USING INTRANETS TO IMPROVE CORPORATE COMMUNICATION

BY DAVID H. HERGET
InfoSoft NW

Internet surfers will be familiar with the huge amount of information available on the Internet. There are hundreds of thousands of web servers that can connect you with hundreds of thousands of people, companies and services. Literally, the Internet is an electronic gateway to the world. Music, video, text, pictures; all is available from different web sites.

This allows us the unprecedented ability to communicate with people all across the world. Checking flight schedules with an airline, looking up local bus schedules or reading the morning paper are all possible throughout the Internet. My youngest daughter even found a web site in Australia where she could browse down under jokes posted by a grade school in the outback.

But while this "openness" is one of the things that makes the Internet a great thing, it can also be too accessible for some business applications. For companies that want to use the Internet to create a national or international computer network for their employees to use, the risk that people outside the company pose to security, even when using passwords and other security measures, is simply too great. For such companies, there is an alternative: Intranets.

Using the same technology as the Internet, an Intranet is a private "site" or series of sites set up for and used exclusively within a company or organization. While the Internet connects you to millions of people across the world, an Intranet is a smaller, closed version that will only connect you with a select other computers. Much of a companies' information is internal, and has no place in the daily newspaper, the six o'clock news or on the public Internet. A company Intranet can keep information proprietary. Within the Intranet there may be levels of security allowing specified information to those with a need for it, but it is internal.

Already, many companies are taking advantage of an Intranet's capabilities. Research released by Zona Research Inc. of Redwood City, California indicates that sales of Intranet software will reach $448 million in 1996 and exceed more than $1.2 billion in 1997. More than half the servers today are used exclusively as corporate Intranet sites. More than 15 million workers are linked together with Intranet applications.

An Intranet can be a very efficient way for a company to conduct in-house communication. It creates a great opportunity to save money by eliminating printing and administrative costs associated with the producing and distributing internal information. And information that was too costly to distribute previously may now have a vehicle to make it available.

Intranets can also benefit a company by providing the necessary information to allow employees to do their jobs 24 hours a day -all from one single source. Users can be using different types of desktop machines at the office or a laptop from their car and still have the same interface to all corporate information.

What kinds of information? How about engineering, library, training, research, consulting hints, orientation material for new employees, news, sales communication, marketing materials, product information, financial information, staff mailing lists, press releases, management techniques, health and safety regulations, requests for business cards, stationary, forms, etc.

An Intranet can also be a great time-saver when it comes to disseminating information within a company. Ken Fenwick, Senior Business Systems Analyst at Safeco talked about the collapsing information float. How much time does it take to produce an internal document and distribute it to all employees? The completed document requires printing and distribution, which can take anywhere from a few days to few weeks. Eliminating that time float, or collapsing the time of distribution, has the potential of having cost benefits to the company. "If the cost of doing business can be reduced, we can reduce the costs to our customers," said Fenwick.

An Intranet is an excellent repository for all the corporate literature and policy information that employees may want to reference from time to time. In many businesses, these questions can take two or three people several conversations to obtain the answer. Company policy manuals, sick leave, maternity benefits, work schedules, etc. can all be easily accessed by employees themselves without taking the time of a manager.

One of Safeco's Intranet project allows an executive to request information by filling out an Intranet form requesting specific information. The Intranet software analyzes the request, determines where the information is located, retrieves it and presents it in a readable format to the person that made the request - all without the use of a second of another employee's time.

Such an information distribution system can be set up in a myriad of ways to fit different business needs. An employee of a service organization could send a daily report to a regional office detailing the number of clients visited, the work done, time spent and the resources used to do it. The Intranet web server can massage the information and also send relevant parts of the report to the accounting and management departments, and even send it to another secure machine to develop a database of cumulative information, billing and reporting.

Communications is the issue. Sharing information within a company can be one of the key factors of its success. Who are we doing business with? What did we do for them? Could we do it for someone else? Sharing important knowledge between employees not only gives them a great sense of importance and involvement, but it also allows employees to learn from each other's mistakes and successes, and quickly builds a "knowledge base" that can help a business grow and prosper.

Already, many companies have found unique ways to use Intranet technology to improve their business. AT&T is using their Intranet to allow users to order office supplies and have them delivered to their desk. Safeco is putting insurance policies online so employees can have access to help policy holders more quickly. The adage of time is money is very relevant in the service industry.

As the use of Intranets grows, its collaborative nature will change the basic business structure in many firms. Politically, those who have power because they control information in and about a business may suddenly not command such knee-jerk respect. Decisions on specific issues and general policies won't be decided behind the closed doors of an executive board room. Instead, an Intranet can allow a company to literally hold a meeting with all its employees at once, and still efficiently and quickly make decisions.

The Intranet will create opportunities to manage the information and to develop new controls and new methods of communicating to and with employees and enhancing productivity. Keeping up with the changes in the information will be one of the major challenges of the company's webmaster (the person maintaining the Intranet's web sites). Controlling and managing internal web sites will be a major focus for management. Keeping the content accurate and up to date will also be a task needing constant attention.

In simple terms the greatest benefit of the Intranet is more people have more access to more information at a lower cost. For example, say a company operating in the Puget Sound was to use WAN (Wide Area Network) technology to connect the computers in their offices. They want to use the connection for internal communications, e-mail and document transfers, and have branch offices in Seattle, Lynnwood, Port Angeles, Bellevue, Longview and Bellingham. Using a WAN network system, they will pay anywhere from $140 to $500 per month for dedicated phone lines for each site. But if they instead "piggybacked" an Intranet on the Internet, the phone costs could be reduced to $40 to $50 per site, a substantial savings.

More important in the savings formula is cutting costs of labor otherwise needed to find and distribute information. Though costs of developing and maintaining the information will still be incurred, printing and shipping costs will be eliminated. And more importantly, the widespread access an Intranet offers can save a company countless hours they'd otherwise spend maintaining information. Making changes and or corrections will be instantaneous with everyone in the company having access to the information at the moment of change. How many hours are used looking for information. Who has the file? Where is the manual? Copies can be available for everyone who has the need to see them immediately, and several people can "use" the same document at once.

While Intranets aren't the best solution for every company's networking needs, they can be an ideal solution for the right company, providing a unique and efficient way to store and transmit a company's most important facts and figures in a secure, safe environment.

David H. Herget is a 34-year veteran of the computer industry, and currently is Regional Manager for InfoSoft, a systems integration company specializing in Intranets.