Portals ranked as one of the five key technologies for the coming year in a recent survey by the Society for Information Management. But if IT heads can see the value of the technology, business users remain hard-pressed to quantify that value. Notes Jim Murphy, research director at Boston-based consultancy AMR Research: "It's very difficult to figure out what value they're getting out of this."

Many companies with portals point to a reduction of complexity as the technology's greatest selling point. Sunil Rajpal, senior vice president and associate segment executive at Bank of America, says the bank's in-house portal project has cut the number of internal Websites by nearly 85 percent. That, in turn, will enable BofA to pare the number of servers it operates.

Other savings accrue from the trimming of business-process activity and paperwork. Moreover, managers at the bank have used portal technology to unify the look of all company sites — a plus for internal branding. But putting a dollar sign on branding initiatives is a tricky proposition at best.

Not surprisingly, the vendors' claims of enormous savings may well be overblown. David Vanslette, vice president of portal services at JPMorgan Chase & Co., says one tech consultancy told him that some portal projects were yielding 40 percent reductions in process costs. But according to Vanslette, without cost-accounting systems for lines of businesses, business functions, even product lines, it's difficult to size up any savings. He can tell, however, that "our savings were nowhere near 40 percent."

The trend toward Web services will only complicate the ability to perform return-on-investment calculations in the future. Using Web services, companies can pull out a discrete element of an application, then grant access to the feature via a portal. While that approach is still in its infancy, the concept raises whole new questions about IT governance. "The original funders of the app aren't the only ones who will use it," points out Nils Gilman, director of product marketing (WebLogic Portal) at BEA Systems Inc. "So who pays for it?"

Hard to say. For his part, Vanslette advises portal ponderers not to overthink things. "You can try to figure out cost-savings [from a portal] for a long time," he says. So far, the company's prove-out process has taken 60 to 90 days. Vanslette says he'd like to get that down to 30 days. "Once we meet our threshold, we move on." —J.G.

How Cool These Portals Be
The business benefits of portal technology.

• Single entry point for Web links, databases, and applications.
• Single user log-in for multiple systems.
• Reduction of intranets and internal Websites.
• Unified look and feel for internal Websites; navigation elements all the same.
• Centralized management of security and user IDs.
• No need to republish content or to individually fix errors across multiple sites.

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