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The ability of users to cope with the change to browsing technology is a key element when introducing an intranet to a company, a market researcher has claimed.

   Martha Bennett, research director for British market research firm Wentworth, said: 'The technology is here now and is only one aspect of intranets. Implementing an intranet is only the very first step.'     Content management and the ability of users to cope with the change from a mainframe environment were essential issues.

 Mrs Bennett was speaking at a conference organised by Wentworth last week on 'Exploiting Intranets', explaining the benefits, costs and risks that an intranet can bring to enterprises to members of its IT management programme.

   This six-month in-depth study concentrates on the social impact of intranets, rather than on the technology surrounding them.

 'Implementing an intranet requires a lot of work on structuring the information content, and on terminology,' Mrs Bennett said.

  She explained how a US airline could not agree on what an airport was: in some documents an airport was described as 'anything that has a runway'. Elsewhere it was described as a place where an aircraft could land.

 In another case a large oil company did not agree on what was an oil field. It was described as a spot with potential for oil or a location where they were actually drilling.

  Too much information, contradictory pieces of information or outdated information often lead to confusion and to communication breakdowns that might cause a loss of faith in the technology.

  One way of tackling the problem of information management is to set up in-house policies on information ownership, that defines who is responsible for updates and who has the final word in case of conflict.

  Another way of preparing a good working intranet infrastructure is to define new roles within the company, such as a Webmaster, who would mainly be around to ensure the intranet was running smoothly and that people had proper access to it; or the 'Cybrarian', whose role would be similar to that a librarian with skills to oversee the index and catalogues appropriate for the technology and to select intranet tools.

   Other roles Mrs Bennett believes are important for an intranet to be successful include a technology consultant and a technology watcher, because 'on the Net, development moves in Web Days, not Man Years'.

  'Intranets can produce significant benefits but also have a tremendous organisational and social impact,' Mrs Bennett said.

  Using Web technology to publish documents - from telephone directories to product manuals or newsletters - contributes to cutting down paper costs.

  Intranets also cut down distance and time constraints and speed up the decision-making process, but they are also challenges to traditional ways of working.

  Intranets change department boundaries and require users to demonstrate a certain amount of initiative that was not necessarily requested from them before.

  'No intranet can be successful if it is not part of an internal programme gearing at changing the company's culture,' Mrs Bennett said.

  According to Mrs Bennett, Asian companies share the concerns of European or US counterparts.

 'Cultural issues are a prior concern here,' she said. 'However, companies here can see even more benefits, because they tend to have subsidiaries all over Asia and especially in China, so the time and distance constraints are more important to them than to companies elsewhere.'   The five-year IT investment cycle that seems to be typical of Asian companies might impede the development of intranets here.

  'Intranet technology needs to be constantly updated. It can take a lot of resources to manage and maintain and requires yearly attention.'   New technologies are appearing every day that make using intranets more relevant to companies and to their employees.

  Tackling the risk of information overload, user-configurable broadcast tools - such as Pointcast or Marimba's Cast-a-net - enable corporations to notify intranet users of corporate announcements, important updates and other alerts.

  Similarly, using agent technology enables users to narrow down information and to engage in concept searches rather than random searches.

  Even security was less of a problem, Mrs Bennett said, citing companies that ran all their legacy applications on their intranet.

  'An intranet can be made as secure as any network. All the same technologies apply. There is nothing wrong in deploying firewalls and encryption technology within the company.' 



Intranet a browsing revolution