How Can the Intranet Make its Rightful Contribution to Productivity?
...XML

By Barry Schaeffer, X.Systems, Inc.

With the past decade's rush of technology, the world is almost giddy over how easy it's becoming to make our electronic dreams come true. So giddy in fact, many organizations are forgetting the maxim that technology, if it is to be of any real use, cannot serve its own ends. Intranets, technological marvels that they are, can no more ignore this truth than can their cousins, the Internet and WWW. Indeed, we must view the rise of the intranet as an opportunity to rethink how we conduct business and commerce. Intranets often end up as merely a slicker way to do what we have always done. While perhaps laudable in itself, that outcome falls far short of its potential and our expectations.

There is no shortage of opportunities for this basic restructuring of our business and commercial sector. The growth of e-commerce alone is re-arranging the positions of major industries and players, creating entire new sets of winners and losers. Moreover, major investment is moving in and out of Internet-impacted firms on an almost daily basis, radically affecting their decision processes. Intranets, if they are to justify the work being put into their foundation technology, must likewise act to improve their users' ability to compete, both in their chosen markets and in the chase for funding. That won't happen if Intranet technology becomes just a better tool in the hands of the IT group.

Mature environments such as EDI, personal communications, publishing and finance are under serious and often illogical pressure to evolve, and intranet technology development, largely due to its ability to proceed in a partial vacuum, is more susceptible to this "gold rush" mentality than most of its technological cousins. The folks down in the bowels of IT can work for months, even years and not share their results with anyone outside their own shop. Indeed, end users of an intranet are usually unaware that different technology is even in use.

So how can the intranet make its rightful contribution to the productivity of the business and commerce communities? A couple of opportunities come to mind:

1. XML itself, because of its ability to describe virtually anything in neutral terms, it should be a key building block in the intranet world. Indeed, XML offers the logical glue that can make an Intranet into a true enterprise resource.

The "three tier" XML strategy envisions proprietary applications on both sides of each transaction with XML as the neutral interchange vehicle. This means that most development and support will take place in the proprietary portions of the architecture with XML as a bridge that should make the interchange of information more or less transparent. While it will be sometime before this level of flow is seen in the broader, Internet world, the more controlled nature of the corporate intranet contains the elements necessary for an environment in which everything is available to everyone under the best possible circumstances. The decision support implications of that kind of visibility are enormous.

XML, however, won't become the corporate resource it should be unless its most important users, the intranets, play an active role in defining how the standard is to be implemented and the ways in which information is mapped for corporate use. Today, industries, individual firms, standards bodies and even some individual gurus are competing for bragging rights to having developed the XML standard for their area of interest. While predictable, this makes little sense. Only when corporations, the ultimate users of XML information resources, articulate their vision of how information must be made available to them will this near-chaos get down to the business of really justifying its existence.

2. XML-tagged information services from vendors in many industries can create a virtual shopping list of highly usable resources, each available to corporate decision-makers through their intranet at reasonable cost and with a high potential for integration with other information. While information is available on the open market today, it comes in a myriad of formats, most of which aren't easy to integrate into corporate decision making processes. With XML, the foundation is laid for a market in highly usable and interchangeable information. Some vendors are already moving into this market, viewing the corporate intranet as their primary market. News, for example, is now available in XML with tagging to support a high degree of subject filtering for corporate knowledge management needs. Likewise, vendors of catalog items are beginning to explore provision of their information in XML enabling users to develop their own "meta-catalogs" spanning many vendors. The building design-construction-operation industries are working to develop XML-tagged technical descriptions of everything from huge HVAC machines to roof materials, allowing owner-managers to develop highly specific applications for operation and maintenance.

The corporate intranet is the highway on which these information resources can best flow. Indeed, judging from the recent spate of Internet site penetrations by hackers, the intranet, with its closed architecture and higher level of security may be the only safe way to move important information resources. Again, while the broader Internet world may take some time to reach this level of information integration, the intranet community can plan for such services even as it implements the enabling technology. The corporate intranet world is a huge potential market, perhaps the most coherent in the information marketplace. Studies show that every one of the Fortune 1000 has implemented some form of intranet, and that is likely just the start. As this market becomes more visible, vendors in the information marketplace will move to satisfy its demands with resources designed to blend easily into the corporate decision-making landscape.

3. The resources inherent in intranet technology must trigger a serious effort to better understand and include major portions of the supply chain and back office not now integrated under EDI or current e-commerce applications. This is a difficult subject to even discuss because our acceptance of yesterday's technology limitations has literally shaped our view of what's possible. While maxims like "thinking outside the box" have been around for some time, they have perhaps never been as appropriate as they are now. Our overwhelming tendency is to use new technology to do things better and faster. What's more appropriate to the rise of the intranet is to think of things we haven't been doing and find ways to include them in the mix.

Looking at current supply chain automation, for example, there certainly appears to be ample room for new paradigms. Our automation efforts, some based on thinking nearly 20 years old, tend to segregate transactions into parallel but disconnected tracks which must be reassembled on each end in order to make sense. EDI, for example, focused on short, highly compact transmissions of only those critical elements necessary to make a transaction work. While few would defend its relevance to today's world, the same type of thinking underlies many of today's e-commerce efforts. Instead, perhaps, the supply chain should be viewed as the flow of everything each side knows about products, their specifications, their operating instructions, their legal disclaimers and usage histories, even their marketing literature. With that as a base, the scope of information available to purchase, use and evaluate the ingredients of business becomes limitless. However, this kind of new approach will happen only if its major participants, the corporations funding most of the technology, demand that it be so and communicate that demand both to their IT groups and the information vendors to whom they will be looking for the resources to improve their future.

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The Author

About the Author

Barry Schaeffer is President and CEO of X.Systems, Inc. of Manassas, Virginia. X.Systems provides a range of services and products to the e-business community, with a particular focus on the nature and use of XML and other structured information resources. Mr. Schaeffer is a veteran of over 35 years in the electronic information field..