Intranet Management: An EMERGING Challenge - how organizations are converting isolated intranets into a single enterprise-wide resource - Internet/Web/Online Service Information

Now that intranets have become a corporate asset, how are they be managed?

Has their success caught traditional IT off guard?

Organizations implementing intranet solutions can find productivity gains in excess of 1,000 percent. This is the result of a study done by International Data Corp. (IDC), a Framingham, Mass-based technology research company. The study of Internet technology use for customers within a corporation concludes by suggesting that "typical implementations [of intranets] are achieving returns on investment well over 1,000 percent."

That's remarkable feat, considering that most first-generation intranets are developed by enterpreneurial volunteers from user areas such as human resources or corporate communications. Now that these sites have become a corporate asset, how are they to be managed? Has their success caught traditional IT off guard?

The productivity gains don't come as a surprise to Mike Gentile, vice president for IT services at Zurich American Insurance Group in Schaumburg, III. "Intranets are following the same model that PCs followed in the 1980s," he observes. "They start out serving individual or workgroup needs and gradually evolve until they become enterprise resources. In the past when we did a project with a programmer, you went through hell just getting the programmer and the user to talk. With intranets you come along with just enough enabling technology that the user can do the application themselves."

But don't intranet applications require the same planning and management foundation that traditional applications need? Gentile doesn't think so: "We used to pretend that mainframe systems had a lifetime of 10 years; in reality it's something like 30 years." Intranets do not fit that management model. "Our experience with this technology is that the life cycle is about 3 years. In that time span, either the business rules, the organization's management or the technology will change enough so that the application is obsolete. If we were foolish enough to try to apply traditional management strategies to the internet, the applications would never get delivered," says Gentile.

Local Services Become Enterprise Successes

For some organizations, managing an intranet means rethinking how the services are delivered. For Grubb and Ellis, a Northbrook, III.-based commercial real estate services firm, the facilities management business had always been carried out locally in field offices throughout North America. Recently, as clients asked the company to provide integrated management for operations in a variety of cities, Grubb and Ellis had to find a way to unify the databases scattered around more than 50 field offices. "We're heavily dependent on market information," says Scott Williams, CIO for Grubb and Ellis. "And as our business changed from a local focus to multiple markets, we used an intranet to bring together resources that were unavailable to the enterprise as a whole."

This has meant taking the individual databases off locally supported Web sites and creating a new, centralized intranet in its place. Many local users might be wary of such an assertion of control by an IT organization, fearing that the features of the intranet that made it useful to local staff would be lost in a version designed to appeal to all sites. According to Williams, the change to an enterprise perspective for intranet management was a relief for many users. Business information is still controlled, entered and managed by local staff, but "the burden of supporting the underlying technology has been lifted from each field office," says Williams.

Grubb and Ellis had a variety of platforms at each individual field site. As part of the corporate restructuring, the company conceived a plan to replace its existing NetWare/IPX-based local networks with Windows NT Server-based IP networks.

One of the nice features of moving to Windows NT is that Grubb and Ellis can use IIS and Windows NT's native security to control who has access to what content. It allows the local employees to update the "containers" of real estate information locally, but make the information available internationally. Grubb and Ellis is using the conversion from Novell IPX/SPX to Windows NT and TCP/LP as an opportunity to bring the newly designed intranet tools to its field staff. "At first we provided the tools to functional groups in our organization like research and marketing," says Williams, "because they were the users that were the key to our delivering the business."

Rather than resent the change to a centrally managed intranet, field staff at Grubb and Ellis have been supportive. "Because of the tools we have, it's much more distributed than ever before," says Williams. "Users have more access to corporate information than they ever had in the past."

Surviving an Intranet Merger

If changes in business strategy dictate new ways to manage an intranet, then an entirely new organization provides a unique opportunity to design an intranet management strategy from scratch. The Canadian Food Inspection Agency (Nepean, Ontario) is a new government organization built from inspection staff formerly scattered among three other federal agencies in Canada. Since each of the other agencies already had an intranet, the new organization faced the problem of how to merge the inspection components of the old intranets into a coherent new intranet service.

Rather than try to retrofit the old sites, the Canadian agency seized the opportunity to break away from the cultures of their older organizations and develop a new intranet. How does a site manage to ensure that internal content is developed and managed by those who know the most about it?

