Efficiency and Cost Savings (pages. 12 –13)

Whilst it is clear that institutions are motivated to deploy portals by a range and

combination of the factors for Pickett and Hamre (2002) “there is one major reason for portals, efficiency. Portals help make more efficient use of an individual’s time”.

Similarly, for Looney and Lyman (2000) institutional portals are designed to make the users “Web experience more efficient and thereby make the institution as a whole more productive and responsive”.

Such a perspective is shared by Connelly (2000) who indicates that taking advantage of the portal to create an individualised information repository can lead to administrative cost savings and easier access for users.

At the University of California Berkeley (2001), senior staff realised that in a time of recession the federal agencies would be unwilling to provide additional funding for higher education. With a non academic workforce of over 100,000 the efficiency gains created through providing personalised access to information and services online are potentially large.

Louisiana State University’s desire to provide all members of the institutional community with access to data previously only available through administrative offices led to the development of a portal which provided access to existing systems (Etheridge, Hadden & Smith 2000). By empowering the user to access systems directly staff were able to work more efficiently and students access

data more easily.

Within the UK, Supple (2003) indicates that tackling the increased workload burden of academic staff and creating administrative efficiency gains were drivers behind the decision to deploy a portal at the University of Birmingham.

Similarly Cobb, Riley & Earley (London School of Economics 2002) report that the development of ‘LSE for You’ aimed to reduce the duplication and expense of keeping users informed my traditional methods. “It was labour intensive and costly to keep customers informed: letters were produced from different service providers for different purposes and little effort was made to coordinate postings between offices.”

The paper in its entirety is found at:

http://www.fair-portal.hull.ac.uk/downloads/iportaloutputs.pdf

Acknowledgements

The PORTAL project is funded under the Focus on Access to Institutional Resources (FAIR) Programme of the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). The project is undertaken as a partnership between Academic Services Interactive Media at the University of Hull and the UK Office for Library and Information Networking (UKOLN), based at the University of Bath. For further information on the JISC and JISC Programmes, visit their Web site at

http://www.jisc.ac.uk/.

References

Pickett, R.A. & Hamre, W.B. (2002). Building Portals for Higher Education. New Directions for Institutional Research (113) Spring 2002 Regents of the University of California, (2001). ‘My UCDavis: Serving us now, laying the foundations for the future enterprise portal’. UC Davis ITTimes. http://ittimes.ucdavis.edu/oct2001/myucd.html

Looney, M. & Lyman, P. (2000). Portals in Higher Education. Educause Review. July/August 2000. http://www.educause.edu/pub/er/erm00/articles004/looney.pdf

Connolly, C.G. (2000). From Static Web Site to Portal. Educause Quarterly 23 (2). http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eq/a002/eqm0024.pdf

Regents of the University of California, (2002). A New Business Architecture for the University of California. http://uc2010.edu/abuot/index.htm .

Ethridge, R.R, Hadden C. M., & Smith, M. P. (2000). Building a Personalized Education Portal: Get a behind the-scenes look at LSU’s award-winning system Education Portal, Educause Quarterly No 3. http://www.educause.edu/ir/library/pdf/eq/a003/eqm0031.pdf

Supple, D. (2003). The Portal Project at the University of Birmingham. Pan European Portals Conference 2003.

http://www.codex-se.org/pepc2003/pres/supple.ppt.

Cobb, C., Riley, R. & Earley, S. (2002). LSE for You: London School of Economics Portals Case Study. http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/BSS/JISC_LSEforYou.pdf