Chapter 1
Intranets explained
Intranets are generally considered, and on the whole justly proven, to be inexpensive to implement. However, the ensuing operational and development issues become far more complex and require a significant amount of thought, planning and nurturing than may initially be envisaged. Subsequently, costs begin to climb, especially as more interactive systems are embraced on the Intranet such as legacy and backoffice systems, along with dedicated web-based e-commerce solutions.
Intranets are now emerging from a recent history, where they were commonly regarded as a cheap and cheerful means of meeting an organisation’s information dissemination needs. The realisation has now emerged that there is more to be gained from these enabling Internet technologies than merely reaping a quick Return-on-Investment (ROI) through savings on reprographics and distribution costs.
Five years on from a time when pioneering organisations first implemented corporate-wide Intranets (Aslib, 1996) and claimed massive costs savings in reprographics and publishing, these same organisations are now realising that the technology can offer greater rewards. With the advent of more sophisticated technology and applications, that greater reflect core business aims, the Intranet has become recognised as a strategic tool to nurture the identification, sharing, and creation of an organisation’s intellectual and knowledge assets. In short, many large organisations now regard their Intranet as the corporate memory.
This chapter aims to discuss how this transformation can be realised and reflect upon many of the painful lessons learnt by these organisations, so that they may be re-addressed to aid the further exploitation of Internet technologies to provide greater business value.
So what is an Intranet?
Due to the fact that Intranets frequently cross organisational boundaries and ‘touch’ all functional areas and departments, even the process of defining an Intranet can be more complicated than first thought.
An Intranet may be seen to be different things to different people depending on the perspective held by each individual and their respective job function and department (or even their relationship to the organisation as a whole if they are a supplier or customer).
Generally, definitions will relate to:
- i] a technological viewpoint concentrating on Intranets purely from the perspective of software, hardware and networking protocols or;
- ii] an operational and process perspective concerned with the business-value that such a tool brings to the organisation
Any other definitions will generally be seen to fall somewhere in between the two. Examples of how an Intranet may be perceived by individual employees according to their respective job functions, may include the following two extremes:
…that of an IT Manager who may well define an Intranet as:
‘…an IP-based network of nodes behind a firewall, or behind several firewalls connected by secure, possibly virtual, networks’
(Intranet Design Magazine, 1999)
… whilst a member of the Senior Management Team may refer to an Intranet as:
‘…an organisation’s corporate memory.’
(Kuhn and Abecker, 1999)
Both of these definitions may be argued to be equally valid. Ordinarily, and from a practical perspective, establishing such a definition for a technology or business process would normally be regarded as a case of mere semantics. The important issue would typically be that each department or function using the technology should come to a common agreement on a definition that was relevant to their respective business-concerns.
However because of the pervasive nature of an effective Intranet spanning the organisation, all business functions and employees will have some involvement with its development or use. As a result, cross-functional relationships will develop that did not previously exist and standards will need to be created jointly and adhered to by departments who previously may have had no common ground with other departments, apart from being part of the same organisation.
For these new partnerships and teams to succeed in implementing and developing an Intranet it is important that each has an understanding of the different perspectives and interpretations held by different parties in terms of what they perceive the Intranet to be and what benefits it has to offer.
In trying to take into consideration as many of these differing perspectives and contexts as possible, this chapter will adopt the fairly wide definition for an Intranet as prescribed by the Institute of Management (Irving and McWilliams, 1999).
‘An Intranet is a private, corporate network that uses Internet products and technologies. Access to an Intranet is controlled by the organisation that established it, and is often restricted just to employees. Occasionally, however, suppliers and customers can also be given access to parts of it.’
The latter proviso referring to suppliers and customers can also include remote employees in the field or at home. This form of access to an Intranet is known as an extranet and will be examined further in chapter 17.
The technology
In researching issues relating to the contents of this book, several organisations, which have implemented Intranets of substantial size or maturity, were surveyed by questionnaire with regard to the methods, technology and policies used to implement the use of Internet technologies on their respective internal networks.
