Managing Your Electronic Office
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Setting and agreeing on standards is central to any successful system. Understand the different types of standards and how they interact, as wel as their respective impact on the organization. While this will likely add time t o a project, attempts to bypass the standards issue will almost certainly have adverse consquences, including stakeholder alienation and potential project failure. Mark Scherling " From Concept to Operations" "The Intranet is offering a new set of challenges that is forcing the IS team to make another evolutionary step. That is, from service provider to coach." |
The following article first appeared on our GeoCities website in early 1996 --- our apologies for formating errors and the style shift, but there was no such thing as CSS or template pages in those days. Managing Your Electronic Office
TeleDynamics Feb 1996 I don't like the word "Intranet" --- any real 'Intranet' project is doomed. People quite often don't listen to me, but many come back later to tell me how right I am. On this one, I am dead on. Intranets are doomed to failure. In the 1980's, forward-thinking small businesses clicked to the BBS craze, a doomed fad prolonged only by FIDOnet. Why? Many BBS operators clung to their isolation, and succumbed to the Internet. Why? An Intranet is a microcosm of the Internet, offering the features, but none of the scope. Do you see a pattern here?The Wall Street Journal reports over 100% increase in Intranets in 1996 Our motivation is simple: If someone in your office has information, you cannot get to it until they are free. They may be away at a conference, with a customer ... or working from home. At first, we groped along with "workgroups" and "fileservers" which is fine if you all have the identical computers and time to configure and program them, however the easy portability of a TCP/IP network with a webserver is a ready-made, a solution just sitting there waiting to be put in place. Enter the Intranet: All you need is a fileserver running an HTTPD server and a firewall. Your staff has some access to global information and at the same time can manage their own information with simple webpages cobbled in Netscape Gold. Everyone is happy --- and a basic solution can be cobbled together for as little as a few thousand dollars for the server and a few hundred extra per workstation. So what is wrong with this picture? Most Intranets fail to address the very human need to be inclusive rather than exclusive, and our cleverness in addressing the progressive granularization of trust --- any so-called Intranet solution must either accomodate the eventual tumbling of the Corporate Berlin Wall or suffer the consequences.But an Intranet is safe! Or is it. Ernst & Young found 80% of the surveyed companies in the US who had lost valuable information from internal attack! The Wall did not 'protect' East Berlin, either. Accomodating the global while protecting the local will be a common problem as the world becomes more interrelated (yes, I said moreinterrelated. A firewall solution is no different than a castle wall or an Iron Curtain --- all three are eventually seen as unprofitable. Like any neurosis, the energy required to maintain the defense eventually consumes the defender. A Don Quixote cannot forever tilt at windmills. Eventually, they either become his bane, or appear for what they really are. Delphi now reports 37% of organizations have 75% of their desktop computers networked to an intranet. 82% of these organizations expect to be fully connected by the end of the decade. The simple math is to divide these numbers by the number of non-interoperable intranet solutions and we have yet another Year 2000 problem! Internet Communities of Interest"Those who sacrifice liberty for security will end up with neither" (Ben Franklin)Employees will be at home, or abroad, or in a train station (well, perhaps not in Canada, but some nations still value their trains) and they will need to be integrated into their office. Suppliers, certain customers, collaborators, intelligent agents ... 600 days ago, very few had heard of Java and yet many dream of a world stable enough to imagine closed, warm, safe, isolated 'Intranets'. With IPv6, we are looking at a world with tens of thousands of IP addresses per square metre! Are none welcome inside your gates? A Jupiter Communications study predicts 15.3 million homes will be using non-PC devices by the end of the century, and 47 million will have Internet access from desktop computers. Strategis tells us 52% of current wireless users and 40% of non-users are interested in wireless Internet services. The day of ubiquitous communications is, like many days, closer than we think. If you find an Intranet along the road ... kill it Any 'Intranet' solution needs to be mindful of abandoning the concept ... likely more sooner than later. It is not enough to have a closed (fire) wall --- what we need are trusted communities of interest More cracks in the FirewallI am not alone in my assessment of the firewall. A recent product update of the Silicon Graphics firewall line incorporates a new standard feature: These products will securely interoperate with other similarly equiped sites. Firewall-like protection is granted to each site, but each site is effectively inside the enterprise firewall. The next step is to grant this, on the fly, to trusted clients, roamers and hotel-based workers.Is your Intranet an Intranet?Chances are, while you are reading this and discounting my vision of no-walls computing, you may be thinking your own Intranet is a good solution for the present state-of-the-art. There is, however, another question: Do you have an Intranet, or are you running Client/Server in the emperor's new clothes?In' tra net - n. 1) a computer network connecting an affiliated set of clients using standard internet protocols, esp. TCP/IP and HTTP. 2) an IP-based network of nodes behind a firewall, or behind several firewalls connected by secure, possibly virtual, networks.The operative words in Innergy's definition are "affiliated" and "nodes" --- there is no mention of client/server. Top-down Data is PropagandaClassical MIS puts great power in the hands of a few, and virtually none in the hands of those who need it. Far too many Intranets fall into this category.An Intranet is not a webserverThe etimology of the word is "Intra-inter-networking", which means, like the Internet itself, your microcosm grants all nodes equal status. SGI ships a webserver as standard issue on all workstations, and this is an install option with SUN. Why do you suppose the Internet visionaries would do this? An Intranet is not Client/ServerTo be as effective as the Internet, and who can doubt that the Internet is effective, an Intranet cannot have a "star topology". It cannot be constructed with massive central feeders distributing 'official' information to dumb (ie Windows) terminals. Curiously, Microsoft omits all data-source and personal broadcast software from its standard OS products; a quick visit to Windows95.com solves this, but the omission, considering the full sets shipped with all Unix systems, is very curious. To be effective, an Intranet must have a fully networked topology where all nodes are as much a source as a drain. Each participant must be a participant and not a passive consumer of canned data. Each node must be given the right to manage their own data store (which leads to massive gains by distributing the MIS labour). Without this, all we have is Client/Server painted over with a thin veneer of Internet, an expensive facade --- if client/server were such a good idea, we would not now be in the throes of an Internet explosion. In measuring up an Intranet solution, we must be weary of being spoonfed worms when we could be flying with the eagles. TeleDynamics and IntranetsTeleDynamics and Intranets have long been sononomous; we continue to work with governments and corporate clients to meet internal information management needs; we are as guilty as the next company of building isolated little top-down worlds.When looking at inter-networking projects, we have always advised open solutions for our clients, and continue to research methods to build virtual office spaces which accomodate rather than restrict business life. It is not always a popular choice, but history seems to bear us out Computer Intelligence reports nearly half of the corporations surveyed are rethinking their entire network infrastructures and looking beyond their traditional vendors. 97% reported a preference for quality over cost. If you have questions on building community of interest Internet systems and how you might avoid your own Berlin Wall, send us email or contact us at the address below © Copyright 1996 TeleDynamics |
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