Critical Success Factors in Implementing Portal: A Comparative Study

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1 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Vol. 10 Issue 2 (Ver 1.0), April 2010 P a g e 129 Critical Success Factors in Implementing Portal: A Comparative Study Abdullah S. Al-Mudimigh 1 Zahid Ullah, Basit Shahzad 2 GJMBR Classification (FOR) , Abstract- In today s business portal is very important for information sharing and service delivery in every enterprise. Portal has the potential to develop the performance of an organization in terms of productivity and business process efficiency. Portal is never ended project and need modification time to time as for the business requirements. However implementing portals can make negative significant changes to business environment. Therefore significant information and resources are needed to invest for the success of portal implementation. In this paper we have identified and analyzed some critical success factors in the implementing portals and the results are compared with the results of the other researchers in the same area. The work done in this paper has been taken from both theoretical and practical framework to cover the service delivery as well as the overall portal implementation. Keywords-CRM, Critical Success Factors, user, enterprise, employee. R I. INTRODUCTION apid changes in the internet technology can urge significant challenges in the business of an organization. New services are always required to make the portal more effective and valuable according to the organization s need and employees moral. We have addressed some critical issues regarding the implementing portal in Saudi Arabian organization. CSF are vary on their degree in affecting portal implementations, some of these are considered as high, while some are less important [11]. In our new framework of portal implementation we have taken some critical success factors (CSF) in consideration, our planned framework is adapted from both practical and theoretical frameworks to covers the service delivery as well as the overall portal implementation. Portals are large application that integrates information, people and processes across the organizational boundaries. On the user point of view portals have been defined as corporate portals, customer portals, employee portals or enterprise portals [8]. A big problem to make the portals effective for their users is the lack of inclusive and convincing means for measuring the portals ability to meet employee and other audience demands [12]. Portal extends the integration of business application capability of a About Department of Information System College of Computer & Information SciencesKing Saud University - mudimigh@ksu.edu.sa -zahid@ksu.edu.sa -basit.shahzad@gmail.com company to interact it with its clients, employees and vendors and interchange its information on a single point [8]. It generally involves the use of e-business approaches and internet technologies for delivering a comprehensive set of services to employees [10]. II. Background Study The literature reviewed for this paper has been referenced from different journals and articles related to the topic of this paper. Portals are the gateways that integrates the information from different sources and provide it on a single window to the end users [1,2,3]. Portals development is a costly initiative and not only that it costs the company to develop it but it requires significant business process change in order to influence it for business benefits [4]. A portal is an-tier information system accessed via the web and exchange data and services with users and thereby implements a value added service [5]. Fengchun et-al [6] has implemented an informative portal which has a unique characteristics and functions for the educational sectors. Visitors use some standard tools within the portal framework they all have a consistent appearance and is reducing the learning time [6]. The organizations are needed to exclude all the inaccurate and misleading information and provide the right information to the right people [7]. Hazra [8] described the software engineering principles for the implementation and challenges face the enterprise portal. Corporate portals offer organizational users the ability to access a wide variety of information sources directly from the desktop [9]. Senior business executive appreciate portal s ability on the delivery of benefits to the organization and their employees [10]. A. Critical Success Factors Analysis Portal implementation can directly influence the effect of any organization. To implement such portals there are several Critical Success Factors (CSF) that any organization must pay attention to. Look at CSF from four different perspectives: Strategic, Tactical, Organizational, and Technological perspective in Table.1 [11]

2 Organization al Technological P a g e 130 Vol. 10 Issue 2 (Ver 1.0), April 2010 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Strategic Table1. Model of CSF Tactical Top management. User Acceptance. Change Management. Project Management. Team competence and Skills. Strong recommendation inwards and outwards. Dedicated Resources. Project monitoring and controlling. Business process reengineering. User training and education. Clear goal and objectives. Flexible project Structure. Organizational Culture. Portal Strategy. Defining the portal architecture. Selection of the appropriate portal package. Requirement Analysis. Portal reengineering roadmap. Process and application and integration. Prototyping and portal design. Portal design. The critical success factors (CFS) in Table.1 is ranked in Table.2. The critical success factors are rated as Critical=1, Very high= 2, High= 3, Moderate= 4, Low= 5, while CFS highlighted with grey are the organizational portals [11]. Table.2 Top CSF across all stages of implementation

