Home.front: more than just internal Internets, intranets and extranets are tying companies together - and blurring the boundaries between them - Chief Executive Guide: Beyond the Internet

Chief Executive, The, March 15, 1999 by Peter Buxbaum

For the CEO accustomed to surfing the Net, venturing onto the turf of his local intranet or extranet may seem all too familiar. After all, the language, the icons, the links appear to be the same. But the similarity is only superficial. For while each of these three species of electronic network are accessible by means of a Web browser, their content is quite another matter.

The World Wide Web has all the decorum of the Wild West - marked by exponential growth in content ranging from the sublime to the obscene to the ridiculous - but its intranet and extranet cousins must be far more restrained, because they are designed to suit the specific knowledge- and information-management needs of enterprises or groups of enterprises.

Succinctly put, an intranet comprises a wholly private network that is designed to disseminate information and knowledge within a company. An extranet moves information in and out of secure, walled-off sections of the public Internet and is designed to connect trading partners electronically and seamlessly. More important than distinguishing between these two phenomena, however, is examining how both can and should work together as part of a company's technology strategy.

The wild and woolly nature of the World Wide Web - with all its excitement, innovation, and massiveness - is what we have come to expect from that global behemoth. While experts say one should strive for innovation in the intranet environment as well, its framework must be carefully controlled in order to facilitate the knowledge sharing for which it is designed.

Internal Affairs

"You don't want your intranet to be an internal Internet," says Susan O'Neill, a partner in PricewaterhouseCoopers's Global Knowledge Management group. "You want to encourage innovation but you want it to fit within a cohesive content architecture. You want to categorize information in such a way that it is useful to the end user." The intranet, in other words, should not be allowed to develop willy-nilly, as has the Internet.

PricewaterhouseCoopers is creating a global intranet that is designed to give the firm a competitive advantage by keeping its people well informed. "What we are trying to do is to leverage what we have captured and have more people use it," she says. "We make accessible the knowledge we gain from solving problems for our clients in an effort to apply it to other situations. That way, our people don't have to start from square one when they begin work on a new assignment." PwC's intranet also facilitates internal communications and this, too, helps with client relationships. "We may have 400 or 500 people in 40 countries working on a single client's business," says O'Neill. "Our intranet enables us to tell each other what each of us is doing on behalf of that client. The client expects us to know this."

For PWC, the merger last summer of Price Waterhouse and Coopers & Lybrand has been a driving force behind its knowledge-management strategy. As Ellen Knapp, PwC's chief knowledge officer and global CIO, explains, "You've got two mega-global organizations of roughly speaking 70,000 people each in some 148 countries, and these two organizations have to come together. The most critical challenge we have in this merger, particularly because we are a knowledge-based organization, is to know what we know. One of the tremendous advantages here is that it brings us not just more people, but new areas of practice, new skills and competencies we can bring to our clients. But we have to know they're there. Our partners have to know what's available. We also use different methods in our various practices. We have to quickly learn each other's ways of doing things so we can quickly work together. And of course, beyond the 'know what' and the 'know how,' there's the 'know who'-with more than 140,000 people, how do you know who the expert is in mining in Australia?"

For O'Neill, what makes for a good intranet - and what clearly answers the questions Knapp raises - is global seamlessness. However, she cautions, with an eye toward the types of organizational changes that have restructured corporations around the globe, "It is something that should get past company silos," she says. "Some companies have different intranets for different divisions, and they are not connected. That is not effective knowledge management."

An E-Commerce Application

The original knowledge-sharing purposes of the intranet have given way to commercial applications as well. For an information retrieval company like The Dialog Corp., intranets have begun to play an increasingly important role in its overall business strategy. The London-based Dialog, which owns the world's largest information database and retrieval system, was formed last year through the merger of Knight-Ridder Information and M.A.I.D.

"The intranet is the corporate portal for both internal and external information," says Daniel Wagner, Dialog's chief executive. "We want to be that portal." Dialog is attempting to accomplish that by marketing e-commerce applications as well as information sorting and retrieval systems that address themselves specifically to the intranet environment.