This excerpt is adapted from Chapter 9 of "The Corporate Intranet" by Ryan Bernard (John Wiley & Sons). Copyright 1997 by John Wiley & Sons. Used with permission.
by Ryan Bernard
In most companies that were early web adopters, it has been with the tolerance of
management, rather than at their urging, that the Intranet was formed. Lucky is the
manager who understands what's going on.
Executives are getting little help with this from their IS staffs. Some corporate IS
departments are still mired in the mainframe world and are only starting to explore
client-server. Those that are heavily committed to client-server have jumped into some
very expensive proprietary technologies and big-bang projects that require a lot of
administration and maintenance, and it will be some time before they get their heads
unstuck enough to see what is happening around them.
When they do, they may find that their original assumptions about client-server technology
have to be completely rethought. "IS people were asleep when personal computers
happened," says Chris Koehncke of Nortel, "and I think they are asleep now on the World
Wide Web."
In companies where employees are truly empowered, people tend to take Intranet
technology and run with it in all kinds of unexpected ways. In fact, you might gauge the
intellectual health and level of entrepreneurship within your own organization by the speed
at which web systems are adopted and grow.
In companies where employees are functionally empowered, technologically enabled and
intellectually challenged, web technology may spread very fast. In companies that ration
technology and where initiative is stifled by layers of bureaucratic control, you may see
some signs of life on the web front, but the general rate of adoption may be incredibly slow.
The quickest adoption often occurs at companies where savvy managers catch on and
help lead the charge.
Intranets work best when people are given the same freedom to use them that they now
have with ordinary business applications like desktop publishing and spreadsheets. It's
important to recognize that web technology-at its core-is not rocket science. It's just
another business communications medium, like desktop publishing is now, but one in
which the network substitutes for paper. But it's also important to realize that web will
exponentially increase the speed and immediacy of business communications and that it
will eventually suck in all the other information stream-not just words and pictures, but data,
multimedia, messaging, conferencing, and applications.
When this happens, watch for a further flattening of organizational structures and drastic
changes in the management of information systems. In the Web Era, mid-level managers
will have an even smaller role as the intermediaries who interpret and transfer information
between the bottom and top rungs of the corporate ladder. Grunt-level workers and
executives will have a common platform for communication where they can silently (or
even audibly) audit each others' web pages, hear each others' concerns, and add their
voices to corporate-wide discussion groups focused on special topics. The new
technology will enhance the communication of corporate goals, performance targets, and
employee feedback across the organizational nexus.
IS managers may find their entire world shifting around them once again, as the internal
web becomes the dominant environment for delivering data and applications. The entire
method of application design and delivery may require a new phase of reengineering with a
focus on more modular, applet- based information systems, and a more serious look at
ways of integrating the entire information stream, including data, documents, multimedia,
and applications.
IS will certainly continue to be the guardian of back-end legacy data, but will find more and
more of their information being served out directly onto the Intranet. Many application
programming functions may devolve out to individual departments or information centers,
as people create their own form-based interfaces to data sources.
None of this should suggest that an internal web is unmanageable, or that there aren't
concrete steps that should be taken to manage it. In fact, there are many management
issues that must and should be addressed to ensure that people can use the new
technologies in efficient and productive ways. This chapter will discuss the key
management concepts, and suggest ways that management can cope with the coming
web explosion.
The Matter of Control
Large organizations love control, and the larger the organization, the more effort they
spend controlling things. It's no wonder, then, that one of the biggest impediments to
adoption of a web may be the control issue.
People make no bones about it. "Our company likes control," one client told me. "We might
not want just anyone going out and setting up a web server, or using one of these things."
But think about it. If the company likes controls so much, where are the controls on the
telephone and e-mail systems? Who controls the desktop publishing and interoffice mail
systems? Anyone can use a word processing program to prepare a document, print as
many copies as they want and drop all those copies into interoffice mail to be distributed
throughout the company with no questions asked! Where's the control there?
"We can't control the use of word processors or the copying machine," people may argue.
"That would be impossible. Everybody needs those tools to do their job."
My point exactly! You don't mind employees wasting money to print all this paper and
hand-deliver it to locations worldwide. They can do that without restriction. But if someone
wants to use the network to bypass these archaic information distribution systems, they
have to ask for permission first. Does that really make sense?
The control issue is a vestigial part of the old information systems models. In traditional
computing environments, you start with the idea that everything is prohibited unless
someone in power enables it. Thus, people who want access to computer resources are
typically given access only if they request it.
With web systems, on the other hand, access is automatically granted unless it is
specifically denied. In other words, everyone starts with full access to the system, and they
are restricted from key applications only where that type of control is absolutely necessary
(such as with highly confidential product designs, personnel records-that sort of thing). The
new paradigm is that you let the system grow free at the grass roots, then you take a little
time to manicure the lawn.
Understanding the Web Control Model
That's not to say that control is not a legitimate issue. There must always be some amount
of access control, even in an open system like a web. It's just that the control model has
changed; almost inverted. On its face, a web server is the epitome of control. With web,
however, the controls are non-intrusive, built-in, and decentralized.
Can anyone access just any information on a web server? No... People who are looking at
my web site are seeing only the information the author or webmaster wants them to see. In
other words, the individual author or provider of information exercises control over who
sees what by moving it into the web server document folders. No one (unless they are a
somewhat bored and very talented hacker) can see any other information on the server
platform unless it is physically moved into the server folders.
In a web system, therefore, there are two levels of control involved, that can be called
author versus viewer control, or server-side control versus client-side control.
Think of the web server as sort of neutral territory being visited from both sides by two
opposing camps. On one side are the authors of the information, who are mainly
responsible for publishing it and keeping it up-to-date. On the other side are the users of
the information, who are mainly responsible for browsing through it, learning from it, and
occasionally interacting with it. Here's how the control systems work on both sides of the
equation:
Author/Server Control
On the author/server side, we have the issue of who will be able to create new information
and deposit it inside the web server directories, who will be able to update the information,
and who will be able to tamper with the configuration of the file systems or other aspects of
the server host computer. In this case, the server may be controlled by the people who
contribute the information to it, which may be an individual, a workgroup, a department, or a
division.
In these situations, the traditional control models are more likely to apply: The web server
could be installed with server directories mounted as a local file system on each
contributor's machine. That way, each author could directly access and edit the
information just as though it were stored on a local hard drive.
In this case, permissions would be set on the server side to make sure that only members
of the group could access the directories to change their content. Or an automated
process could be used to transfer and convert web content in a shared workgroup
directory to a set of production server directories controlled by a webmaster.
Workgroup server model.
On a wide area network with built-in Internet software, access to the server directories
could be provided in other ways: including FTP and telnet either through the network or
through dial-up SLIP or PPP connections. Thus, for example, authors might create and
manage the content on their own local computers, then use FTP to transfer the completed
files over to the web server. A time-triggered "cron" job could be set up as an batch
process to automatically do this on a regular schedule.
