GrowingPains

Birth of a portal

On September 30, the Tilburg University student portal was launched. The portal seems to have been enthusiastically received by both the students (the end users) and the information suppliers (such as faculties, service departments, and student associations) who own the portlets that make up the portal. To get an idea of what it is, look here for a brief overview.

Developing the portal has been a very complex project, with respect to both the technology (trying to develop secure and scalable portlets and integrating the portal with a live digital learning environment in Blackboard) and the organizational back-end of requirements analysis, definition of procedures, and communication. Nevertheless, the many people and organizational units involved together have been able to produce something the university can be proud of. The project will continue until the end of December, to finetune the embedding of the portal in the university organization, but my role as project leader has now officially finished.

Some key development goals of the portal were that it had to be Single Sign On (one login for most applications), comprehensible (in terms of having a clear overview of underlying information resources) and userfriendly and customisable. One of the most important features of the portal to me is, however, that it is owned by the community and will be further developed in a continuous process. It is a good sign that during the demos of the portal just before the launch, many ideas have already come up for new portlets, which will be worked out in future rounds of portal development.

The portal is of, for, and by the students. It should be their view on the complex and fragmented information system reality of the university. As end users they have been closely consulted in the development of the current version. Furthermore, the students also play an active role as information supplier, for example through the news and activity agenda "community portlets" owned by the student associations.

To ensure ownership by the students, interactive, two-way communication with the students has been a priority in the project. Some communication channels were:

• Consultation with formal student representatives, such as with the Library and IT Services Student Advisory Board, as well as informal talks with individual students.
• A suggestion form which allows students to provide ideas for improvements and new features. An overview of these suggestions is publicly accessible.
• An extensive student survey resulted in over 900 completely filled out surveys. These results were the basis of many design decisions for the final version of the portal.
• A weblog was set up to inform the students and other stakeholders about developments and considerations during the development process.

The portal should have great value for the organization. Students have more efficient and customised access to that information that is most relevant to them. Still, the portal is much more than that. Creating a useful "cockpit for student applications", requires an extensive consultation and alignment between needs and interests of students, information suppliers and technology providers. In this process, bridges are being built between people and organizational units and much synergy and energy can be released in the university organization. As such, the portal acts as a "university wide web" in which users and suppliers of information and ICT meet each other in a continuous process of idea generation and collaboration, resulting in the development and integration of essential work support systems and processes.

I am moving on now with CommunitySense, but am very happy that I have been able to put some community theory into good practice...

Portals as Community Hubs

The main project I have been working on since last September is as the leader of the implementation of the student web portal of Tilburg University. It is interesting to be back here, this time in a very different role. Whereas as a student and scientist I was always thinking analytically about information systems development, I am now in the trenches trying to make these systems actually work, a very different ball game!

The original project assignment was quite a different one from the current mission. The initial idea was to build and deliver a portal consisting of a number of predefined portlets (channels to applications). These included portlets like My Week Schedule, My Exam Schedule, University News, Webmail, and so on. Through the portal, these applications are to be accessed from a single location, with a single sign on. The list was compiled by a committee in a preceding project, based on student surveys and a thorough analysis of goals and available resources.

Although such a well thought-through list is a prerequisite for a successful portal, it is not a sufficient condition. Rather than being a frozen technical system, a portal is a living socio-technical system.  It is a catalyst for the building of relations between people, applications, and business processes. Much more than a static, hierarchical model, a lateral, evolutionary model should guide the development of a portal. A portal is never finished, but needs to continuously grow in requirements and functionalities, driven by the real needs of the end users, in this case, students, while being constrained by technical and organizational realities.

Having been fully immersed in this process for half a year now, and still to go on for half a year more, it is surprising how much time and effort is needed not only in building technology, but in identifying stakeholders and aligning their needs, preferences, and interests. Not only students, but also the technologists and the owners of the applications and information resources to which the portal links need to have their say. Legitimacy is therefore all-important, as every decision can affect the ways of working of so many in the organization. In fact, the portal project is all about building for a community with a community. More about how we approach this from a community perspective in a later post.