Providing User Self-Care

Providing the right level of self-care is critical if the user is to receive a good customer experience. Any self-service/care portal should be able to support the same sort of experience that users are provided with in the web generally. If you look at Yahoo! mail or iGoogle, a user can arrange different types of content in their web view. The same should be the case for the cloud portal, allowing tenants to add fulfillment, assurance, and billing content as long as they are entitled to see such content as a critical part of any solution. In most cases, providers have three options:

• Build a portal using a standard framework, such IBM Websphere

• Buy a cloud portal

• Use an aggregator/broker