The Role of Information Resource Management in Managing a Corporate Portal

Abstract

The Corporate Portal is a central gateway to the processes, databases, systems and workflows of an enterprise. When personalized to the job responsibilities of employees via the Intranet, the corporate portal provides a seamless, single point of access to all of the resources that employees need to do their jobs. When further personalized securely via the Internet and Extranets to the interests of suppliers, customers and business partners, the corporate portal becomes the integrating conduit of the many disparate databases, systems and workflows each enterprise uses to carry out business with others. It also becomes a single place to manage rapid enterprise change. Implementation of a corporate portal requires interfaces with legacy systems and data warehouses. An application of the enterprise architecture technique lends itself to a logical design for an enterprise portal. The portal grows through evolutionary stages. It is therefore, essential that all portal planning and development be based on the adaptive architecture, which is systematically maintained. The configuration of the portal continuously changes as the ebusiness changes. Metadata initiated during the architecture stage will play a key role in maintaining and managing the corporate portal on an ongoing basis. The presentation also covers issues Data Administration has to address in order to assure successful functioning of a corporate portal.