3 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Vol. 10 Issue 2 (Ver 1.0), April 2010 P a g e 131 III. Methodology The concept of portal and e-services is quite new in Saudi Arabia and there are several portal implementations around the kingdom, but only few are considered mature portal implementations. In conducting this research, several ways and methodologies have been chosen, considering time, available resources, and the effort external entities are willing to give. Preparing several un-formal meetings, and speaking to key persons in many organizations, as well as meeting with portal developers and integrators. Furthermore, official meetings was conducted, structured interviews, and many regarding some fast Q/A. To make this work more clear and understandable we have presented a detail case study of Saudi Stock Exchange in the following section. IV. Case Study Saudi Stock Exchange Market (Tadawul) has been established in March-19th, Tadawul is a Saudi Arabian organization and is operating all stocks exchange operations inside the kingdom. Tadawul contains several departments, but IT is the main and biggest depart in the entire organization with around 100 employees. One of these departments is the website developing and maintaining department, this department is responsible for all activities regarding the website (portal). There are two main activities this department is doing: operating the website and technical activities. According to release manager at website department in Tadawul, he indicated that Tadawul get more than 800,000 users every day, moreover, the portal get around 9,000,000 hits every day. Tadawul web site contains all information and data about Saudi stocks exchange, whether these information is updated or historical so there is a massive amount of data in there portal is accessing every day. Tadawul has been upgraded and enhanced the portal in 2004 to comply with the new evolution of Saudi stock market that time. Tadawul is providing many new services and facilities to public and the portal is using as a window interface to the outside world. In addition, Tadawul is using a standardize way to operate and enhance the portal. In fact, they are using ITIL [13] standards in terms of change management and release management etc. they are using two environments to develop and deploy services to the portal, one is for testing and the other is for production. There are highly strict policies and procedures in the portal development that every change or new release must be approved by Change Advisory Board (CAB), which meets twice a week furthermore, scope, risk and impact must be defined in advance. V. Challenges Tadawul facing the following challenges: The major challenge that is facing to Tadawul is the availability of time. According to release manager of this organization time is a major factor for it because there are too many request without enough resources to handle the job. Additionally, user acceptance is another challenge, the portal team finds it difficult to negotiate and agree with business users upon some issues regarding the portal, beginning from the initial request up to the final acceptance. Moreover, outsourcing is a third problem that Tadawul is facing, it directly impact on the portal when there is any conflict between the team and the vendor and this problem let the Tadawul to lose the control over the project and its services. On the other hand, portal architecture is a serious issue because it provides a blueprint of the overall services. Tadawul collect all the information from repositories and many other sources so it is very important to carefully understand the integration architecture, and that the new integration will not affect existing ones. Finally, defining a flexible project structure is a very important according to the dynamic nature and regulations of the stock exchange market that may be applied and forced at Tadawul. VI. Findings and Results After applying UlrichRemus [11] CSF ranking to Saudi stock exchange, we came with some interesting results shown in table.3. Table.3 CSFs for Saudi Stocks Exchange ID Critical success Factors Mean Std. Deviation 1 Strong communication inwards and outwards User acceptance Top management support Clear goals and objectives Project monitoring and controlling Requirements analysis

