Building Extranets for Business Advantage - Industry Trend or Event

ENT, June 14, 2000 by David B. Miller

You knew it was coming sooner rather than later. Your executive committee has come down with a bad case of the E-B-G-Bs: E-business is Good Business. The symptoms are pronounced: no word is uttered without an "e" prefix, and talk of extranets, self-service, portals, and profits fills the corporate meeting rooms.

To be prepared for the transition to ecommerce, you need to know how upper-level management thinks. What do they want out of this Internet excursion? How do they plan to present the business to online customers? What should the system provide in the way of services and information to the employees running the back-end processes? How will it all involve you?

Building a solid extranet that compels customers to return is no trivial matter. A number of factors need to come together for an effective extranet, including the interface, the infrastructure, and all the corporate data made readily available. Most important, perhaps, is making the data mean something to line-of-business managers and customers.

The Customer Is King

Due to the nature of their purpose, extranets and the systems they encompass must be designed with the customer in mind. A critical component of the customer-centric extranet is the user interface. It must be simple, clear, and easy-to-use, but still provide access to extensive information behind it.

Ideally, everything and anything a customer needs to do can be accomplished via this interface.

"The traditional business-intelligence tools have been slow at adapting their technologies to the Web and making them modular enough to allow themselves to sit seamlessly within a Web solution," says Sanjay Poonen, director of product marketing and a founder at Alphablox Corp. (www.alphablox.com), which builds a platform for e-business analytical applications. "People want to read a Web page as if they were reading CNN.com, unaware that some of the information is, in fact, business logic that is analytical in nature from a structured database, while other items might be unstructured information in the form of news feeds."

Greg Johnsen, director of product marketing at Tradiant Inc. (www.tradiant.com), a provider of e-commerce solutions to the transportation industry agrees that presentation is a key factor in an e-business's success. "We run an online marketplace, and giving our customers the help and information they need to make good commercial decisions is critical," he says.

Johnsen's team manages the multiple communication channels the company uses to interact with its customers. These include e-mail, phone, fax, and the Web. The company collects information gleaned from its interactions, in the end pushing very specific and useful knowledge to customers.

Building an effective user interface means developers of e-commerce applications must integrate data from structured sources -- such as relational databases and data warehouses -- as well as from unstructured sources, such as news feeds.

The Infrastructure

Larry Freed, vice president of divisional practices at Compuware Corp. (www.compuware.com), sees challenges on the back-end side of an extranet's user interface. Freed spent several years working with the American National Standards Institute X.12 committee for electronic data interchange (EDI).

"The system-to-system communication components of e-business demand the adherence to standards. Although a standard like XML is critical for effective computer-to-computer transactions, the path to seamless communications still has some potholes," he says.

Freed continues that although several e-business partners can write to the XML standard, each one can write to their own interpretation.

"I worked with automakers for several years on the X.12 standard. While we got real close to agreeing on standardized forms for data interchange, invariably, there was always something a bit different," he says.

For seamless system-to-system communications, which effective extranets require, business partners have to agree on such matters as what fields are defined in their data exchanges, what type of data populates each field, where the fields are located in the data stream, and so on.

Naturally, the complexity increases as the number of business partners increases.

Jim Lambert, director of corporate marketing at Octane Software Inc. (www.octane.com), a company that makes Internet relationships management software, sees the integration of disparate systems as a key hurdle to over- come -- similar to the days when it was typical to find a PC and a minicomputer terminal on someone's desk because the two systems didn't "talk."

"Some early systems were narrow in focus, perhaps con centrating on the call center where the telephone was the key tool to use. Then along came the fax, e-mail, and the Web. Often, point solutions were implemented for each of these communication channels," he says. "You'd have the 'phone group' in one corner, the 'Web group' in another, and so on. Technology today must be flexible to allow the development of systems that integrate multiple input channels and present them to the knowledge worker in a single, unified manner."