Assessing a Fragmented Enterprise Portal Ecosystem

A regional bank had grown through years of decentralized, business-unit-led technology decisions. Each line of business had built and maintained its own client-facing portal, with its own login flow, its own design conventions, and its own backend systems. The result was a fragmented experience for clients who needed to move between products, and an internal picture of "the portal experience" that didn't actually exist as a single, coherent thing. Before anyone could recommend a future state, the organization needed a clear-eyed, evidence-based understanding of the current one.

I was part of a small research and analysis team brought in to run a comprehensive discovery effort across the bank's enterprise portals and document management systems. That meant building and running a multi-method research approach rather than relying on a single input: observational walkthroughs of each portal with the teams that owned them, one-on-one interviews with business stakeholders across departments, interviews with client-facing service teams, structured workshop sessions, and a review of existing voice-of-customer feedback and internal documentation. Across dozens of individual sessions, the goal was to build a full picture of the current experience from every angle, technical, operational, and client-facing, rather than assuming any single group had the whole story.

My part of this work centered on the qualitative side: developing interview guides tailored to each stakeholder group's role and vantage point, conducting the interviews, and synthesizing what came out of them into findings the broader team could act on.

A few patterns showed up consistently across nearly every business unit we talked to, regardless of which portal or product was involved. Digital experiences were inconsistent from one part of the bank to another, with no shared design or brand standard connecting them. Clients had little to no ability to self-service on common account tasks, even for straightforward requests, which pushed volume onto support teams that weren't resourced for it. And because each business unit operated independently, client data and workflows were siloed rather than connected, which meant no one internally had a unified view of a client's relationship with the bank.

These findings gave the bank something it didn't have previously: a shared and evidenced understanding of where the experience was breaking down, organized clearly enough to prioritize with. Our synthesis fed directly into the roadmap and future-state recommendations the broader team developed from there, and the strength of the findings played a direct role in expanding the consultancy's engagement, leading to additional project work beyond our original scope.

This project demonstrates the ability to run a multi-method research effort at an enterprise scale, and to synthesize input from a wide range of stakeholder types into a single coherent, prioritized set of findings. It also illustrates the power of research: when insights are credible enough to shape a client relationship, not just simply fulfill a deliverable. The strength of the findings played a direct role in expanding the initial engagement into additional project work.