vendors would be using the portal, you have no way to estimate accurately the number of seats you'd need to purchase and no way to predict your per-seat costs each year. The solution which is designed does not have per-seat fees. This also allows you to justify the hourly fees charged by your portal builder company. Since there are no licensing costs, you can spend some extra money on developers who understand your goals.
Reduced Computer Hardware Cost: Your open-source development tools are resource-efficient. You are able to perform most of the development using low-end 400MHz Pentium II desktop PCs acting as small servers. Moreover, non-server operating systems such as Windows 98 or Windows 2000 Professional can be used as server test beds because the open-source server tools (MySQL and PHP) do not require a true server operating system to function.
Accelerated Timeframe: Since you don't need to buy products, it made it easier to quickly get the tools you need. We believe you will get started on the project faster because of this.
Cost Savings: These were realized in five major ways. One, the development tool costs are reduced to zero. Two, per seat fees are reduced to zero. Three, computer hardware costs are reduced to zero because you have graveyard parts on hand. Four, your ISP has always been aggressive, so your co-location costs are very reasonable. Five, the elimination of the procurement period fast-tracks the entire project.
4. ROI: The Reality
On the other hand, it is also important to talk about the downside of the implementation. First and most important is user documentation. Some open source projects are not well documented and structuring workflow often requires some trial and error to see what works. Second, you're comfortable with the security on the application, but some of the internal code may involve more gum and bailing wire than other shrink-wrapped products.
It is impossible to calculate your return on investment without making up a bunch of assumptions and numbers (the future always looks so promising when you use Excel).
It is our opinion that open source tools make sense for some of future projects. This is because open source tools reduce development costs and usually eliminate recurring costs as well as reduce product development cycles.
A meaningful ROI calculation should not minimize the soft benefits and cost savings.
5. Top 5 Criteria
For companies to get the biggest return out of expertise marketing systems, they should first determine the processes to which the technology should be applied. The META Group has identified five criteria companies should consider when deciding whether, and where, to implement one of these solutions.
1. Complexity Processes that hinge on subjective judgments within complex rules are cross-functional, possess high-risk decision points, or contain multiple routing scenarios with co-dependencies and complicated exception handling flows--or where uniformity between process and work practice is critical--are good candidates.
2. Information density Processes requiring mastery of information sources that drive complex programs, such as clinical trials, or intricate practices, like compliance regulations, can reveal where expertise automation adds value. Analysts should examine not only how solutions might better discover, categorize, and organize content sources more effectively, but also transition linkages that facilitate requester-to-expert interaction.
3. Competency depth/breadth Processes where performance is affected by know-how (competency, skill proficiency, certification, and real-world experience) may reveal gaps that can be alleviated by systems that extend worker knowledge. Regulations often require covered entities to certify that employees comprehend appropriate laws, process controls, and data-handling requirements. Expertise automation, though not an alternative for proper training, can improve organizational performance by supplementing those efforts through a structured dialogue between expert and line worker.
4. Geographic Dispersion Distribution of resources due to globalization, remote workers, or joint development efforts with partners and suppliers can result in productivity barriers that impede process performance, such as time zones and different work shifts. This fragmentation causes collaboration to become out of sync. Expertise automation systems can provide a more structured response management platform that brokers requests in a way that ensures issue closure.
5. Time-to-action Constraints identifying the "right" expert in an organization does not always mean interacting with the "best" expert. Processes driven by time-to-action parameters can result in weighing options against multiple dimensions. When determining the most appropriate response, expertise automation systems can provide users with decision support capabilities that enable trade-offs to be made.
6. Conclusion
A growing interest by management in improving organizational productivity and process performance has made marketing workflow the next frontier for portal frameworks. The value of workflow--putting controls and structure around work tasks and interactions--in a portal environment is that it provides a means of codifying the best practices for key business processes.
Portals enable an integration framework that can help guide users to contextual information, display relevant screens, expose workflow status and work-queue items, and point them to the people they need to coordinate with to handle exceptions or route work to once the item is complete. However, portal professionals define expertise automation as the life-cycle management of discovering, profiling, brokering, and connecting users and teams who need to exchange know-how about a particular business topic or be aware of each other's activities. What we usually mean as the essence of online marketing.
Resources:
1. Bradley, Ben. "Time for a portal", Darwin Magazine, March 20004, available at:
http://www.darwinmag.com/read/030104/portal.html
2. Gotta, Mike. "Viewpoint: Expert Portals", Portals Magazine, April 01, 2004, available at: http://www.portalsmag.com/articles/default.asp?articleid=5680
