Your portal: Homogenised, pasteurised and flavoured to taste!

Nathan Bailey, Manager, Flexible Learning and Teaching Program, Information Technology Services, PO Box 3A, Monash University, 3800. Email: Nathan.Bailey@its.monash.edu

Keywords

portals, enterprise information portal, university, homogeneity, applications, services, user-centred design, customer-oriented websites, disintegrated environment, unified environment

Abstract

For too long, IT has provided applications which are focused on specific data niches, rather than services which are oriented to the user's needs. Users have to switch between many different applications that manage various bits of data in order to do a larger task. How much easier it would be if all these applications worked together to provide a seamless workflow in the way that the user needed to use them?! After all, users just want to find the information they need and to action it in the way they need to, quickly and easily

It is the intention of an enterprise information portal to be the "glue" that joins the many diverse offerings of an organisation into one cohesive whole -- the portal becomes the great homogeniser, encapsulating, simplifying and personalising all the heterogeneity of the organisation and its many applications into a unified, user-centric service.