How to Prepare the Information Systems Organization for the Intranet
by Alex Cullen
There have been many publications discussing how to set up an Intranet, or how to sell the concept within
your organization. But looking ahead, "how to set-up" will be less important than how well the Intranet is
operated and supported. According to many surveys, Intranet's are proliferating in most businesses.
One characteristic of Intranets, like the Internet itself, is that in the early stages, they grow organically,
without any overall plan. The technologies are ideal for creating very responsive information systems.
Various business groups can set-up their own servers with little investment. This lends itself towards
experimentation - "how can we get started quickly, and what can we do with it?." While this has benefits, it
also results in a proliferation of approaches. One company thought it had three Web servers, but found
upon survey it had eighteen, another company I.S. which claimed to have no Intranet yet found it had four
servers operated by various business groups. These servers operated on different platforms, used
different software, and applications were being developed which utilized different browsers and plug-ins.
Intranets are driven by business application opportunities. Today, the applications most commonly
focused are making information which has been hard to distribute or keep updated more easily available to
a wider audience. This is the "low hanging fruit". As we become more comfortable with the technologies,
and the development tools improve, Intranets will be the foundation for new business applications,
superseding and incorporating many of the mainframe and client-server systems now supporting
business processes. Clearly, Intranets will evolve from a 'nice to have' to a 'critical business platform'.
What this means is that the qualities that are important for an Intranet will change. After the initial
enthusiasm over what information can be made available, the qualities of availability and reliability, stability,
user support, security and cost will require more attention. Where Intranets may have initially sprung up
outside of I.S. operations, as these qualities become important, they must be integrated within IS. Intranet
builders must begin planning in the early stages towards this transition. Web developers and Webmasters
must understand central I.S.'s requirements for operating and maintaining production systems.
The I.S. operations function has defined approaches for production systems operations, user/desktop
support, change management, security/user id administration, and network planning. These have been
developed for the mainframe and client-server world, and likely are in a continual state of change. How the
Intranet impacts these approaches can summarized in two words: "speed" and "integration".
The speed of change -- in technologies, in uses, and in the structure of the Intranet information itself, is
widely appreciated and often seen as a virtue. The downside is that I.S. has to learn to adapt to this pace
of change. An IT director at a large technology firm recently observed that his organization operates
around a one-year cycle for changing back-end software and desktop applications, but he is now being
asked to compress this to less than three months. The ramifications of this impact everything from how
he can support and train users, to how he forecasts network traffic.
The integration aspect is, in some ways more significant. In the information infrastructure we are evolving
from, services are implemented and operated as separate silos: file/print servers, email systems, office
automation applications, groupware applications, custom business applications. With the evolving Intranet,
these separate silos are being integrated together; at the user's browser, and through Intranet application
servers which range from your Novell Intranetware, to your Netscape Mail, to your Web-enabled
mainframe CICS applications. From a technology perspective, this new environment is less able to be
architected as separate and distinct systems. These systems must share common security services,
navigational services and user desktop software. From a support perspective, ensuring availability and
responding to user and business requests becomes much more complicated. Think of Helpdesks who
must diagnose and dispatch problem reports in this environment.
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