Building Enterprise Communities With Enterprise Portals

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Category: Portal

Published on Wednesday, 18 July 2007 22:56

Written by Jude Lobo

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"The future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered by the present, but a place that is created--created first in the mind and will, created next in activity. The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating. The paths are not to be found, but made, and the activity of making them, changes both the maker and the destination." John Schaar A Gift Retailer once decided to expand his business by selling gifts online. The problems he faced in deciding to build an online-store was firstly generating funds for advertising to get customers to visit the site and secondly persuading them to order gifts. Instead he chose to build a Portal, where members would be offered Dating Ideas, Relationship Advice, Matchmaking and Horoscope Information. People dating and looking for romantic ideas often visited and registered as members of the Portal. By providing these services free, effectively he had built a community with a huge potential customer base. He thus successfully grew the business by extending sales to the community members through a collaborative effort of service and relationship building.
 
The need for community is one of the human strongest innate desires and it has been the accomplishment of community that fuelled Internet growth. Virtual Community is defined by Howard Rheingold as ‘a group of people who may or may not meet one another face to face, and who exchange words and ideas through the mediation of computer bulletin boards and networks'. Indeed the earliest use of what we now call the “Internet” was to facilitate communication among communities of scientists, researchers, and scholars. The advent of E-Commerce gave birth to a new business model, the “Community Model”. The viability of which was based on user loyalty where users had a high investment in both time and emotion. When an enterprise creates a community of like-minded people to be a part of, lots of people respond. The value achieved from this model grows exponentially with the number of users who effectively use it. It's the human connections, not the electronic ones that make a community. What matter most is the way communication change human minds, not the way digital data is shuffled.
 
With organization spread across geographical boundaries, cultures and businesses the need to build corporate communities to strengthen the social fabric of the organization forms an area of prime importance. An Enterprise Portal should thus be centred around building of a B2C Community focused on cultivating a positive associations for the product in the minds of consumers, a B2B Community focused on building trust and improving customer service by delivering greater value from every step in the business processes across the value chain and a B2E Community focused on knowledge sharing and building a sense of community spirit within the employees of the enterprise.
To this effect the Enterprise Portal Solutions of the world provide all users (Customers / Employees / Partners) personalized convenient access (Point & Click, Drag & Relate, Single Sign-On) to everything needed (Information / Applications / Services) anytime, anywhere (Web Browser / Mobile Devices) in a secure way (Robust Security Features) to get their desired task done. But what needs to be understood most is that a sense of community combined with services should be the focus while building and implementing an Enterprise Portal.
  
Jude Lobo
Technical Analyst - Cadbury Schweppes

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