Business Objectives
The business goals of your portal affect deployment decision. Understand your objectives. If you do not understand your business requirements, you can easily make erroneous assumptions that could affect the accuracy of your deployment estimates.
Use these questions to help you identify your business objectives:
•What are the business goals of this portal? (For example, do you want to enhance customer service? Increase employee productivity? Reduce the cost of doing business?)
•What kind of portal do you need? (For example,
•Who is your target audience?
•What services or functions will the portal deliver to users?
•How will the target audience benefit from the portal?
•What are the priorities for the portal? (If you plan to deploy your portal in phases, identify priorities for each phase.)
(Optional) Use these questions to help identify your business objectives if you are deploying a secure portal:
•Do you need to increase employee productivity (by making your intranet applications and servers accessible over the Internet)?
•Do you need to provide secure access to your portal?
•Do you need to reduce cost of ownership of an existing Virtual Private Network (VPN) solution?
•Do you want employees to access intranet applications such as Citrix and pcAnywhere from the Internet?
•Do you want your employees to explore intranet servers or machines from the Internet?
•Who is your target audience (all portal users, employees, or customers)?
