The corporate portal as information infrastructure: towards a framework for portal design

Corporate portals offer organizational users the ability to access a wide variety of information sources directly from the desktop. By functioning as an underlying Web infrastructure for information management, portals can provide firms with a shared information work space that facilitates access to information content, organizational communications, and group collaboration. To foster the development of portals in this way requires a design approach that goes beyond traditional technological and content concerns. Utilizing ideas borrowed from both Taylor's value-added model of systems development and Davenport's concept of the information ecology of organizations, a framework for corporate portal design is presented. The framework stresses the need for developers to incorporate value-added processes that match the information needs and uses of organizational participants and improve the organization's informational context. Doing so, can help promote corporate portal designs that function as infrastructure for information access and use.