Lecture 23: Lesson 10: INTRANETs

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Notes from The Lesson Plan

The learning objectives of lesson 10 include:

• Understand the concept of an Intranet
  

What is an intranet?
An intranet is a network within an organization that uses Internet technologies to enable users to find, use, and share documents and Web pages. Corporations use intranets to communicate with employees.

In some large companies intranets are used as the primary way for employees to obtain and share work-related documents, share knowledge, collaborate on designs, access e-learning and learn about company news.

Intranets use traditional Internet protocols, TCP/IP and HTTP to transfer data. They usually reside behind firewalls, for security, and are not limited by physical location—anyone around the world can be on the same intranet. Intranets also link users to the outside Internet, and with the proper security in place may use public networks to transfer data.

Top 10 trends for intranet/extranet development:

Trend 1: Customers Are Becoming the Focus of the System
When companies began to deploy web systems five years ago, the focus was on providing easier access to information. These systems soon evolved into tools that simplified and enhanced customer interactions, in addition to helping companies get to market faster and create new online business opportunities. More recently we saw companies focused on helping make the customer more successful, and in the process reap customer loyalty — and profits. Clearly, making it easier to do business with your company can mean more profit, but, more important, in the long term it can help develop customer loyalty.

Trend 2: Delivering Information Where Its Needed
Companies are now delivering information to a wide variety of locations. Mazda North America gets information down to the repair shop floor, where mechanics access details about a car by its VIN. Milwaukee-based Cleaver-Brooks is delivering design information to boiler rooms, helping 10,000 engineers worldwide design and specify products better, faster and more accurately.

Trend 3: The Intranet Is Becoming a Utility
The trend of the intranet becoming critical for doing business continues. Ninety-eight percent of Cisco's employees use their intranet on a regular basis, and Cisco enjoys one of the highest revenue per employee in the industry.

Trend 4: Integration into All Business Processes
One of the key messages from the companies we saw in this category is that value is best created by deep integration with the entire business process. At Cisco, each of its 16,000 employees is considered a web developer, all systems development is web-based and all web development is funded by the business. Cisco calculated its ROI for web work at $35 million per year.

Trend 5: More Interesting Applications
Recently we have seen a number of especially interesting ways of deploying the web. There is the "Ask Mom" section on Remedy's intranet, Sandia's rumor area, the ticker that tracks the status of major projects and National Semiconductor's tools that help customers create homepages.

Trend 6: More Support for Collaboration
More webs are helping people work with each other, not just inside corporations but also with other business partners. 3Com has its 3Community site, and the U.S. Navy and Boeing have a system called GOSNET that helps them share information.

Trend 7: More Sophisticated Development Models
As the web becomes more important to businesses, we are seeing companies become smarter about how they develop, maintain and extend their internal systems. PHH has adopted the "design big, build small" approach, which allows the company to extend its web piece by piece, based on an existing model and architecture.

Trend 8: Less Is More
As we combed through this year's applications, we saw that while more companies are formally funding web projects, they are not building large teams to accomplish their internal systems. Many (the U.S. Navy, Sandia and Fujitsu, for example) are deliberately keeping their teams small.

Trend 9: Creeping Knowledge Management
KM is hitting the intranet, initially in the form of "communities of interest." Companies that have started knowledge management deployments report that they are better able to compete. We saw examples of such deployments at Cisco, where they were built around classes of people (sales and IT for example), Ford and some of the consulting companies.

Lesson 10: New Business Opportunities
As companies do a better job of capturing and sharing information, some are finding new opportunities. CKS, which focuses on capturing knowledge from its over 2,000 employees, found that the company had skills internally that were not obvious, leading it to extend its offerings.