In responding to one of the survey questions regarding the start-up date of his company’s Intranet, one Principal Engineer replied that his company had already implemented an Intranet when he joined the company in 1987. Those with a general knowledge of Internet history and who find nothing surprising in this statement may wish to jump to the next section.
For those who may be surprised by the claim that an Intranet could exist in 1987 (several years before the advent of the World Wide Web) the following background information may be useful in understanding why Intranets have become such powerful communication and effective business tools.
An introduction to a book such as this could not avoid first briefly referring to the underlying technology that has made the development of the Intranet possible.
First off, to explain the response made by the respondent mentioned above; his reply referred to the fact that his company had been using email on the organisation’s worldwide TCP/IP-based network. IP-based (Internet Protocol) networks have been around since the late 1960s and available for any individual or organisation to use as a networking platform.
TCP / IP is the Internet protocol that acts as a network carrier for other closely related protocols and services that include the World Wide Web (HTTP - Hypertext Transfer Protocol), E-mail (SMTP - Simple Mail Transfer Protocol), FTP (File Transfer Protocol), Gopher (menu-driven system for document retrieval), Telnet (a remote terminal connection service), IRC (Internet Relay Chat) etc.
Although many of these services still exist, in many cases they have been replaced, subsumed or web-enabled within the web browser interface. Therefore, the so-called ‘killer applications’ now associated with the Internet are email (electronic mail) and the web browser (e.g. MS Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator, etc.). It should also be acknowledged here that the vast majority of email systems also provide access via the web browser interface.
The main reasons generally cited for the web browser becoming so successful are often attributed to the following (Bernard, 1998):
Cross-platform compatibility
The World Wide Web protocol (http) is platform-independent so any individual web document on the Internet can be accessed across all platforms e.g. PC, Unix, Apple Macintosh or Linux, etc.
Global access
Documents can be requested seamlessly from any server located on any TCP / IP network like the Internet or private network such as an Intranet.
Ease-of-use
The Hypertext (or hyperlink) Transfer Protocol allows documents and multimedia to be simply retrieved without the user needing to know the specific location of a file or its name.
Flexibility
The web browser has evolved to enable seamless access to be gained to various server types (Web, gopher, SMTP, ftp, etc.) and may be configured to recognise any file types and launch the respective application to view any proprietary file formats such as MS Word, Excel, PDF etc. WWW servers can also provide access to backoffice legacy systems such as databases and in-house developed applications.
Open standards
Any software that uses the published standards can be used as a browser or HTML editor.
Cost
The only cost associated with using web browsers is related to those incurred in installing or configuring the web browser itself. Of course all of the factors above have some kind of economic benefit associated with them. However, one of the most significant cost saving first recognised by organisations who realised that web browsers could be used on private internal networks (Intranets), was that this was a sophisticated graphical user interface that would operate across any platform and was available as either freeware or inexpensive shareware.
Business benefits
Apart from the obvious cost savings in reprographics, organisations quickly observed additional benefits arising as the Intranet began to transform the way in which the organisation was communicating and refining business processes. KPMG, the global finance and management consultancy (KPMG, 1997) highlighted the main benefits of these transformations as:
- Releasing the latent value of the information it [the organisation] holds
- Sharing the use of the information
- Allowing expertise and intellectual skills to be exploited more widely
- Encouraging teams to work and grow together
- Removing departmental barriers
- Improving cross-functional communications
- Enabling greater collaboration between geographically distributed employees
- Linking remote offices
- Changing the nature of work and employment
- Reshaping power structures and management
Big wins often gained through the implementation of organisation-wide Intranets are not dissimilar to those claimed by Silicon Graphics:
‘…the intranet saves £90,000 each day in print and distribution costs, £220,000 per year in training and £45,000 in HR administration each year.’
(Mansell-Lewis, 1998a)