Intelligent Portals

The competitive edge for the enterprise within today's fast-paced and changing environment has increasingly become its ability to harness and provide the right information or knowledge in the right context to its employees, partners and customers.

The Intelligent Portal is the term we use for the vehicle that businesses use to level and bring into context complex information flows.

Enterprise Portals, as they have been traditionally implemented, focus more on providing access, organizing existing information or surfacing transactions through the web browser. The Intelligent Portal raises the IQ of the platform, bringing it closely in alignment with the needs of the user, the mission and objectives of the business and the collective wisdom of the enterprise.

As with any complex environment, there is no simple definition for an Intelligent Portal. However, we can outline the characteristics that most Intelligent Portal environments share.

The Intelligent Portal:

• Adapts to the User: Broadly referred to as "personalization," an Intelligent Portal approach to this experience is to focus not just on who the user is but what he or she is trying to achieve.
• Supplies Intelligence to the User: In an experience adapted to the specific intent of your user and a form that gets utilized and consumed by the user for the benefit of your business.
• Facilitates Cross-Organizational Interactions: The interaction point with business processes — both within and outside the enterprise — that provides process-centric designs that integrate workflow, collaboration in context, and shared and organized knowledge repositories that allow best practices to be captured.
• Harvests Social Intelligence: Allowing enterprises to involve end-consumers, customers, suppliers and the whole think-tank of their employees into key initiatives, such as innovation, transformation or alignment with business objectives.

Intelligent Portals usually share some other broad characteristics, such as inventive use of visualization and application of integrated portal-side tools such as modelers, alerts, inline resource centers, shared calendars and integrated workflow inboxes, to form the online channel "brass ring."