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Intranet: The New Business Angel

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DQI Bureau
New Update

If you are looking at a cost-saving and productivity-increasing tool, intranet is the right one for your business.

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If you think that information gathering, information-on-demand, quick communication and collaboration are the key flavors of business success, intranet could be the ideal tool, at a reasonable cost, taking care of all these needs.

If one were to name a few im

portant technological innova-

tions that have promoted new arrays of products and possibilities and have forever changed our lifestyle and commerce, a few good guesses would be the internal combustion engine, electricity generation and the telephone.

All are taken for granted in today's world, but have been significant turning points in our history. Another innovation joining the elite club would be the internet, which is fast changing the way we do business. The internet and related technologies are redefining the concept of the 'information age'. Ecommerce is touted as the commerce of the future, chats and newsgroups as the part of future social life and email as the essential communication tool. Be it intranets, ecommerce, chat, email or extranets, internet and its related technologies are pervasive in some form or other across all organizations.

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Today, it seems that everyone is on to the intranet bandwagon and it is not just the herd mentality running across organizations. As Sanjay Jain, CEO, NetAcross, says, "Probably two-three years ago, it was a new IT buzzword, but in the future it will become more of a need as companies realize the importance of intranet." So, if you think that information gathering, information-on-demand, quick communication and collaboration are the key flavors of business success, intranet could be the ideal tool, at a reasonable cost, taking care of all these needs.

Defining intranet

Intranet is a descriptive term being used for the implementation of internet technologies within an organization rather than for external connection to the global web. Since the stress is on internet-related technologies, information can be made accessible to every member within an organization regardless of his choice of hardware platform. Says Jain, "An intranet is internet technologies improving the internal efficiencies of an organization."

They are increasingly being deployed to make the various information resources of an organization available to each member on his desktop at minimal cost, time and energy.

The need

If you are still wondering about the necessity of an intranet in an organization, consider this. Your company has or soon will have about 20-25 locations across the country or globe and about 400-500 employees. The key need of the employees everywhere is timely access to information about their company, corporate policy changes, human resource procedures and simple yet crucial documents like phone books, product specifications and pricing information. If the sales guy in the field is unaware about the changes in the price and pitches for sale, he may not only loose the deal but may also leave behind a negative impact about the company.

Your current exercise is to update corporate information by using printed matter, such as employee handbooks, price lists and sales guides. The issues involved here are significant.

Firstly, printing material is both expensive and time consuming to produce. It also does not in any way contribute directly to the bottomline. Further, you have to deal with distribution and dissemination of the same information. There is a cost element involved in each of these activities. Other key issues also remain to be addressed. For instance, how would one guarantee that all members of an organization have received exactly what they need? How would one ensure that they have the latest and correct versions? Again, how can it be made sure that they also get to know all important policy details or any other information that has changed or is now available?

Added to this is the problem owing to the changing nature of any organization in today's frenetic business world.

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The shelf life of any internal printed matter is reducing so rapidly that, in many cases, it becomes out-dated before it reaches the people who need it. Many corporate hours are lost just confirming and verifying the validity of information.

The timely access to accurate information has never been as crucial as it is in today's competitive business arena.

Though one may hypothetically evaluate 20-25 sites and 400-500 employees, in reality the problem is equally important to a single site with 20 people too. Accurate, timely communication and information flow is essential in today's world.

If you are looking at tackling these problems, you are most likely looking at intranet deployment.

According to Timothy McCall, Manager, Intranet Development, FedEx, "Intranets are an integral part of our existence. Worldwide, our intranet can handle a conference room scheduling system, dynamic generation of organizational charts, a keyword directory and hierarchical site listing, emails, news services, TV and radio broadcasts, hosting services, a search engine, a software download site, chat rooms and many other features."

Of course, it would be unfair

to say that these applications

could not be deployed earlier on existing technologies. As Dr Dhruv Nath, VP, Ecommerce, NIIT, says, "Even before the intranet availability, we had an intranet-like deployment running for over five years on Lotus Domino." However, with internet-related technologies coming to the fore, corporates have been able to achieve similar work efficiencies at substantially lower cost compared to proprietary technologies like Lotus Notes. Not to miss the growing market, almost all the vendors have started offering

intranet-compatible products. Lotus Notes is offered with Dominos to make it compatible with web browsers and intranets.

However, what is swaying in favor of intranet is the adoption of open standards such as TCP/IP, HTTP and HTML, cross-platform support, multimedia support and ease-of-use and available support for secure transaction.

