Proven Portals: Best Practices for Planning, Designing, and Developing Enterprise Portals

Root Causes of Poor Adoption

Organizations are pouring valuable IT resources into developing and deploying enterprise information portals with clear expectations about ROI. But what if knowledge workers don't use the portal? What if the little-spoken truth behind EIPs is that too often, users don't care? If users do not adopt the portal, much of the ROI is not realized; users continue to rely on alternative, less efficient methods to get their jobs done; and IT ends up maintaining the portal as well as the ad hoc substitutes for a centralized data and content management system. To avoid this problem, we need to understand it.

Poor adoption can strike any portal project. The list below outlines the most common causes.

• The portal is difficult to ...