Intranets and Push Technology: Creating an Information-Sharing Environment

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Intranets and Push Technology: Creating an Information-Sharing Environment

Published by Aslib, The Association for Information Management and Information Management International Staple Hall Stone House Court London EC3A 7PB Tel: +44 20 7 903 0000 Fax: +44 20 7 903 0011 Email: [email protected] WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/ This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. ISBN 0-203-40396-7 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-41049-1 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 85142 423 6 (Print Edition) © Paul Pedley 1999 Except as otherwise permitted under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form or by any means, with the prior permission in writing of the publisher. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside these terms should be sent to Aslib at the address below. The author asserts his moral right to be identified as such in accordance with the terms of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Intranets and Push Technology: Creating an Information-Sharing Environment

Paul Pedley

Is your organisation a corporate member of Aslib? Aslib, The Association for Information Management is a world class corporate membership with over 2000 members in some 70 countries. Aslib actively promotes best practice in the management of information resources. It lobbies on all aspects of the management of, and legislation concerning, information at local, national and international levels. Aslib provides consultancy and information services, professional development training, conferences, specialist recruitment, Internet products, and publishes primary and secondary journals, conference proceedings, directories and monographs. Further information is available from: Aslib, The Association for Information Management Staple Hall Stone House Court London EC3A 7PB Tel: +44 20 7 903 0000 Fax: +44 20 7 903 0011 Email: [email protected] WWW: http://www.aslib.co.uk/

Series Editor Sylvia Webb is a well known consultant, author and lecturer in the information management field. Her first book, Creating an Information Service, now in its third edition, was published by Aslib and has sold in over forty countries. She has experience of working in both the public and private sectors, ranging from public libraries to national and international organisations. She has also been a lecturer at Ashridge Management College, specialising in management and interpersonal skills, which led to her second book, Personal Development in Information Work, also published by Aslib. She has served on a number of government advisory bodies and is past Chair of the Information and Library Services Lead Body which develops National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) for the LIS profession. She is actively involved in professional education with Aslib and the Library Association and is also a former Vice-President of the Institute of Information Scientists. As well as being editor of this series, Sylvia Webb has written three of the Know How Guides: Making a Charge for Library and Information Services, Preparing a Guide to Your Library and Information Service and Knowledge Management: Linchpin of Change. A complete listing of all titles in the series can be found at the back of this volume.

About the author Paul Pedley is Head of Research at the Economist Intelligence Unit. Until the end of 1998 Paul was Library and Information Services Manager at City law firm Theodore Goddard, where he had worked since 1992. Prior to that Paul worked for Olympia & York, the developers of Canary Wharf in London’s docklands, and also in government libraries at the Department of Trade and Industry, the Office of Telecommunications (OFTEL) and the Property Services Agency (PSA). Paul is a Fellow of the Library Association, and is an active member of a number of professional groups, including the Industrial & Commercial Libraries Group of the Library Association, and he is also a past chair of both the City Law Librarians Group and the Property Information Group. Paul is a member of the Library Association/Joint Consultative Committee working party on copyright. He is the author of the Aslib Know How Guide Copyright for Library and Information Service Professionals; and has written a number of articles for journals such as the Library Association Record, Business Information Review, Internet Newsletter for Lawyers, and Information World Review; and speaks at professional meetings on topics ranging from copyright, competencies of special librarians and networking to whether the Internet could and should be regulated.

Contents Abbreviations

xi

Introduction Market data LISU research

1 3 4

1. Intranets Definitions Key components Beyond the hype Benefits of intranets The ‘emptynet’ phenomenon Stages of intranet development Cultural issues Intranets and knowledge management Procedures manual Intranet deployment checklist Dos/don’ts Who should be involved? Out of the box v.tailor made

11 11 12 13 15 16 18 22 23 26 28 30 30 31

2. Extranets Definitions

35 35

Development of web technologies

35

3. Groupware Definitions Suppliers Functionality

39 39 39 40

4. Case Studies BT BBC Theodore Goddard

43 43 43 45

5. Push/Pull Technologies Definition SDI Delivery methods Data products Deficiencies Software distribution End-users Intelligent agents Portals Push technology and information overload

47 48 48 51 52 55 56 56 59 60 61

7. Information Overload End-users

65 70

Appendix 1: Key Players Push technology Groupware Extranets Intranet-related tools

73 73 74 75 76

Appendix 2: Useful Information Sources Web sites Journals Exhibitions/events Training courses Useful addresses

79 79 79 86 88 90

References

93

Further Reading

99

List of tables Table 1. Sectoral breakdown of organisations which have intranets or news alerting services 6 Table 2. Sectoral breakdown of the level of library involvement in the intranet 8 List of figures Figure 1. How many special libraries have intranets 5 Figure 2. Intranets: level of library involvement 7

Figure 3. Stages of intranet development 18 Figure 4. Development of web technologies 36

