How do you define a Portal Maturity model? It is the measurement of how well a corporation adopts a technology, the maturity of organizational culture to support the adoption, thereby leading to the way the organization conducts its business.
In layman's terms, it is the right mix of employee/user collaboration, content collaboration, communication, and business process automation that make the most sense to your organization's business and not everything technology can offer.
The key is to identify this mix and find and adopt the right portal technology and features that offer it. When you don't have the appropriate mix (and either overdo it or under-do it), this is when most of the businesses fail on their corporate portal.
Stage 1 - Basic Portal
Many organizations think it is a portal but it isn’t. It is more of a web application that can provide traditional communication tools like email and basic document sharing. There is no formal strategy or analysis involved. Content and data are never structured or routed.
Stage 2 - Standardized Portal
Very much content oriented, structured to some extent, and includes minimal search. This is when an organization has taken the first step toward adopting portal features, tools, and practices, although not enterprise-wide.
Stage 3 - Efficient Portal
Targeted to core business areas, established search and the first step towards social tools and core business processes. Focused more on content collaboration than employee collaboration, defined processes are supported across the corporate with a defined strategy and functional goals.
Stage 4 - Streamlined Portal
This is when an organization realizes employee collaboration is the key for business and adopts the basic social media and collaboration, enhanced applications and integration, measurements, refined search, metadata-driven content to the whole enterprise. They also enable personalizing and integrating social activities into business processes and systems.
Stage 5 - Extended Digital Enterprise Portal
A well-established process is integrated with advanced social media and collaboration, streamlined employee collaboration with employee profiles. It includes advanced internal & external (partner/ distributor) user integration and services, a modern process supported by innovative tools and front-line support along with the enterprise search connecting legacy systems revolving around a centralized platform.
Stage 6 - Modern Digital Work Place
The Modern Digital Work Place is more of a culture change, a paradigm shift completely focusing on employee collaboration and other components like the content and the communication that can be done from anywhere, work on any device, and work anytime. This provides an innovative platform which is a One Stop Shop for all of the sophisticated social collaboration tools and techniques, well rounded processes & support beyond the organization, a secure and well connected portfolio with seamless integration with external users (partners, & customer), continuous improvement, and adaptation to organizational changes and culture. This drives the creation of intellectual property and generates a competitive advantage, connecting people through various communication channels while providing easy access to the single source of content and management.
Summary
The Modern digital workplace increases accessibility & agility for employees and users in accomplishing their work. Adopting this is easy but implementing the modern digital workplace needs lots of research, and a mindset/technology transformation. Constructing this maturity model is a separate topic, I will cover it in my next article.