A Benchmark-Based Approach for Evaluating Capability of Enterprise Web Portals

Business of all kinds is increasingly being conducted on-line, potentially dissolving the boundaries between local, national and global entities. No matter how sophisticated a company´s traditional business model is, its e-business capability is only as effective as its enterprise web portal. It is therefore important for a company to evaluate its web portal´s e-business capability against those in similar businesses, in order to improve the company´s competitiveness on the internet. This paper describes a benchmark-based evaluation approach for the purpose. By choosing a set of enterprise web portals leading the best practices of e-business in a specific business sector, a benchmark of e-business capability and criteria can be established. The benchmark can then be used to evaluate the e-business capability of a specific enterprise web portal, resulting indications where the evaluated web portal can be improved. The novelty of the approach is that the capability evaluation based on the approach gives specific indications of possible improvement for the evaluated portal. The limitation of the approach is that it requires a rather deeper understanding of the business sector in order to establish the benchmark. The paper also describes a case study on using the approach for Mainland Chinese IT sector.