Alice opened the door and found that it led into a small passage, not much larger than a rat-hole: she knelt down and looked along the passage into the loveliest garden you ever saw. How she longed to get out of that dark hall, and wander about among those beds of bright flowers and those cool fountains, but she could not even get her head though the doorway; "and even if my head would go through," thought poor Alice, "it would be of very little use without my shoulders."
Most critics have concluded that this scene from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had a lot to do with author Lewis Carroll's fondness for opium.
But Carroll was a numbers man — he was a lecturer in mathematics at Oxford — and he was familiar with the frustration of an elusive solution.
Chief financial officers can relate. For years they have been seeking unfettered access to the full array of treasury, accounting, and supply-chain applications deployed by their companies. No small wish. While the makers of enterprise business applications have generally promised flawless integration between their products and clients' legacy programs, more often than not there've been flaws. In some cases corporate users have had to bring in third-party software vendors to help bridge the gaps between business applications, information, and hardware. Even when employees have managed to gain access to siloed systems, figuring out how to sift through the mounds of data inside has proved to be a daunting task.
If you think we're leading up to something, you're right. Like the swell garden in Wonderland, the promised land of single-entry computing is finally in sight. Enterprise portals — personalized Web pages that provide point-and-click access to almost all data and software, no matter where the stuff resides — have finally started to catch on with mainstream business users. Indeed, a number of industry experts believe that these commercial equivalents of consumer portals like MyYahoo will soon become the standard desktop interface for most corporate computer users.
Things certainly seem headed in that direction. In the past 12 months scores of US companies, including Boeing, GMAC-RFC, and Ricoh, have deployed enterprise portals of one sort or another. Admittedly, most of the deploying has been done by or for human resources departments. But now it appears that finance departments may soon be getting portals of their very own.
That's a marked turnaround from last year, when — vendor hype notwithstanding — few companies were considering deploying corporate portals for the finance department (see "Portal Envy," CFO, July 2000). One possible reason: There weren't any corporate portals for the finance department. Early offerings in the market, including TreasuryConnect.com and CFOWeb.com, were external sites hosted by outside companies and had little integration with back- end systems. That made them more like niche Web sites than true portals, and most lacked the star power needed to attract large numbers of corporate clients. Many of these sites have since gone to that great URL in the sky.
In recent months, however, software heavyweights Baan, SAP, PeopleSoft, and Oracle have pushed further into the portal business. The pushing is understandable. Depending on whom you talk to — and what their agenda is — the portal sector is expected to generate between $20 billion and $45 billion in sales by 2004.
Projections aside, the arrival of the Big Four has big implications for how finance employees will likely do their jobs in the near future. PeopleSoft and Oracle have already announced plans to roll out full- scale portals specifically geared for the finance function. Those portals will serve as launching pads for the vendors' treasury, accounting, and supply-chain modules. In addition, SAP acquired portal specialist TopTier Software in June and turned it into a subsidiary called SAP Portals. That same month the German-based ERP and E-commerce specialist signed a deal with IBM, which licensed components from SAP Portals for use with Big Blue's WebSphere Portal Server.
Smaller, pure portal players such as Plumtree Software also have finance portals in the works. Moreover, makers of nonfinancial business applications (CRM, IR, HR, and other letters) are busy configuring their software to work on the soon-to-be released portal platforms of ERP and E-commerce vendors. The upshot of all this code-writing: Finance workers should be able to access scores of applications — financial and otherwise — from a single screen on their desktops. (See "On a Desktop Near You," at the end of this article, for the names and Web addresses of companies making their presence felt in the portal business.)
Good news for the numeric-keypad set. But surprisingly, finance workers may have more to give than to gain from portal technology. "Portals tend to be about access to information," explains IBM Global Services consultant Scott Smith. "And finance folks tend to have greater levels of access to corporate information than many of their colleagues." The real benefit of finance portals, predicts Smith, will be from the wide dissemination of financial metrics to employees. "People see those metrics on their portals and want to improve them," he says. "That's where I see a lot of work for the CFO — figuring out how they want financials used and how they want them to impact what people do."
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