Today, the World Wide Web has opened the way to a new Magna Carta, and like the courageous barons of the 13th century, corporate IS has penned its own bill of rights and served it to the present-day monarchs of technology.

After decades of being told that platform-independence was impossible; that applications must live in strictly defined corporate silos; that information systems were doomed to fragmentation; and that monolithic dominance by benevolent technology vendors was the only way to achieve near-compatibility, an alternative has appeared -- the intranet.

As with most revolutions, the power base is being shaken. The intranet does not bode well for many of the software technology vendors who are so clearly behind it. The problem that traditional technology vendors will find with this great new charter is that it signals the death of single-vendor dominance over the desktop and opens the door to commoditization, "componentization," and interchangeability of software applications unimaginable just a few years ago. But Smart Companies, on the other hand, see this as the key to creating an enterprise without boundaries.

The Intranet Magna Carta

• Software Shall Be Free
• Applications Shall Fade Away
• The Desktop Shall Be Public Domain
• The Business Operating System Shall Belong to the Users
• Commoditization Shall Be King

The ability of the Web to act as an instantaneous delivery vehicle for dissemination of applications is far too tempting for most software providers. By infiltrating business enterprises with their particular products, these vendors hope to be able to go back and provide the back-end services that enable their client's applications. To invert a popular analogy, "The money is not in the blades, but in the razors."

Computer users have suffered the absurdity of the need to use discrete silos to launch applications in silence, because there was little alternative, other than proprietary desktop computing environments, until the [commercialization] of the Internet.

Today, it is not outrageous to predict that within a decade, at most, all talk of applications will fade away. Word processing, spreadsheets and databases will all become part of a single integrated business environment, known as the business operating system. Users will no longer launch or care about applications, per se.

How will this be done? The Intranet provides a common ground, namely HTML, for stitiching together work in a single interface format. Where it once required extensive programming to integrate separate pieces of information into a single presentation, the Web is inherently integrated.

How? Intranets act as windows to old legacy computer applications, as well as contemporary solutions. But users only see the surface, they do not see the complexity of integration going on behind the scenes. And since nothing exists at the surface (interface) other than the intranet browser, users see simplicity.

The rules, roles, and routing of the business process must be expressed in means that are compatible across platforms and plainly obvious to the most naive of end users. The Business Operating System acts as an intelligent broker that coordinates work and information acrosss business processes using intuitive metaphors such as icons that illustrate the work being done. And these metaphors are identical without regard to the underlying computer platform.

Workflow and groupware vendors are already providing a wide array of tools compatible with intranets and web browsers that can create the foundation for the Business Operating System.

How is this done? Applets (small pieces of applications distributed over the Internet), free clients, click/usage-based pay schemes, and standardized interfaces will make commoditization possible. These applets will create the equivalent of a universal dial tone for computing -- no matter where you are or what computer desktop you are using, the business process you are working on will look exactly the same. As long as you know the process, any training, ramp-up, or complexity will be negligible. Hard to believe, isn't it? But the tools to do all of this are here today.

So where will all the enormous change being brought on by the Internet take us? A few things are clear: The silos are being torn down; desktop dominance by any single vendor is speculative; commoditization and componentization are fact; and the Internet, which cannot be claimed by any single vendor, will finally offer the alternative that no single vendor ever could have.

Twenty years ago most of us would have thought it patently absurd to believe that PCs would take over enterprise computing. Today we wonder how we could have been shortsighted. The same trend that drove PCs into the mainstream is also driving the Internet. The Internet is the embodiment of the most important trend in the computing industry today -- the trend toward connectivity. Connectivity creates a single point of access to all of the information that workers need to get their jobs done. It does what computers have always done best: deliver work to the worker. Intranets do more by delivering both the work and the tools to the worker. Henry Ford would recognize their significance in a heartbeat, as would any Smart Company.

The Author

Thomas M. Koulopoulos is founder and President of Delphi Consulting Group, Boston, MA. He is a recognized international authority on the subject of knowledge management, workflow and technologies for business process redesign. Koulopoulos has written four books, Electronic Document Management Systems: A Portable Consultant (McGraw-Hill, NY), The Workflow Imperative (Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY), Smart Companies, Smart Tools (Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY) and Corporate Instinct: Building a Knowing Enterprise for the 21st Century (Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY).

The Book

Smart Companies - innovative firms in which the nurturing of the unique contributions of each individual employee is leading to unprecedented success.

Smart Tools - technologies, models, and systems these companies use to create a liberating work environment, to facilitate round-the-clock communication, to continually measure success and efficiency, and to get the most out of their technological investment.

Smart Companies, Smart Tools (Van Nostrand Reinhold, NY: 1997; ISBN 0-442-02496-7) is the book that shows you how to make these innovations a part of your company. World-class consultant Thomas Koulopoulos takes you behind the scenes at smart firms of all sizes to show how their focus on workflow fosters an efficient, empowering cohesion between traditional and non-traditional staff, yielding profit-raising, cost-cutting, employee-inspiring results.

Adapted for IDM with permission of the author.
Copyright © 1997 by Thomas M. Koulopoulos