4 P a g e 132 Vol. 10 Issue 2 (Ver 1.0), April 2010 Global Journal of Management and Business Research 7 Defining the portal Architecture Dedicated resources Selection of the appropriate portal package Process and application Integration Prototyping Flexible project structure Project management Portal design Change management Team competencies and skills Portal strategy User training and education Business process reengineering Organizational culture Portal engineering roadmap As shown in the table3 the first eight factors is balance including organizational factors (user acceptance, requirement analysis) and technical factors (strong communication inwards and outwards, dedicated resources). In the above ranking if we focus so we can easily understand that Saudi stock exchange faces the critical factors in the first part (one third) of the ranking in table3. In the first part of the ranking a user acceptance is the most critical organizational factor. In the portal implementation user acceptance is very critical as told by our interviewee that introducing a new user, evaluation and feed back from the end user is critical. Top management is very important for an enterprise and is responsible for making policies and translates these policies to a meaningful objective and goals for enterprise. Similarly portal architecture is another critical technical factor in Saudi stock exchange. Before starting the portal project the architecture must be defined clearly and understandable for the organizational requirements. Selection of appropriate portal package is the second important critical factor. In fact, the selection is seen as a strategic decision determining all subsequent measures, e.g. the selection and customizing of portlets and the evolution of the portal [11]. This also implies on Business process reengineering as well. By comparing table2 and table3 we concluded the following significant results. Top Management Support and Requirement Analysis is ranked as the highest CSF. While in table2 the same results obtained in number three, but generally our findings where quite similar to UlrichRemus [11] in table2. Moreover, in this paper we have some high standard deviation such as the Selection of the appropriate VII. Discussion portal package and Prototyping. This can be construed by the nature of the work that our interviewee had done. Selection of the appropriate portal package is very critical to any portal implementation because it directly impact on the business process reengineering. Process and application Integration have a 1.5 standard deviation due to a mature portal implementation of Saudi Stocks Exchange. In addition to our findings, we found that there was an additional CSF that our interviewees mentioned it is the selection of the vendor how is going to implement the portal. So if an organization decided to implement the portal through an external entity (out sourcing), we have found that the selection of this vendor will play a major role in the portal implementation. Additionally, there are some criteria that must be taken into consideration such as Strong References to that specific vendor, a good profile in implementing such projects and more importantly the vendor s location. Finally, we urge that some of the CSF can be merged into together. For example, Project monitoring and controlling, Change management, Project management, Team competencies and skills, and User training and education can be merged into one CSF called Project Management. Moreover, Business process reengineering can be renamed to Business process redesigning /reengineering that will indicate the level of change in that process; if it is a minor change it can be called redesigning, while if it is a major change, we can call it reengineering.

5 Global Journal of Management and Business Research Vol. 10 Issue 2 (Ver 1.0), April 2010 P a g e 133 VIII. Conclusion In this part, we would like to reemphasize on the critical success factors in the implementing portal to improve the quality of services for the enterprises. Although, portals can make a significant changes to organizations and enterprises but many organizations lack suitable framework to implement portals for their products and services due to some most critical factors. To address this gap, we have proposed a comprehensive framework to develop and operate portal projects as well as the delivery of new/changed services and have taken into consideration some critical success factors we have evaluated and compared with the past work. The result obtained in this paper is more accurate and significant. IX. Reference 1) Angelica Caro, C. C. (2007), A Probabilistic Approach to Web Portal's Data Quality Evaluation. In proceedings: IEEE Conference on Quality of Information and Communication Technology, pp ) [ Rahim, M. M. (2007), Identifying Barriers to using Business-to-Employee (B2E) Portals: Some Lessons Learned from an Australian University. In Proceedings: IEEE International Conference on System Sciences, pp. 147a-147a. 3) [Davydov, M. (2001), Corporate Portals and E- Business Integration, McGraw-Hill. 4) [4]. Michael F.S. Chan, Walter W.C. Chung. (2002), A framework to develop an enterprise information portal for contract manufacturing, International journal of production, vol. 75(2), pp ) Genoveva Vargas-Solar, Pedro Lozada Peñalva. (2005), Building WEB services portals: implementation experiences, in Proceedings: IEEE International Conference on Services Computing, pp ) Fengchun Zhu, Aihua Wang, Yanbing Ju (2004), A framework to develop a university information portal, in proceedings IEEE international conference on Information Acquisition, pp ) Parker, C. R. (1997), Guide to Web Content and Design. MIT Press, New York. 8).Tusha K. Hazra, (2005), Building Enterprise Portals: principles to practice, in Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pp ) Detlor. B.,(2000). The corporate portal as information infrastructure: towards a framework for portal design, International Journal of Information Management, vol.20, pp ) Tojib, D., Sugianto, L., & Rahim, M. (2005 ). A New Framework for B2E Portal Development, Proceeding IEEE international conference on e- technology, e-commerce and e- services. 11) Remus. U., (2006). Critical Success Factors of Implementing Enterprise Portals, proceeding IEEE International Conference on System Sciences, pp 182a- 182a. 12) Grant A. Jacoby., Luqi. (2005), Intranet Portal Model and Metrics a Strategic Management Perspective, in proceedings: IEEE computer Society IT Pro, pp: ) Introducing ITIL standards for service to your clients. (2002), Accessed date Feb 22, 2010.