"Our approach is to decentralize the development and posting of content, by assigning content managers in each program area," says Patsy O'Connor, project coordinator in the informatics group of the Food Inspection Agency. The Food Inspection Agency assigns the task of posting information to the intranet directly to each content manager. The site uses frames to ensure that every page has a similar look-and-feel. The navigation tools that make any Web site easier to use "are especially important for an internal site," according to O'Connor. The frames-based solution makes it possible for the content managers to ensure that each page supplies a common set of tools for finding, indexing and moving through the organization's internal data.

The strategy also allows the agency to solve another problem. Many organizations make a clear distinction between information and applications published for internal use and content intended for public consumption. While O'Connor has found that the driving force motivating intranet publishing is easy access to personnel and administrative policies, she also notes that information on the agency's public site is often used by internal staff. "It's confusing to have two sites, so that's another reason we use frames," according to O'Connor. "Frames allow us to make the internal and external sites look like a single, integrated resources for internal staff," she says.

The Far-flung Organization

O'Connor is faced with another intranet management challenge typical of large organizations. With more than 4,000 employees distributed throughout Canada, how does one create an "internal" resource available on a national scale? "In many of our locations that available bandwidth is not like that on a LAN," she points out. "As a result, we are very careful about how we design the site and how we choose appropriate content," she says.

Intranet content control can be crucial in another way for large organizations. Mitsubishi, the hue Japanese conglomerate, has dozens of companies under its corporate banner. Originally an enormous military and industrial company supporting Japan's war effort in the middle of the century, it was broken into many smaller pieces after the wary by order of General Douglas MacArthur.

The multitude of organizations injects politics into the creation of company Web sites. "Policies are different in every company," says Phil Fremon, client/server group leader at Mitsubishi Electric America in Cypress, Calif. "As an example, a layoff policy for engineers in one location might be different from the policy for marketing staff at another location." Personnel specialists, originally enthusiastic about publishing their policies, suddenly became concerned that employees would use the intranets to "shop around" for jobs with better benefits. Traditional IS staff "didn't appreciate that there were these political issues surrounding the content," according to Fremon.

Responding to the dilemma, IS used the basic security features of Windows NT to ensure that employees in a Mitsubishi company could see only "their own" intranet. Each Mitsubishi intranet is now protected with a user-name/password combination that controls who can see internally published data for each company.

While the strategy is effective in addressing the political problems of having intranets support many companies, it also makes it difficult to deploy new applications for the entire enterprise. Fremon built a worldwide electronic mail and phone directory application for his company and immediately faced two challenge: how to convince the managers of the individual intranets to deploy the application and how to keep the information up to date.

Unable to simply roll out the application to Mitsubishi intranets, Fremon has had to persuade individual organizations to deploy the software in their protected intranets. "The bigger companies are in control of all the information posted to their intranets," says Fremon, "so they need to be convinced to implement what would, under normal circumstances, be an enterprise application."

Once the application is in place, it is crucial that the people closest to the information are able to update and manage it. "I really believe in distributed maintenance of the intranet sites," says Fremon. He argues that "whoever is in charge of the information should be the ones to udpate it. After all, the people who use the data most often are the ones who care about it the most."

To accomplish this Fremon establishes intranets on local servers. An employee responsible for content on a certain portion of the intranet has the corresponding server directory mapped to a local disk on his or her desktop computer. The result is direct access to the intranet for those responsible for creating and updating content. Once again, Windows NT's underlying security architecture is used to ensure that staff can update content only in parts of the intranet for which they have responsibility.

THE SOPHISTICATED application of Windows NT security and networking services to intranets is another indication that the initial wave of intranet excitement is cresting. The transition from the first phase of entrepreneurial, local and volunteer sites to enterprise-quality internal Web sites is now underway. Achieving the dramatic productivity gains reported by the IDC survey requires that the new intranets be meshed with the traditional skills, services and expertise of the IS shop.

Does centralizing management of a corporate intranet inevitably mean that it will lose its character as an enabling technology for the end user? Hardly, says Zurich American Insurance's Gentile. "It makes my IS group focus on business rules and the integrity of corporate data," he says. Gentile thinks that the new managed intranets are a success because "they allow IS to separate user control of the interface from corporate control of the information assets." According to Gentile, if users aren't in control of how their information and applications look and work, "users will freeze out traditional IS and the cycle of unmanaged, locally developed information services will begin again."

Mark McFadden is a consultant and is communications director for the Commercial Internet eXchange (Washington). Contanct him at mcfadden@cix.org.

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