Assignment on Designing an Enterprise Information Portal

You are the CIO of a major corporation that researches, develops, manufactures, and distributes pharmaceuticals. Your company, United States Pharma Corp., is headquartered in the state of New Jersey in the United States, but it has sites in many countries around the world. Many of the research sites are in the United States, Germany, France, Great Britain, Australia, and Switzerland. Distribution sites are not only in the United States and Europe but also in a number of countries in East and South Asia, Africa, Australia, Latin America, and the Middle East.

Your company is involved with much more than research and development of new drugs. For example, it owns two companies that produce and sell generic drugs (drugs that are no longer protected by a patent and so are copied and sold under other names). It also produces many over-the-counter drugs to combat such problems as headaches, pains, athlete's foot, and allergic reactions. The company also produces and sells some drugs that help cure or improve some animal diseases such as heartworms and fleas.

The key to the ongoing profits of the company is the research and development of new pharmaceuticals. The company researches thousands of possible drugs in order to finally develop and patent only one that is successful and becomes a widely sold pharmaceutical product. Such products take 8 to 15 years to research, develop, and test, followed by clinical trials and finally approval by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The staff must research both diseases and their treatments, and the potential pharmaceuticals that could become innovative new drugs. Experts who are working on the cutting edge of medical, chemical, and other fields are carrying out research in order to develop possible new drugs and medical treatments.

To undertake the research and eventually test the new products and obtain FDA approval, the researchers and other scientists must test all the possible pharmaceuticals. They must also turn to many places to obtain and share information with others both inside and outside of the company. For example they will want to communicate with the World Health Organization, the FDA, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In addition they will need to connect to the pharmaceutical industry's organizations, such as the International Federation of Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Associations (IFPMA). Health education and information sites are also critical, such as the U.S. National Library of Medicine and such private organizations as the Mayo Clinic Health Oasis.

As the CIO, you have concluded that your company needs a corporate knowledge environment portal that can enable many of the corporate employees to easily access the information they need. The users of the portal would primarily be chemical, biological, and pharmaceutical researchers as well as medical personnel involved in research, tests, and eventually clinical trials.

Your task is to set the design specifications of the corporate knowledge Web portal for United States Pharma Corp, providing a description of the different portal components that can be reviewed and approved by your senior executive committee. The design of the corporate knowledge Web portal for United States Pharma Corp must follow some of the existing best-practices framework. It is important that the framework addresses key requirements and proposes to build a flexible yet robust architecture to implement corporate knowledge Web portal.

When embarking on an enterprise portals project, a choice between a vendor supported off-the-shelf product and custom portal development must be made. The choice depends on the objective and long-term view of the portals within the enterprise. While Off-the shelf applications may be very attractive because of out-of the box functionality and rapid implementation schedules, they could be expensive and inflexible to meet changing enterprise needs. On the other hand custom portal development may take a long-time to implement and may be more expensive if the requirements are complex.

A sample Enterprise portals framework along with the Portal Development Methodology (PDM) that supports unique portal development process is shown below.

Questions

1. Prepare and present the design specifications of the corporate knowledge Web portal for United States Pharma Corp which should include the following:

- Internal systems and databases that users of the portal would need to access.
- External sources researchers would need to access to further their research.
- Internal and external communication and collaboration facilities the researchers would need to develop their ideas, pursue their research, and share their research and ideas with others.
- Intranet and Internet search tools to support research.
- Sources for relevant news relating to the company and research.
- Connections to pharmaceutical conferences and forums as well as professional organizations and appropriate professional journals.
- Any additional sources of information that would prove helpful to users.

2. Emphasize the significance of the business intelligence needed by the proposed corporate knowledge Web portal for better decision making in organizational hierarchy of United States Pharma Corp.

3. Briefly describe the role the proposed corporate knowledge Web portal play in developing stronger stakeholder relationships where organizational structures and processes of United States Pharma Corp can be used effectively.

4. Select and present appropriate strategies to develop and acquire the proposed corporate knowledge Web portal to create new efficiencies for United States Pharma Corp. (outsourcing, in-house development, etc.)

5. Provide alternatives for securing the proposed corporate knowledge Web portal's resources with the support of both human and technological safeguards. Discuss disaster recovery options and risk management.