Improving corporate portal design by using service-oriented requirements engineering and service bundling

Portals are platforms combining services from various sources for various user groups. Service bundling from marketing can serve as a new way to enable mass customization of portal services for heterogeneous user groups using existing services. The purpose of this paper is to explore how service-oriented requirements engineering and service bundling can be combined in a new approach for the design of user-centric portals in order to achieve an advanced user experience on the service consumer side and improved service management on the service provider side. The success of both intended improvements is evaluated through the use of a case study. We combine service bundling from marketing with requirements engineering for web service based systems and develop a three step approach for designing portals: first, identifying user needs and matching them to existing adequate services provided by the organization; second, the decision makers negotiate all services according to user wishes and effort expectancy and determine the functionality of the portal; third, service bundling is used to build highly user-centric portal structures that are derived from the users´ characteristic life events or demographic situations. The paper contributes to a new portal design that is fostered by user-centric service provision and high commitment of decision makers.