Abbreviations BT — British Telecom DTI — Department of Trade & Industry EBIC — European Business Information Conference e-commerce — Electronic commerce FTP — File Transfer Protocol HTML — Hypertext Markup Language HTTP — Hypertext Transfer Protocol IPR — Institute of Public Relations ISP — Internet service provider LISU — Library & Information Statistics Unit SDI — Selective dissemination of information TCP/IP — Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol TOMES — Too Much of Everything Syndrome URL — Uniform resource locator

Introduction Library and information professionals are currently operating in a rapidly changing environment. Technological developments are a major driving force for change. There is a paradigm shift from paper to electronic media as the primary form of information storage and retrieval. There are also moves towards end-user searching, and teleworking which have a significant impact upon the way in which information services need to be used. Indeed, one might say that organisations are becoming both technology rich and information enabled. In a letter to the Library Association Record1, David Elder raises the issue of the convergence between library and information services and IT departments in many organisations. He says that a fundamental question for the profession is, ‘What is the difference between an information and an IT professional?’, in the light of the increasing exploitation of IT resources in libraries or the creation of webmaster posts to oversee Internet/intranet based resources. Librarians do indeed need to be clued up about IT and its implications, because this is absolutely essential if they are to both survive and thrive in information services for the 21st century. When I asked a library manager what piece of software they were using for a particular application, I was told, ‘That’s the beauty of being a manager, I can leave that to the IT department’. Or when I spoke to a number of information professionals a year ago about push technology, I found that none of them, 1

Intranets and Push Technology

had heard of it. We have to make it our business to find out about developments in information technology, and we also have to build up enough of an understanding about them to see how they can help us to develop and improve the services that we offer to our users. How else can we ensure that when we are dealing with in-house IT staff, external suppliers or consultants we get what we want? We need to have at least some understanding of the technology and its limitations in order to ensure that we come up with viable, cost-effective proposals. How can we possibly know what to ask for if we don’t attempt to understand the technologies and how they could be used to take forward the business objectives? We mustn’t allow ourselves to be ‘blinded by science’ when IT specialists use lots of acronyms, initials and jargon. It is important that we maintain a watching brief so that we can identify trends, and consider whether particular new technologies are worth further investigation. We must also make the most of the opportunities to work closely with suppliers in order to ensure that when they embrace these new technologies they do so having taken account of our practical requirements, instead of us finding that we are merely left to react to what they have presented us with and having to work out how we can do our best to fit their products into our existing IT infrastructure.

2

Introduction

Market Data A number of organisations have tried to do some future gazing as far as intranets and extranets are concerned. When one is trying to make predictions about something as dynamic as the Internet and associated technologies it is incredible just how quickly the information becomes out of date. But I offer up a few predictions from the literature to at least give an idea of some of the current trends. • • •

•

•

•

Four companies in 10 will have an intranet by the millennium. (BT.)2 60% of companies will have an intranet within five years. (Prodata Partners.)3 Intranet equipment will outsell that used for the Internet by more than 10 to one before the year 2000. (International Data Corporation.)4 The world corporate intranet market, now worth US$1.6 billion, will be US$10 billion by the end of 1999.5 The market for intranet server software was estimated by market analysts Zona Research to be worth $US2.6 billion in 1996. The firm said the market would grow to $US9 billion within two years.6 Total Internet and intranet related expenditure will increase by nearly 50% per year from 1997 to 2002 to reach $562 billion and Internet and intranet software and services expenditures will reach $300 billion by 2002. (INPUT.)7

3


•

• •

Currently 50% of large organisations in the US and Europe have an intranet, compared with 15% in 1996. Intranet-based knowledge management applications will be among the fastest growing application sectors over the next five years.8 The corporate intranet market will reach $28 billion by 1999 (Zona Research).9 By the end of 1999, more than 40% of large organisations will use extranets to communicate with business partners.10

LISU research A recent Library & Information Statistics Unit (LISU) survey11 of the special library sector asked whether organisations had in-house or know-how data on a local network. This is presented in the report as though it tells us whether organisations have intranets. It depends on how you define an intranet, I suppose, because it is not really the same as asking, ‘Do you have an intranet?’ Nevertheless, I do believe that the survey yielded some valuable data. The survey also asked whether they used an external news alerting service. The exact wording of the questions in the survey is given below, along with the findings.

4

Introduction

Does your organisation hold the following on a local network: In-house (know-how) data

YES

NO

External news alerting service

YES

NO

If yes, what is the library/information centre’s involvement in this process? Managing ___ Involved but not managing ___ Not directly involved___

Figure 1. How many special libraries have intranets, and how many use external news alerting services 5


Table 1. Sectoral breakdown of organisations which have intranets or news alerting services.

6

Introduction

Figure 2. Intranets: level of library involvement

7


If yes, what is the library/information centre’s involvement in this process?

Table 2: Sectoral breakdown of the level of library involvement in the intranet.

