Competitive advantage through role based portals

Digital transformation has many facets, and you can look at this term from many angles, giving different possible approaches, initiatives and results. A digital strategy is about how to gain advantages over your competitors using IT, and derived initiatives will almost always include business processes and data. In this blog series, we will give our view on how sharing business processes and data outside your organization could give you that edge.

An interesting question is how we can include our business partners (customers, suppliers and employees) even stronger and more seamless with our own business. Traditionally our processes and data have been available to our employees, but today it’s obvious that these resources are interesting to our external environment as well. A company’s different software platforms are playing a major role, giving users or user groups a fixed set of features and functions intended to make their work more effective. Related to this, there are at least three challenges that could be discussed:

1. Do these platforms, alone or together, give a complete and holistic support for the core processes and their users?

2. Do they give the necessary user experience for the different user roles?

3. Are they available to the user groups when and where they need the data or functionality?

Often, the answers are “no” to all of these questions, which is why custom, role based portals may make a difference for your business. A web portal designed to meet those challenges may represent a way forward as part of your digital strategy.

To turn the answers to “yes”, we will need to provide our users with that tool that gives them the holistic view and access to all needed processes and data, with an unbeatable user experience. Available to the specific user groups, - when they need it. Is it that simple? Well, yes and no. Yes, because the theory and technology are the easy part. No, because it takes some amount of resources and also organizational alignments to agree on what is a holistic view of one process area, what is the optimal user experience and so on. In most cases different core IT systems have to be integrated into the portal in order to give a complete data set, - which is a relatively easy task. The key element will always be the user interface and the user experience, which is why this part (the portal itself) should be detached from the core systems, and implemented without any limitations given in core systems, whether you think of data or the presentation of them.

Some of the beauty in this concept is that it's universal, in the way that it can be implemented regardless of

• industry

• user role

• process area

• data sources

• needs

• level of complexity

This is a general introduction to the matter. In separate articles we will take more deep dives into related topics like

• roles and user experience

• integrations and architecture

• examples for different industries

If you wish to dive deeper into the topics related to the future of  B2B digital experiences, feel free to download our eBook "Gearing Up For Digital B2B".