Nowadays, a website is no longer just a business card, it is used increasingly as a sales tool, as support for the organizational cohesion of multi-national companies, and is the place where company employees seek and find their identity. The Web pages of the bigger companies have become accordingly complex: tens of thousands of pages initially have to be updated and maintained. The bigger companies' homepages often mutate quickly into DIY portals, intended to open up the most varied corporate resources to inhouse employees and associates.

However, as American investment bank Merrill Lynch discovered in its regular survey of American and European chief information officers, reticence continues to characterize IT investment. Yet there are rays of hope in the IT market, including, in addition to IT security, the areas of EAI (enterprise application integration) and realization of ecommerce projects. Fittingly, in spring of this year, the Meta Group noted that corporate portals will, in the near future, assume a "mission-critical" nature. In the case of major companies, portal development heads the IT to do list-according to Meta analysts' findings, 85 of the so-called Global 2000 companies are already planning to establish an enterprise information portal by the year 2003. In the next few years more than $10 billion will be directed towards portal projects. In the opinion of the Meta Group, most content- and knowledgemanagement projects will also end in realization of portal plans.

The Aberdeen Group, too, which at the end of 2001 surveyed the purchasing plans for 2002 of more than 150 IT buyers, discovered that, with 45% of all votes, content, and document management topped the IT shopping list, alongside IT security. A clear indication that, in the interim, companies are both struggling to cope with maintaining their websites and that they have recognized the value of the information stored in the widest possible range of applications to be business-critical for their own company.

Considering manufacturers in the portal platform market, the Meta Group identified two groups that are significant: powerful suppliers such as SAP, Computer Associates, IBM, and BEA, and specialists such as Day, Verity, Hummingbird, and Plumtree. But the Meta Group also discovered that the desire to invest in the field of portals is governed by RIO ratio and security considerations, with the majority of portal realizations being effected through outsourcing.

Indeed when it comes to ROI analysis, at present, opinions differ greatly. The phrase "return on investment" is well worn, and customers are increasingly dubious when manufacturers promise fast ROI. Determining the ROI of a content-management system alone seems not altogether straightforward, even if so-called "business needs" are clearly at the forefront. The cost of a content-management system is made up of software licenses (including databases, search engines, and other necessary packages), the cost of integration, adaptation to customer requirements and system expansion, as well as costs stemming from integration services (data housekeeping, migration, etc.). According to inquiries by Forrester Research in January 2001, the price of a content-management system can easily cross the $500,000 threshold. In order to calculate ROI, these costs must be offset against "profits" that a company can achieve by using a content-management system.

Tony Byrne, founder and managing editor of CMSWatch (www.cmswatch.com) includes socalled "hard factors" such as increased sales, better distribution of products and services, increased return from existing IT investments (e.g. ERP), faster time-to-market, greater process efficiency, reduced Web-publishing costs, reduced paper or mailing activity costs, reduced costs resulting from human error. According to Byrne "soft" factors that also represent a profit for the company are to be added to these hard factors: achievability of uniform online communication, maintaining a cohesive brand strategy, gaining increased customer satisfaction, a greater degree of socalled "content security," which may in turn reduce the problem of legal disputes, as well as improvements in internal specialist knowledge due to greater employee specialization. Demonstrating ROI is therefore an uninspired (and very laborious) task.

For CIOs who simply can't dispense with a serial "house number" at this point, software manufacturer Merant's calculation is provided as guidance. For the content-creation sector alone, the latter calculated $1,412,500, $412,000 for maintenance, $124,000 for publishing deployment, enhancements (including business benefits) $156,250, a total ROI per annum of $2,105,250 that could result from implementation of a content-management system (in this case a Merant system).

Since a content-management system initially represents the first necessary step towards a portal, it's no wonder that the whole ROI thing becomes very complex when it comes to accurate quantification of cost and benefit in the portal market. Establishing a portal is not just limited to its frontend implementation. Instead it takes a firm grip on the back-end too, since, as platforms, they are responsible for integration, collation, and segmentation of greatly differing sources of data. Behind the term "enterprise information portal" lurks the technical challenge of carrying out genuine "enterprise content management"-a company must be able to access manuals, emails, and business-critical documents just as swiftly and easily as it can ERP or CRM data, or images, or video streams, etc. It is this content that must be available without restriction to company employees, as well as suppliers and customers. Because this data does not lie in a central archive or repository, it must be collated laboriously, i.e. access must be provided to the varying ERP, CRM, workflow, procurement, or supply management systems.

Spinning Wheels

At the start of the year, online magazine Business 2.0 (www. business2.com) listed software and integration costs for a comprehensive ebusiness site, including application integration, sales integration, supply-chain integration, and inclusion of finance and fulfillment, under the heading "The Big Integrations." According to this, between $300,000 and $1.5 million will have to be shelled out for application integration, between $300,000 and $500,000 for sales integration, between $1 million and $3 million dollars for supply-chain integration, around $100,000 to include finance, and between $250,000 and $450,000 to tie in fulfillment. In the worst-case scenario, a company could face a bill totaling $5.5 million, to be ascribed to integration alone. These costs do not take account of TCO (total cost of ownership) that, over the years, may account for many times the startup costs.

Dangerously, the sense and advantage of such expensive integration, as listed by Business 2.0, is taken for granted. David Nuscheler, CTO at Day, has most recently made clear that doubt can be cast on this. "The use of products to automate business processes is simply an expensive attempt to link systems at process level. If processes are to be truly transparent, their dependency upon applications must be eliminated and the focus must be on the content within the applications."

The fashion for content management has caused Forrester Research to compare nine products from content-management manufacturers in a so-called "tech ranking." The results, published this spring, revealed that most content-- management systems could cope with website administration, but some exhibited catastrophic deficiencies, however, when performing access to databases, ERP applications, workflow systems, email systems, etc.

Only those members of the IT community who have fed some fool or other a "total integration" costing millions of dollars will be troubled by the fact that this goal can be achieved already using the latest generation of content-management software that, in fact, should already be classed as "infrastructure software." Much to the IT industry's chagrin, however, this ROI-immune species is, unfortunately, dying out. The sarcastic comment by Steve Milunovich, senior technology strategist with Merrill Lynch, regarding everdecreasing IT investment was: "This year, CIOs are being paid to spend nothing."