Intranets: Changing Corporate Culture
Companies that are intranet-equipped are, in effect, outfitting their employees with running shoes for the race to enter, win, and sustain markets. And by comparison, their competitors without intranets are going to look like they've been tied to a tree. The proliferation of intranets, which are replacing customary use of proprietary LAN and WAN technologies, amounts to nothing short of a revolution in how people in an organization communicate, find information, share knowledge, and make decisions.
What Is an Intranet?
An intranet is a private computer network built on Internet technologies—like the same browser that got you to this World Wide Web page, and the same underlying stack of protocols and open standards that enable all brands of computers and operating systems to play well with others on the Internet. But whereas the Internet is a public park, an intranet is a private club—for members of the organization only. The intranet's first cousin, the extranet, can extend intranet privileges to selected partners, giving them access to certain areas inside the castle walls and creating a secure vendor (or customer) network.
The early-adopter organizations didn't build their intranets by executive order, but by imaginative problem solving. Sure, in some cases it was because a couple of people from the IT department got to tinkering with the tools and found that they could give people quick and easy access to a lot of useful corporate information. In addition, if internal customers were Internet users, they already knew how to use some of the basic browser functions: type an address (a URL), click "Back," click "Forward," press "File," then "Print," click "Search," and so on.
An intranet can be built to maximize all the advantages and minimize the disadvantages of the corporate LAN or WAN. It can combine the best of the client/server paradigm of development with the brightest of Internet technologies to create a computing environment that's easy to build, easy to maintain, easy to change, easy to learn, and easy to use to really get somewhere fast. And it's cheap, compared to the cost to construct and maintain proprietary islands of databases and services found on most corporate networks. Some companies with intranets can point to a return on investment of greater than 1,000 percent in less than a year.
Why Build an Intranet?
Organizations build an Intranet because it's a nimble, competitive tool: powerful enough to compress time, shrink the disadvantages of distance, and build on their greatest capital asset—employees with knowledge of company operations and products.
What's the one commodity today that you still can't buy? Time. You can hire more employees (although throwing additional resources on a project normally produces marginal increases in productivity). You can buy an airline ticket and fly halfway around the planet to meet with partners or colleagues. But you can't make more time. Today's global economy measures 24 x 7: it runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
Intranets give us more time by reducing the amount of time we spend that adds no value. Over an intranet, team members can attend "virtual meetings" and review a document or plan a strategy. It doesn't matter that one team member might be in Tokyo, and another in Topeka, and a third in Tanganyika. With intranet tools, they can see their workflow chart, draw on the same whiteboard, show each other a model, revise the same documents (separately or together), and not get on an airplane. Instead, they launch the browser on their desktop. Or on their laptop. Or on their kid's computer at home. Today, you need a browser, rather than a toothbrush and a fresh shirt, to go the distance.
OK, So How Do I Start?
The beauty of intranets is their underlying simplicity and flexibility. It takes some servers, which can be any mix of computers, to organize, manage, and store information. (Depending on the size of your intranet and the number of desktops it needs to cover, servers can be dedicated to one service, like a mail server, transaction processor, or an index server; or these functions can share space on one server.) It takes some network connections (like routers and bridges, which you probably also already have) to connect the desktop computers and the various servers so they can "talk." It takes some Internet-based software to perform special services, like indexing the information or querying a database or handling security. This is going to be one of the largest growth areas in software, as entrepreneurs and in-house IT people invent even faster and smarter ways to access data and turn it into useful knowledge for decision-making.
However, be aware that planning an intranet entails more challenges than just deciding on a platform, deciding which software tools to build or buy, whether to construct a firewall or an airwall—tunnels or encryption—and what about using the new "push" technology to wave the corporate flag? Most organizations require building a business case that's not an exercise in creative writing, but one that includes both quantitative and qualitative metrics. In turn, designing a pilot project so it can succeed means building the right team, selecting the right content for the test, detailing the site management process, putting the pre- and post-launch measurements in place to gauge effectiveness, developing a promotion plan, conducting training on the uses and abuses of the organization's electronic space—and a host of other procedural and policy decisions.
That Sounds Like a Lot of Work . . . Are You Sure It's Going to Be Worth It?
The underlying need for intranets is the shift in the type of capital that runs our economy. In the industrial economy, capital assets were measured in steel, bricks, and machinery. But that's changing. A company's main capital asset is the intellectual capital invested in its employees that results from the work they produce. Intellectual capital is what intranets were built to handle. In the hands of knowledge workers, intranets are tools of alchemy, for turning ideas and information into knowledge, and transforming knowledge into market-leading products and services.
The sum total of an intranet is more than enhanced communications, more than quick access to information, more than powerful multimedia online learning tools, more than increased productivity, reduced cycle times, and paperless offices. Intranets are redrawing the structure of the relationships between individuals and their organizations. Empowered employees are proactive: they act, rather than wait to be told what to do. There's no time for waiting any more, and few organizations can afford to waste those capital assets.
In this vein, the role of the IT department will change, too. Programmers and systems engineers, freed from the chores of maintaining islands of information and the need to provide intensive user support, will be able to shift their focus towards using new intranet technologies to create productivity tools that improve data quality and shrink development cycles.
Intranets are feeding the changeover from static, hierarchical organizational structures to team-based, highly productive learning organizations. Picture a collaboration of information technologists and communicators and knowledge workers—all empowered to work more productively. Those are the people who are more apt to take a new idea and run with it. All the way to the bank.
Tyson Greer is CEO/CIO of Tyson Greer. . . .Writes, a 15-year-old Seattle-based writing firm. Greer's business background in the paper and energy industries focused on analysis of emerging issues. "While many people regard the act of writing as being about as rewarding as pushing a string or wrangling cats, Tyson Greer continues to prove she can sit upright at 8 a.m. and enjoy writing about leading-edge topics," said CEO Greer. Under the watchful eyes of two mismatched attack cats, Cyron and Lily, Greer wrote Understanding Intranets, which was published by Microsoft Press. E-mail tygreer@msn.com to share intranet (or cat and mouse) stories.
