Boye Janus Boye

How to benchmark a portal?

11-Sep-2007

Tags: Portals and Content Integration, Implementation, Industry Standards

Last week found me teaching a 2-day course on Build, Benchmark and Improving Portals in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, with delegates from Malaysia, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Benchmarking is helpful as a way to assess current strengths and weaknesses, but remember that a portal can be measured in many ways, depending on which scenario is it deployed for (e.g., enterprise intranet or self-service).

Still, issues such as strategy, governance, content, accessibility, standards, and usability seem universal across use cases. The course delegates certainly confirmed that the Malaysian public sector is quickly catching up on portals. Interestingly in Malaysia they've created criteria for an assessment of Malaysian Government Portals and Websites, a bit like our Danish "Best on the Net" competition among government sites. How Malaysia officially differentiates between Portals and Websites left me confused, but benchmarking exercises can surely help you agree on terms and common scoring criteria, so that you can derive results and then actionable recommendations. Still, if you want to be truly innovative you need to look beyond best practices and more at state of the art for enterprise portals.

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