Portal Technology for the public sector: lessons from Lawson software's user conference.(Solutions)

Although portal technology offers a number of important benefits to the public sector, it is still unclear whether these benefits are enough to justify such an investment in the face of declining revenues and shifting priorities.

GFOA has established a technology consulting practice to assist state and local governments in selecting and implementing financial management and ERP systems. GFOA also serves as a public sector industry analyst through its publications, research, and training activities. Leading software firms that serve the public sector often invite GFOA staff to their annual user conferences. GFOA makes a point of sharing the information from these conferences both internally among our consultants and with our clients and members. This article presents one of the leading themes in this year's Lawson user conference--portal technology for the public sector.

WHAT'S A PORTAL?

Also known as executive information systems, portal technology is a means by which business activities, processes, and information are accessed and presented based on the user's role and responsibility. Now that the cost of data storage has decreased and the capacity to retain information in modern systems has increased, the business software industry is addressing the problem of how to access and manage all of the information retained by modern systems. Portals are an important part of the solution to this problem.

The basic premise of role-based portals is that different users of financial and ERP systems require different information. For example, the needs of purchasing agents are very different from the needs of department directors and the public. Portals resolve this issue by streamlining information access and providing users with real-time access to pertinent information.

Portals provide a broad range of real-time business performance indicators, and can display this information graphically in a manner that alerts executives to issues requiring focused attention. Portals can pull data from an organization's internal systems, but they can also extract information from the Internet and from the patchwork of shadow systems that often work in proximity to the core financial system, making this technology a particularly valuable resource for executive analysis and decision making.

One of the challenges that we in the public sector face in understanding the value of portals is the diversity of opinions within the technology community as to what exactly a portal is. While portals are used to pull information from various systems in order to improve information analysis, the term has also been used to describe systems that allow for role-based access to back-office systems. Portals have also been associated with e-government initiatives that allow citizens, government employees, and suppliers to access specific user screens and interfaces within a government system. Although each of these three functions is distinctly different, each has been associated with portal technology.