INTRODUCTION
One major objective for information portals is to provide relevant and timely information to their intended target groups. The main challenge from an information management perspective, however, is that the portal itself does not have full information ownership, and therefore cannot guarantee information quality. Poor information quality severely decreases the actual business value of a portal, but the quality of the portal information is inherited from the underlying sources. The case study we present illustrates the evolution of the Swedish Travel and Tourism Council’s (STTC) national Internet portal through three phases, thereby unmasking some of the core problems in portal information management: information ownership, stakeholder incentives, and clear business roles in the content provision process.
Information portals have been on the business agenda since the hey-days of the Internet era, and can as a concept originally be attributed to Yahoo! Inc., an Internet search service that has categorised Web information since 1994 (see www.yahoo.com). However, the portal concept has during the last 10 years emerged to encompass much more than merely a set of links to Web pages. In early 2000, industry trend-watchers forecasted that portal development in corporations would skyrocket. Delphi Group reported that 55% of Fortune 500 companies already had corporate portal projects in progress and Gartner Group predicted that more than half of all major companies by the end of the year 2001 would have corporate portals as the primary method for organising and discovering corporate resources (Detlor, 2000). The hype can partly be attributed to highly overtoned statements found in management literature: “The corporate portal is the most important business information management project of the next decade” (Collins, 2001) or Information Week’s speculation whether portals will become “the next generation of desktop computing [and] … do for global knowledge-work what the railroad did for the industrial revolution” (Koulopoulos, 1999). However, as Dias (2001) points out in her review of portal literature, the benefits are still to be seen. Following her review, it is evident that there is still no scientifically sound proof and most of the claimed benefits are merely anecdotal with Detlor (2004) as the obvious exception. Dias concludes by calling for more real case studies of portal implementations in order to verify these claims and we therefore intend to make a contribution by reporting from an actual case study. In our work we focus on the back-end side of enterprise portals, that is, the integration point with all underlying information resources.
BACKGROUND
This work has been carried out in close collaboration with the Swedish Travel and Tourism Council (STTC), as a longitudal qualitative case study (Landqvist & Stenmark, 2006). In 1999, STTC, the Swedish Tourist Authority and the Swedish Tourist and Travel Industry Federation started two inter-organisational development projects, one aiming to increase knowledge sharing within the tourism industry (see Landqvist & Teigland, 2005), and one that intended to enhance the visibility of Sweden on the Internet (Visit-Sweden). In this text, we focus on the latter, and have interviewed the infomaster and CIO of STTC.
The tourism industry has already been recognised as highly fragmented and in need of various collaboration and coordination efforts. Research on tourism development has hence highlighted the importance of engaging all potential stakeholders, and to do so early in the development process (Aas, Ladkin, & Fletcher, 2005). When it comes to stakeholder participation and IT projects, Irani (2002) showed a relationship between the level of involvement in the concept justification phase and the level of commitment towards project success. Beecham, Hall, Cottee, and Rainer (2005) show that lack of stakeholder input in requirements engineering processes is a major problem and a cause of project failure.
Regarding portal design, researchers have acknowledged the need to involve stakeholders. To illustrate, Detlor (2004) advocates participatory design (PD), that is, an approach which lets the users take active part in eliciting requirements and making decisions. According to Detlor (2000), PD is a “robust and comprehensive method by which to secure a useful and well-utilised portal system” (p. 78). Three factors contribute to this. First, without actual users it is difficult for developers to correctly identify how knowledge is being utilised across the organisation. Second, portals span the entire organisation and must thus be based on the input from all stakeholders. Third, a portal changes the daily routines of the organisation. To ensure the buy-in from as many users as possible, they should be involved early in the development process.
However, Detlor’s suggestions relate to the design of the portal per se. Even though no single definition of what a portal is has emerged most commentators seem to agree that a portal should be understood as the integration of application software and information infrastructure, able to aggregate a selected subset of information to through a central location (Shilakes & Tylman, 1998). A portal’s primary function is thus to provide easy access to information and service already available elsewhere and not itself act as such a source (Detlor, 2000) (emphasis added). For this integration to work, the underlying information and services must be very precisely aligned, but it is unclear how this alignment is supposed to happen. This back-end side of the portal has not been covered by previous academic work nor is it described in the trade press or in the vendors’ brochures. It seems that the integration is tacitly understood as trivial, but, as our case shall illustrate, this is far from the case. On the contrary, the work required to align information and services in such a way may exceed the benefits for the information owner, and hence overturn the entire portal implementation.
The focus of the business case will not be on the technical aspects of the portal itself but on the demands the portal places on the underlying information resources and how stakeholder involvement affects the degree to which these demands are met.