One of intranet's most obvious virtues is its ability to slash the need for paper. According to reports published on the Netscape web page, General Electric has obviated the need of printing a standard directory by putting this information on the intranet and saves an estimated $2,40,000 a year in printing cost. As a web browser can run on any type of computer, any employee can have access to the same electronic information.

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Forget the cost of printing and reprinting. It is no brainer that the earliest uses of intranet deployment were to distribute corporate information and replace printing items like the newsletter, telephone directory, employee handbook, corporate policies and the annual report. (see Box- typical applications).

Similarly, more often than not, chances are that your organization will have a different system for payroll and accounts, HR-related applications and other key application. The integration of these proprietary applications developed by different vendors can be a tough task. Intranet provides an easy-to-use interface accessing a large back-end database that can contains an organization's entire HR, accounts and other applications.

What about the bottomline

In the final analysis, the decision of deploying an intranet or any technology rests on its impact on the bottomline or the cost/benefit relation. Thus as already mentioned above, intranets are a great delivery channel. Any number of reports, newsletters, policies and procedures can be put on the net, and save printing and distribution costs. Other benefits include saving on the upgradation cost of software or hardware. As Viraj Savant, Director, Marketing, DBS Internet Services, says, "It offers huge savings in terms of investments and upgrades of software as well as hardware. A centralized computing solution like the intranet basically means investments only in thin clients like your browsers which are practically free, the software and upgrades would be only toward the centralized server."

Moreover, the investment needed for setting up an intranet is not much. Since not much hardware/software are needed to have an intranet up and running with the basic applications, the investment is not much. As RP Singh, President, Technologies, Nucleus Software says, "If an organization is not deploying intranet thinking that one would have to make huge investments in terms of leased lines, firewalls, hardware and other things, then it is missing out on a great business tool."

However, in any cost-benefit analysis, it is imperative to assess the tangible and intangible benefits of the technology. You would have to factor in intangibles like the time saved and the increase in

efficiency due to information on demand.

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As Tejinder Mann, Business Manager, Microland puts it, "A cost-benefit analysis is a must for large sites. For a 500 nodes-plus site, the total investments could be as high as Rs25 lakh, with payback usually within 6 to 8 months. However, the payback period can be much smaller if the end-user and enterprise adoption are faster and there is an increase in the number of applications hosted on the intranet." Agrees Sawant, "If one looks at the huge cost savings in terms of reduction of overheads caused due to telephones, faxes, paper time as well as increased efficiency, the payback period is normally close to 6-8 months."

Board the bus before...

If one goes by the trend worldwide, it would not be long before intranets will be used as mission-critical tools.

New technology like streaming video will enable richer content applications like education, internal recruiting, HR applications and revamping workflow to reinvent the very nature of how they do business. Adds Jain, "Intranet started as a one-way medium, with policies, procedures and newsletters ported on it. The next stage has been interactive or queries answering and finally we will see business-critical applications like employees ordering inventory, leave application processing, sales management and inventory control." Adds Sunita Joseph, Product Manager, Wipro Net, "Wipro Net has already deployed business-critical applications on its nationwide network and we are looking at applications like ERP, supply chain management and sales order tracking."

Also, a secure intranet can be the base for extranets that is connecting the organization with its suppliers, dealers and customers. Most of the vendors provide intranet capability with their proprietary technology.

Believe it or not, if you are not implementing the intranet, your competitors are, and making it an indispensable part of their infrastructure. As Nath says, "In retrospect, I don't know how we could live without the intranet. Today, we take it for granted and are continuously evolving it." One of the biggest obstacle that scuttles intranet deployment in an organization is the resistance to change. Agrees Arvind Chandrashekar, Product Manager, Network Management Division, HCL Insys, " e had to sell the idea to the company. The clincher-it is not that we need intranet to change but since we are changing we need the intranet."

Sawant voices the same opinion, "Inertia, the reluctance to change/streamline operations in many corporates and not understanding the advantages offered by intranets can be a major inhibitor."

So, though one can see many ERP installations and intranets which are neither expensive nor tough to design and adopt, these are still not being able to finding the right place in organizations. Agrees Mann, "It's surprising to see only a few large organizations adopting them. And though this is certainly changing, still the adoption of intranets by non-IT organizations like manufacturing and finance is quite low today."

There is a need for intranet and many companies are realizing it. Says Mann, "The need to work collaboratively in organizations, besides cutting costs, are the key issues in favor of intranets over traditional client server applications and groupware." It is not that organizations cannot survive without intranets, but then you can also survive without telephones and emails.

YOGRAJ VARMA,

In New Delhi

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