Ted Goldsmith
Azinet LLC
Company internal use of Internet technology (Intranet) is expected to be the most important business computing development in the near future. Intranets have the potential of vastly increasing business use of computers to communicate and perform collaborative work and reducing dependence on paper and highly labor intensive and time consuming paper processes now used. Intranets thus have the potential for substantially reducing costs and time required to execute business processes. Intranet technology is, however, in a relatively primitive state (even compared to Internet technology) and confusion abounds. This white paper is intended to provide some insight into the concepts and potential for Intranets.
The term Extranet is sometimes used to describe use of Internet technology for company external purposes such as communicating with customers, company employees located in customer facilities, suppliers, etc. In this paper these are all considered potential Intranet activities. In fact, a company may find a very broad spectrum of users for a single Intranet application ranging from functions which need completely public access (such as the shareholder events calendar) to functions which will need access by only a few people (such as the executive airplane schedule).
The following describes models for inter-employee communications.
Although most companies use computers extensively to perform the company's prime business, most are still using paper for many communications between company personnel and each other or between company and customers, especially "administrative" activities such as time reporting, purchase orders, budgets, memos, work orders, travel requests, etc. In addition to the number of trees that have to be chopped down to support paper oriented processes, the manual effort and time involved in typing, duplicating, hand carrying, mailing, and filing is extensive. In major companies, computers are used at a top level to perform functions such as time keeping, manpower, and budgeting but the majority of the people still collect and handle the data via paper. The problem is therefor how to involve more personnel in communicating these data via computer rather than paper and extending computer use to lower levels in the organization.
The problem is often not a hardware or infrastructure problem. Many more people have computers on their desks than use them for meaningful business communications beyond email. Many of these computers are already connected to the internet.
The division of a major aerospace organization that I worked for several years ago had about 150 different local area networks (LANs), tied to a central network and then to the internet. There are numerous "groupware" software products available for LANs. My group decided to install a groupware calendar software product which had a "server" portion which provided storage of the calendar information on the LAN server and a "client" portion which was installed on each user's desktop computer. This system failed to obtain a critical mass of users and we had to go back to a paper process for the calendar. The problems with the LAN groupware approach included the following:
The Intranet approach potentially solves all of the above problems.
An application unique client program to be installed in the user's computer can provide better appearance and sometimes significantly improve efficiency for frequent users. Browser plug-ins can be essentially self-installing. However, use of unique client software increases training and installation problems and is almost always going to be browser specific.
Use of features specific to a particular browser such as ActiveX (Microsoft) or Javascript (Netscape) can result in a more effective application but can also materially increase download time over slow links. Anything which requires use of a specific browser is going to interfere with use of the application by loose workgroups. In addition, many companies would like to delay deciding whether to implement a forced, company-wide adaptation of a specific browser until advantages and disadvantages of that approach are more clear. It is possible to have the server application detect the browser being used and then use either Jscript (Microsoft) or Javascript (Netscape).
Some applications are priced according to the number of individual users and are therefore difficult to use with loose work groups or in the generally less defined environment now existing at many companies. You don't want to pay for 100 seats and end up with four people using the application. Equally bad is having to delay an activity to wait for more licenses to be procured. What happens if you have a temporary need for a lot more slots?
Many companies are involved with loose work groups such as product development teams which are formed and dissolved on an ad hoc basis and can involve company employees, employees of other companies, outside consultants, and customer representatives temporarily teamed in support of a particular project or joint activity. One of the most promising major potential uses of Intranet applications is in the support of such loose work groups since the people tend to be geographically distributed and loosely managed. Since you don't know and don't control what browsers or platforms these people will be using, and may not have access for training or installation, it is very difficult to effectively use application specific clients, browser specific applications, or by seat pricing with loose work groups.
Use of Intranet or other computer communications technique is still very new. Very few position descriptions currently include requirements that the employee be able to use computer Intranet applications (possibly excluding employees at Netscape, Sun, or Microsoft!). This is probably more true the higher you go in the company organization. It is therefore essential that the total impact on employees related to learning and using new computer technology be kept to the minimum possible to encourage maximum acceptance. This is another argument for using low-training, zero-installation applications.
Based on the above discussion the following advice is given regarding development or purchase of Intranet applications.
AZINET Business Internet Solutions (C) 1997