SWEDISH TRAVEL AND TOURISM
council portal
The Swedish Travel and Tourism Council is a national organisation, responsible for the promotion of Sweden as a business and leisure travel destination. STTC is owned equally by the Swedish Government and by the Swedish tourism industry. The main focus is marketing, information, coordination and distribution to the travel trade, media and consumers. The business objectives are to ensure attractive and enriching experiences while traveling in Sweden, improve profitability for companies and cooperative organisations in Sweden, and increase income and enhance prosperity for Sweden as a nation.
In the rise of Internet as the main channel for communication and marketing within the tourism industry in the late 1990s, STTC realised an urgent need to provide an Internet platform for easy access to the Swedish travel and tourism experience. This was the starting point for STTC’s information portal Visit-Sweden.
The Swedish tourism industry as such is very entrepreneur driven, dominated by small and medium sized enterprises, geographically spread, and very branch specific. In addition, there are also some very large entities within the industry, for example, hotel associations or strong Swedish tourism brands that stand out such as Glasriket (the Crystal Kingdom). The tourism industry also has political dimensions, since all regions and cities do their best to draw attention to their particular offerings. The complexity of the underlying information environment was (and still is) overwhelming. The information resources could eitherbe a simple home-page for a one-man company out in the bushes, a portal with several context-specific features and applications, for example, a hotel booking systems or a regional content intensive site. The diversity and chaotic nature of the information sources made the application development extremely intricate.
A set of stakeholders from the tourism industry was allocated and tightly involved in the identification of the requirements as well as in the incremental site construction as such. A market analysis was also carried out to illuminate the end-user demands on a tourism portal of Visit-Sweden’s magnitude. Throughout all the different development phases described, STTC used end-user involvement through usability testing in a test lab. This was combined with industry stakeholder involvement to set the priorities corresponding to end-user needs. The industry stakeholders had a broad representation of the industry as such, but none of them were also owners of the key information resources that needed to be aggregated into the portal.
First Appearance: Pilot (1999)
The business driver behind the first pilot of Visit-Sweden was to allow visitors to find Swedish tourism experiences. This vision led into the domain of search portals, that is, a search engine-driven Web site. It did not go as planned, however.
Even though a multitude of tourism sites were readily available, they were hard to track down in the information gathering processes. The fine tuning of the different Web crawlers was cumbersome and very manually intense, and the central administrators were not particularly experienced with search engine configuration. Another problem with the sites that actually were indexed was that the information quality was so low. The Web sites contained both test data and outdated information that cluttered the index and hid the more useful pieces, since the awareness of searchability was not present in the mindset of most site owners. Consequently, neither a guide to the site structure (robots.txt file) nor relevant metadata were present.
Second, many of the end users searching for traveling experiences in Sweden did not have enough knowledge about Sweden to construct precise search queries and Boolean expressions that would narrow down the result lists into something useful. They rarely constructed any complex search queries, and they did not use the advanced search form at all. A majority only entered a single keyword. The negative feedback received from the end users and the tourism and travel industry indicated the need to help the end user in the navigation.
Second Coming and Relaunch (2000-2002)
The business vision that the Swedish Tourism and Travel Council had for the second version of the portal was for the end users to be able to drill down into the unexploited and unexplored information resources that represented tourism in Sweden, and refine the information into usable fuel for the end users’ travel planning, both when the end user was in pretravel mode and while being in Sweden. STTC also wanted to customise the information according to well-known target groups, and in some sense personalise the appearance to further improve the end-user experience and the perceived information quality.
The experience from having relied solely on a search engine in the first pilot version uncovered many problems. Based on the problems in the pilot, STTC acquired a new search engine that would also help out in the information management and automatic categorisation domains. The vision was to help the end user with a personalised Yahoo-like navigation. In addition, two other dimensions were also included: spatial information and time-related information.
For the spatial information, STTC acquired a geographical information system (GIS) to provide dynamic maps and positions. To be able to actually get good information into this system and the related producer/product database, STTC asked the information owners to codify all their offerings and geographical positions according to STTC’s standards. Because of the awkward input process, not many did, however.
The time-related information was meant to enable the search for events, but this complicated things even more. Many information owners already had self-developed calendar applications to market different local events, but these were incompatible with one another. STTC started a standardisation process together with several different important industry players in order to develop an XML scheme that would expand the calendar objects with event-specific data.
STTC spent all the way too much resources to get all different applications to work together, instead on the real information management issues, such as a good navigation structure, good information ownership and resource quality issues. Visit-Sweden’s Infomaster explains: “We totally underestimated the information management domain. The poor information quality of the underlying information resources diminished the business value of the portal.”
Third Time: Present Portal Experience
In the third development attempt, the Swedish Tourism and Travel Council tried to ensure information quality by offering an appealing brochure-like illustration of Sweden before directing the end user into the details residing elsewhere. This was achieved applying a content management approach which incorporated an editorial process and a central staff of editors. There were primarily two reasons for this development. First, tourists were not able to find Visit-Sweden using other Internet search engines, since Visit-Sweden did not have much content of its own. Second, the tourists that did find the site did not have enough background knowledge about Sweden to be able to make informed choices given the different options available. By adding high quality content at the portal level, STTC intended to address both these problems.
