Challenges and Pitfalls in Portal Information Management

Book chapter, 2007

One major objective for information portals is to provide relevant and timely information to its intended target group. The main challenge from an information management perspective, however, is that the portal it self does not have full information ownership, and therefore can not guarantee information quality. Poor information quality severely decreases the actual business value of a portal, but the quality of the portal information is inherrited from the underlying sources. The case study we present illustrates the evolution of the Swedish Travel and Tourism Council’s (STTC) national Internet portal through three phases, thereby unmasking some of the core problems in portal information management; information ownership, stakeholder incentives, and clear business roles in the content provision process. Information portals have been on the business agenda since the hay-days of the Internet era, but the portal concept has during the last ten years emerged to encompass much more than merely a set of links to web pages. In the early 2000, industry trend-watchers forecasted the portal development in corporations to sky-rocket but the benefits are still to be seen. It is evident that there is still no scientifically sound proof and most of the claimed benefits are merely anecdotal and more real case studies of portal implementations in order to verify or falsify these claims. Our chapter therefore makes a contribution by reporting from an acuall case study.