Portal Development –

“A day at a time”

Director’s Seminar

Wed August 8, 2001

Annie Stunden - CIO

John Peterson - Dir. PS

Division of Information Technology (DoIT)

University of Wisconsin - Madison

• There are both cultural (political) and technical issues

• It is easy to get mired in both but……

• The political/cultural issues are the toughest to solve

• No one will initially agree on what a Portal should be, either technically or “politically”

• We will concentrate on the cultural issues

Key Points

Key Points

• There are both cultural (political) and technical issues

• It is easy to get mired in both but……

• The political/cultural issues are the toughest to solve

• No one will initially agree on what a Portal should be, either technically or “politically”

• (We will concentrate on the cultural issues)

If you are planning on implementing an enterprise portal you will need…….

• The support and collaboration of the entire campus…or a lot of it.. and for sure, the leadership

• A way to manage “customer” expectations

• Compelling functionality early-on

• A way to educate both your users and yourselves

• A strategy to convince your data “jailers” that this is about the user NOT the provider

• Is a BRAND NEW communication vehicle• One-to-one and two way• One-to-many or broadcast

• Uses the web but is NOT just a new web page

• Knows something about the user (push)• Can remember user decisions (pull)• Aggregates content from multiple sources

AND

FIRST you must get a broad spectrum of the campus community to understand that a portal…….

• Reverses the trend of self-published content, more like book publishing

• authors and publishers

• content providers and portal

• Presents aggregated and disparate content within a consistent user interface

• Demands intelligent and timely content management

• Allows content to be dynamically generated

• It’s chaotic, so not really. Local rules, global behavior

• It’s a new trend within the web, which itself is a new trend for communication

• So we will all learn together

SECOND you must be honest when someone asks the question “Does anyone truly understand portals?”

SO why do we need to implement a portal anyway?

BECAUSE

• It WILL contain timely and/or rapidly changing information

• It WILL contain information that pertains to “me” as a user

• It CAN and SHOULD provide virtual one-stop interaction with the Campus

• It WILL provide better service because it is about the user NOT the provider

• AND (most importantly)

• It IS how your future students already deal with their world

• In the very beginning we formed a Campus Advisory group (MUM Advisory Group) made up of key people from both College & business office Administration & Faculty & Students

• Educated them and then encouraged them to educate the Campus

• They “decided” the key user issues and it became “theirs” not ours.

How did we gain collaborative partners and manage expectations?

• The advisory group made the decision to start with students but aim at eventual “cradle to grave” service

• Selected a small (~500) student group sample for a pilot (August 2000)

• Next progressed to a larger (~1600) pilot group (January 2000)

• Performed over 70 individual demos and periodic user focus groups

• Then rolled out to all our (~5000) entering freshman (June-August 2001)

How did we encourage broad usage while getting the campus community smarter?

• As we planned for extending our portal beyond students, we formed a second advisory group with more senior folks (e-CAT) with the chancellor’s blessing

• E-CAT’s role is to formulate policy, provide coordination (and pressure where required) and set user standards

• Made the key “data jailers” the owners of the integration and simplicity issues (at least, we are trying to)

How did we manage the “data jailer” issue?

• Early commitment to NOT go beyond pilot until we had integrated enterprise web based e-mail and calendaring. (Our focus groups made this point loud & clear)

• Pushed ourselves (hard) to make that functionality available for SOAR (the entering class this summer)

• Now we are back to managing expectations as we prepare to roll out to 44,000+ students in the next 3 months!

• And faculty and staff in January 2002!!

How can we implement great functionality and generate broad and enthusiastic usage?

Issues

• Build or buy the portal infrastructure software? What about U-Portal?

• Single sign on? Can we at least get to a single id?

• IAA and integration with a registry and directory

• Mail and calendar system integration

• PeopleSoft SIS integration

• Data warehouse and query library integration

• Other integration issues. (We are are own system integrators)

More Issues

• User interface organization (roles, groups, functions, modules, tabs, etc.)

• The PeopleSoft thing again:, HTML Access, V.8.0, or a rewrite of screens?

• Relationship with other Web Pages

• How to generate both understanding & excitement across all campus communities

• How broad is target audience (Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Applicants, Vendors, Families, ????)

•

Check it out

• Html:\\my.wisc.edu• There is an annie student log-on