An approach to deliver an early return on investment during the development of a corporate Web portal

The paper describes a case study conducted in collaboration with a leading provider of global transportation solutions. The organisation is a multimodal cargo solutions provider, offering worldwide transportation via land, sea, and air, as well as logistics services. The company engaged in an initiative to develop an enterprise portal aiming to leverage leading edge technologies to improve customer service, streamline internal business processes, consolidate distributed applications, and enable the organisation to continue to expand globally. Following a feasibility study, which included analysing the current system, establishing the original system requirements, identifying new and emerging requirements, and analysing suitable portal products that would meet these organisational requirements, a portal suite was purchased. The organisation was then faced with the challenge of deploying a solution and a number of portal applications that would quickly, provide business benefits to the organisation, therefore giving stakeholders an early return on investment. The paper describes the design and development approach adopted during the initial phases of the portal development life cycle focusing, in particular, on the development and implementation of two service portal applications.