How Do You Measure the Success of a Portal?
One of my clients launched their SPS-based corporate intranet this week. The “vision”, established many months ago, was to establish a single communication and collaboration medium for the 2000 geographically disbursed employees. As we went live this week, I had to ask “how do we know if we were successful?”...
ROI on portals is tricky. We could measure click rates or reduction in network drive usage or decreases in email attachments... but how do we really know if the portal makes a difference? I have found that the best way to gauge perception is to ask (lots of people). What do you think of the portal? What is your favorite section? How often will you go back to it? What personal processes has it changed? If you can gather enough feedback at this level you begin to see patterns. No one will step forward and say that the CEO's idea of a portal is dumb. Very few will admit that they are so comfortable in their current day-to-day activities that change is scary. Portals tend to alter (rather than create) business processes. The goal is to find a “better” way... but “better” is by default “different”. Again, how do you measure success?...
I have always pushed clients to spend as much time and effort focused on the portal “polish” one month AFTER launch as before launch. On LAUNCH+30, who “owns” the portal? Has it fallen into IT application support? How many new News items have been added? Have content owners added new documents and links? What does the focus group think now? A portal is not like a software application... there are no versions; there are no “frozen code” stages. It SHOULD change... every day. Demand for new content is one metric that indicates that things are working. Perception is everything with portals...
So, was this week's launch successful? The portal didn't crash! Feedback, through the portal, has been positive. People are reporting misspellings (that means they are reading content!). As I walked the floor and asked folks for first reactions, I got comments like “I didn't realize that we did all this stuff”, “I feel more connected to the corporate directives”, “This has broken down the silos that existed across the different business units; we REALLY are one company”. It's only been a few days but I think we did a good job... it's just a start but I think we are well on our way to success...