A Vertical Look at Portals

A Vertical Look at Portals
  
Basic portal functions (e.g., communication and collaboration) are common across vertical industries, but recognizing the characteristics and challenges inherent in each vertical can help an enterprise build a better portal.
 
  
 
  

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In the past, Gartner has looked at portal products horizontally — that is, at how portals affect business across industries, regardless of the specific industry on which the portal product or service focuses. Any vertical views that we have taken, to date, have consisted mainly of how portals stack up in terms of specific applications — e.g., customer relationship management, enterprise resource planning and training.

Here, we take a look at industry-specific portal characteristics and requirements, and some leading examples of portals in the vertical sectors of healthcare, higher education, government, financial services and manufacturing. At a high level, portals — no matter what the vertical industry — share some common functions: They not only offer an enterprise greater visibility, but also a channel with which to communicate and collaborate. Regardless of sector, Gartner believes that large independent software vendors will be the most likely survivors of the ongoing portal provider shakeout. However, "pure play" portal providers that make the right alliances can improve their likelihood of overcoming substantial odds.

In addition to vendor choices, enterprises will also need to select the delivery model for their portal — whether it be through an application service provider (ASP), an open source option such as uPortal, a horizontal portal product, a vertical portal product or some combination thereof.

Choosing the Right Portal Product: Examine Functionality

Taking a high-level view, Gartner recommends enterprises consider portals that provide the following functionality:

Robust search across all structured and unstructured repositories
Taxonomy support
Content management/aggregation
Personalization
Application integration/development
These are the basic features that define a Generation 1 portal product or service (see "Best Practices in Deploying Enterprise Portals," COM-11-3816). Generation 2 and future Generation 3 portal products add significantly higher features (see "Generation-Two Portal Products Emerge," SPA-11-7034 and "Generation-Three Portal Products: Unification," SPA-13-6140), but a vertical portal product or service can be of Generation 1, 2 or 3.

Looking at Portals Vertically

At closer look, however, the choice of a portal may hinge on certain requirements that are specific to an industry or enterprise in that industry. Features that designate a portal product/service include:

Domain expertise from the vendor
Pre-built taxonomies for the vertical industry segment
Off-the-shelf integration with the popular applications of the vertical-industry segment
Built-in application functionality relevant to the vertical industry segment
Specific features relevant to the vertical industry segment (e.g., click stream analysis and collaborative filtering for consumer-facing retail industry portals)
Some industries that have vertical-industry portal offerings include: government, higher education, financial services (including insurance), healthcare and manufacturing.

Higher-education portals have been around for several years. However, of late, the industry has shifted away from portals that are vertical and dependent on advertising and e-commerce toward time-tested horizontal portals that are adapted to meet the needs of the higher-education vertical industry (see "Higher-Education Enterprise Portals: Vertical to Verticalized," M-15-0778). Academic institutions looking for a coherent way to deliver and manage administrative service, e-learning and library and research resources increasingly see the enterprise portal as the solution — but now there's a higher price tag.

Government portals have many differing audiences, including citizens, businesses, employees, suppliers and tourists. For each service identified as a candidate for e-government, the government must examine delivery choices and determine the best mechanism (e.g., government-owned portal, vertical-portal solution or intermediary). Intermediaries will assume a greater role in e-government service delivery because the intermediary's investment can be leveraged to satisfy the needs of constituents (see "Changing of the Guard in the Government Portal Market," M-14-9565).

Healthcare is a major recent adopter of enterprise portals. Doctors, nurses, patients, insurance providers, customers and suppliers all have needs that are met through healthcare enterprise portals. However, although healthcare vertical portals are an active part of the Internet, they are hobbled by inhibitors such as the lack of a proven economic model, transaction standards, medical terminology standards, security, privacy, reimbursement policies and government regulation (see "The Promise of Better Healthcare Portal Benefits," M-15-0083).

The manufacturing industry places unique demands on an enterprise portal, and manufacturing portals do not come in one shape or size that fits all. Thus, configurable approaches are necessary, and users must balance the capabilities with the larger enterprise providers with the domain expertise of plant information management enterprises (see "Manufacturing Portals: Diverse Roles and Requirements," M-14-9828).

Financial services enterprise portals attempt to provide a single entry point to all the financial instruments of an individual customer. Integrating the multitude of customer service systems, many running in different business units, into such portals is a challenge. Financial services providers should treat enterprise portals as one element of an integrated self-service strategy, and seek consistency across channels (see "Financial Services Enterprise Portal: A Cog in the Wheel," COM-14-9462).

Bottom Line: Enterprises should examine portal product and service offerings for their vertical-industry segment to determine if the added features warrant an investment. When examining the horizontal-portal product and service market, enterprises should pay attention to the amount of support provided to their specific vertical industry.