The Portal is a Failure

I can’t imagine there are many people out there who disagree – but I wanted to pin my colours to a mast. The portal as a technology idea is a failure – now move on.

The portal as a view on the world and the place where you go to for ‘everything’ doesn’t exist and never will. I have worked on a number of projects where an organisation had a grand goal of providing a place and portal where everyone could get to everything. Each of these has been lead by a corporate centre and each one has been a failure. This, in my opinion, has not be a technical failure, although the technology has a good way to go. It’s another soft-skills issue. Just because you want to see the data in this way doesn’t mean Sue does, or Jonathan does, or Emily does.

Anyone who does any software development knows this. Write an application and some people will think it is brilliant and another set of people will think it really sucks. This is not because the application is either good or bad – it’s because we humans are massively complicated things and we don’t approach things in the same way.

I personally use hundreds of different bits of technology and will switch between them all day, Sue uses a different set, Jonathan another, and Emily another. So why would I want to dumb down to a single view of the world. I use different technology because I relate to the way it is working. I have a personal thing with the particular portal that my employer uses, it just doesn’t make sense to me. But I know others in the company who think it’s great.

You can’t even say that the desktop is he portal – because I use other interfaces.

lease, please, please find the proper place for the portal – as a point of aggregation and connection.