Last week, Darcy Otis left his West Des Moines office to drive to St. Joseph, Mo., on Tuesday, drove to Hazelden Center City, Minn., on Wednesday and flew to Rapid City, S.D., on Thursday. The subject for each business trip was the same: how a company can benefit from enterprise portals.

The term might sound like something you’d be concerned with in science fiction or possibly in the U.S. Navy, but “enterprise portal” refers to a hot topic among corporations that are trying to use their computer systems more efficiently.

Otis is the general manager of the local office of Quilogy Inc., a 13-year-old computer consulting company based in St. Charles, Mo., with 14 branches nationwide. When the company opened a downtown Des Moines location in 1995, its emphasis was on information technology training. “Now consulting is 90 percent of our business,” said Otis, a native of Alberta, Canada. “And we’re primarily a Microsoft consulting organization.”

Though Quilogy gets involved in a range of computer applications, the enterprise portal issue has become a top priority. In basic terms, it can be compared to a personalized starting point on a Web browser. If you have set up the home page on your computer to provide items of specific interest to you, such as finance, politics or sports news, you have a taste of how a corporate enterprise portal works.

When Otis logs on to his personalized Quilogy site, he finds an array of information tailored to him as one of the company’s general managers. For example, he sees Quilogy’s financial information, and can quickly “drill down” into the Des Moines numbers; he sees the latest information about his employment benefits; he can check his schedule; and he sees up-to-date numbers on his employees’ performance.

“This technology will have equal or more impact than e-mail” on corporate efficiency, Otis said.

But the catch is easy to spot: If your company has hundreds or even thousands of employees, how do you customize a portal for each one?

That’s one reason companies rely on consultants such as Quilogy. “If a client has thousands of employees, we set it up with generic sites,” Otis said. “Over time, we work with them to find their needs and deploy the right information to each unit.”

The particular Microsoft software Quilogy uses is called Sharepoint Portal Technology. In many cases, a Quilogy client already has it as part of an automatic Microsoft upgrade but hasn’t attempted to put it into use.

“As people look at this and play with it, they see the potential,” Otis said. Also, “the cost point is more reasonable now.” The expense varies with the size of the company, but Otis said a typical client spends $50,000-$100,000 to fully implement enterprise portals.

The Quilogy office at 1501 50th St. in West Des Moines has 15 full-time employees, and Otis hopes to add two within the next three months, and possibly two or three more in the next 12 months.

With clients to visit and computer connections galore, the Quilogy staff doesn’t use the office in a traditional way. On a recent day, staffers were at Pella Corp., GuideOne Insurance in West Des Moines, Polk County Health Services and Iowa Vocational Rehabilitation Services. One was in Redmond, Wash., working directly with Microsoft. “I haven’t seen him in about eight weeks,” Otis said.