A producer/product database that was developed by regional tourism authorities in Sweden was purchased. Again, the reason for this action was to provide information of higher quality, which was achieved. However, it came with a cost. STTC realised that they did not have the expertise required to effectively run a search engine and therefore decided to end their endeavour in the search engine realm. The purchased database did only contain a small subset of all tourism offerings in Sweden and since STTC no longer had a search engine, most parts of the existing tourism related content on the Internet was excluded. This impeded on STTC’s ability to connect the end user with the tourism industry not present in the purchased database.
Even with the database, the Visit-Sweden portal still relied on information from other information owners. The majority of entries in the database were provided by small entrepreneurs who saw this as a free marketing channel, and who had the time to fill in all forms and to codify the information. The work required by large tourism companies to codify their offerings was substantial, while the added value of being included in the portal had diminished due to the individual sites being searchable via standard search engines such as Google.
discussion
The owners of the information resources within an enterprise portal usually have a well-defined end-user community and therefore focus the content on fulfilling their local business demands. Information owners are thus reluctant to invest in the extra effort required to share their content base with some overarching portal without seeing tangible return on investments. This problem is very apparent in the context of Visit-Sweden. However, the information resource owners may be incorrect in assuming that their customer base is restricted to their local context. The increased visibility that comes from contributing to the portal may generate benefits that well exceed the work invested, but this may be difficult to see from their position. We suggest that the problem is pedagogical rather than technical or organisational.
Information ownership also relates to the power relations that may exist amongst different business units. The portal directs attention to the top of the organisation and local information owners may fear that all resources will be redirected to the portal instead of to their specific businesses.
Information integration is a second issue. It may seem that adding content metadata, setting up a robot.txt file, or removing ob solete and outdated data on a Web site to improve the spidering and the indexing would be simple, but as our case study shows, even such tasks require cooperation and coordination amongst the information owners and is thus more complicated than one might be lead to believe.
In the case of having more sophisticated underlying information systems that need to be integrated even more complexity is added. This complexity is inherited to the domain of governance of the underlying information model in the specific information system. Any information system within a corporate setting has already a predefined agenda, which not always aligns easily with the more enterprise-wide integration view of the actual content.
Enterprise-wide portal information management is a balancing act between central and decentralised information management practices. Clearly, local content providers benefit from central investments in information technologies such as content management systems, taxonomy management systems, or search engines. However, central information management efforts might instead be considered an albatross around one’s neck when there are no visible short-term gains. In this lies a paradox: only the local information owner who knows his or her information in detail, but only the portal manager who can see the greater picture and understands how every little piece can contribute to the enterprise view.
FUTURE RESEARCH
The obstacles described on the back-end side of the portal are easily derived from the information needs and demands relating to the front-end. An enterprise portal is typically supposed to serve all, but often fails by being far too general to actually create business values in day-to-day life for the end user. Many users instead direct their information needs directly toward the underlying information resources that already serve a tangible outcome. When it comes to the creation of a sound information architecture that will work both on the top level as well as in the local setting, we foresee power relations and business tensions that need qualitative research.
STTC has during the last two years focused on the motivational, training and knowledge sharing efforts, to improve their inter-organisational relations with the industry, since this is a core issue for the success of the Visit-Sweden site. We intend to carry out our further portal research based on the determinants of inter-organisational relationships (Oliver, 1990), to be able to uncover new contributions the portal research domain.
CONCLUSION
Our account shows that technology per se does not make cultural, political or business boundaries disappear. Too often, information owners are either kept out of the loop entirely or assumed to willingly provide whatever the new technology required. From the content providers’ perspective, the business incentive to engage is thus missing. To be successful, portal projects need to address information ownership, information integration and information management, and balance skillfully between the central and the local context. To build a portal, which itself has no content, the owners of the subdomains and subsites must be included and given tangible reasons for sharing their content base. If all they get is extra work, the portal is likely to remain an empty shell.
KEY TERMS
Back-End Side (of Enterprise Portal): The intersection between a portal, and its underlying information resources.
Information Integration: The processes and activities of integrating information and data from different repositories, information resources and data formats into easily and comprehendible content.
Information Management: The processes, roles, activities and tools to manage the corporate information assets, throughout the information lifecycle.
Information Ownership: The responsibilities, roles and resources to manage information, information systems or information resources.
Information Resource: Information repository, information system, Web site or a depicted and clearly defined content set within a portal.
Power Relations: Interpersonal relations where power structures, visible or invisible to the organisation, inflict on the outcome of the integration process for a portal.
Stakeholder: People who will be affected by the project or can influence it but who are not directly involved with doing the project work.
