Portal Development – “A day at a time” Director’s Seminar Wed August 8, 2001 Annie Stunden - CIO John Peterson - Dir. PS Division of Information Technology (DoIT) University of Wisconsin - Madison

There are both cultural (political) and technical issues It is easy to get mired in both but…… The political/cultural issues are the toughest to solve No one will initially agree on what a Portal should be, either technically or “politically” We will concentrate on the cultural issues Key Points

There are both cultural (political) and technical issues It is easy to get mired in both but…… The political/cultural issues are the toughest to solve No one will initially agree on what a Portal should be, either technically or “politically” (We will concentrate on the cultural issues)

If you are planning on implementing an enterprise portal you will need……. The support and collaboration of the entire campus…or a lot of it.. and for sure, the leadership A way to manage “customer” expectations Compelling functionality early-on A way to educate both your users and yourselves A strategy to convince your data “jailers” that this is about the user NOT the provider

Is a BRAND NEW communication vehicle One-to-one and two way One-to-many or broadcast Uses the web but is NOT just a new web page Knows something about the user (push) Can remember user decisions (pull) Aggregates content from multiple sources AND FIRST you must get a broad spectrum of the campus community to understand that a portal…….

Reverses the trend of self-published content, more like book publishing authors and publishers content providers and portal Presents aggregated and disparate content within a consistent user interface Demands intelligent and timely content management Allows content to be dynamically generated

It’s chaotic, so not really. Local rules, global behavior It’s a new trend within the web, which itself is a new trend for communication So we will all learn together SECOND you must be honest when someone asks the question “Does anyone truly understand portals?”

SO why do we need to implement a portal anyway? BECAUSE It WILL contain timely and/or rapidly changing information It WILL contain information that pertains to “me” as a user It CAN and SHOULD provide virtual one-stop interaction with the Campus It WILL provide better service because it is about the user NOT the provider AND (most importantly) It IS how your future students already deal with their world

In the very beginning we formed a Campus Advisory group (MUM Advisory Group) made up of key people from both College & business office Administration & Faculty & Students Educated them and then encouraged them to educate the Campus They “decided” the key user issues and it became “theirs” not ours. How did we gain collaborative partners and manage expectations?

The advisory group made the decision to start with students but aim at eventual “cradle to grave” service Selected a small (~500) student group sample for a pilot (August 2000) Next progressed to a larger (~1600) pilot group (January 2000) Performed over 70 individual demos and periodic user focus groups Then rolled out to all our (~5000) entering freshman (June- August 2001) How did we encourage broad usage while getting the campus community smarter?

As we planned for extending our portal beyond students, we formed a second advisory group with more senior folks (e- CAT) with the chancellor’s blessing E-CAT’s role is to formulate policy, provide coordination (and pressure where required) and set user standards Made the key “data jailers” the owners of the integration and simplicity issues (at least, we are trying to) How did we manage the “data jailer” issue?

Early commitment to NOT go beyond pilot until we had integrated enterprise web based and calendaring. (Our focus groups made this point loud & clear) Pushed ourselves (hard) to make that functionality available for SOAR (the entering class this summer) Now we are back to managing expectations as we prepare to roll out to 44,000+ students in the next 3 months! And faculty and staff in January 2002!! How can we implement great functionality and generate broad and enthusiastic usage?

Issues Build or buy the portal infrastructure software? What about U-Portal? Single sign on? Can we at least get to a single id? IAA and integration with a registry and directory Mail and calendar system integration PeopleSoft SIS integration Data warehouse and query library integration Other integration issues. (We are are own system integrators)

More Issues User interface organization (roles, groups, functions, modules, tabs, etc.) The PeopleSoft thing again:, HTML Access, V.8.0, or a rewrite of screens? Relationship with other Web Pages How to generate both understanding & excitement across all campus communities How broad is target audience (Students, Faculty, Staff, Alumni, Applicants, Vendors, Families, ????)

Check it out Html:\\my.wisc.edu There is an annie student log-on