(Note: because of rounding up, some figures add up to a total of 101%.) 8

Introduction

It is certainly true that technologies such as those for intranets and push technologies have huge potential. They are all about maximising a company’s strengths—intranets make it possible to leverage a firm’s intellectual capital, whilst push technology has the potential to leverage a company’s earlier investment in legacy systems and inhouse databases. This book mentions a number of pitfalls and problems which people may well encounter in trying to implement intranets and push technology. I mention them not in order to put people off undertaking a project to introduce the technology, but rather to equip them with information which could help them avoid those dangers or at least minimise the impact that such problems might have. Forewarned is forearmed. I hope that the book gets across to those who read it the huge potential that the new web-based technologies have opened up, provided that their implementation is properly thought through, and carefully managed. We should be enthusiastic about new developments in technology, and not overwhelmed by them; but we need to have the vision to see how the technology can be utilised within our own organisations in a way which brings competitive advantage to the organisation.

9

1. Intranets An intranet is a framework for creating and sharing corporate knowledge, the emphasis being on the word framework. Based on Internet standards and tools, an intranet focuses on content sharing within a limited and well-defined group. Here are a few definitions:

Definitions ‘An intranet—some people might call it a corporate wide web—is a private network that uses Internet technology to provide information to the organisation.’12 ‘…the integration of an organisation’s information assets and communication facilities into a single, widely accessible networked environment using Internet-based technologies, such as e-mail, news groups, file transfer protocol (ftp) and world wide web technologies.’13 ‘…a network connecting an affiliated set of clients using standard Internet protocols, especially TCP/ IP and HTTP.’14 ‘…a TCP/IP network designed for information processing within a company or organization. Its uses include such services as document distribution, software distribution, access to databases, and training. An intranet is so called because it usually employs web pages for information dissemination and applications associated with the Internet, such 11


as web browsers. It can also include FTP sites, email, and newsgroups and mailing lists accessible only to those within the organization.’15

Key components An intranet is made up of a number of key components. These are: •

•

•

•

TCP/IP—which stands for Transmision Control Protocol/Internet Protocol. This is the system which networks use to communicate with one another on the Internet. Browser—such as Microsoft Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator. From a user’s point of view, the browser becomes a standard client to a whole range of information resources. Web server software—such as the server included with Microsoft NT or the Windows 95 ‘Personal’ server. Web authoring software—examples of software for publishing web pages would be Microsoft FrontPage 98 or Hot Metal Pro. The latest versions of word processing programs can also be used.

Deploying Internet technology inside an organisation to create an intranet desktop, the browser is the user interface of the intranet. A web browser is a software application that can make requests of web servers for documents. Such documents are most commonly written in Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), which is an industry12

1. Intranets

standard way of encoding a document containing text and graphics. One of the key fundamentals of an intranet— platform independence—is the key to the technology’s success and widespread adoption: as long as you have a web browser on your computer, you can access information held on any server within an intranet or on the Internet. It should be pointed out, however, that an intranet does not have to have any physical or logical connection to the Internet. The web laid down a common communications protocol, in the form of TCP/IP with all of the client and servers communicating using the TCP/IP suite; it also has a common transfer protocol, in the form of Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP); and a common address scheme, in the form of the Uniform Resource Locator (URL).

Beyond the hype Nick Shepheard says, ‘Wouldn’t it be nice if every time you wanted to find information on your network you used the same piece of software? No more struggling with databases, no more having to ask someone where they saved a particular client’s letter, no more juggling e-mail, spreadsheets, presentations and cd-roms all with different commands to remember and a seemingly endless series of keystrokes. A well-planned intranet could be the answer you’re looking for.’16 The key, of course, is that the introduction of an intranet into an organisation has to be carefully planned. The reality is that a number of companies 13


rushed into having intranets without fully appreciating their potential. Intranets are not the same as an Internet web site—the former is about managing internal information and communications, whereas the latter is often a marketing tool. For an intranet to work effectively, you need management buy-in, but you also need the support of key user groups and middle managers within the firm. Putting information onto an intranet is not simply a case of transferring huge quantities of text from word processed documents onto the intranet. Rather, it requires a radical rethink about how information is accessed. Reading from a screen is very different from reading from a page. Web technologies allow you to structure information differently, particularly through the use of hyperlinks. For an intranet, you need to have a site map in mind, even if you don’t actually include it on the intranet for the users to see for themselves. The site doesn’t have to be static, you could build in a certain amount of interactivity. But the design and content of an intranet are not the only issues that have to be taken into account. Indeed, perhaps the most important thing to bear in mind is that whilst an intranet is a vehicle that has the potential to greatly enhance internal communications, this can only be achieved if the culture is right; there has to be an information sharing environment in place. At the European Business Information Conference (EBIC) held in Lisbon in April 1998, TFPL carried out a straw poll which ‘confirmed that many corporate intranets fail to support business strategy and, even worse, in many cases seem to make information problems even worse rather than 14

1. Intranets

solve them. Some 250 delegates attended the conference from 26 countries. Of these around 80% had an intranet, only 25% believed that their intranet(s) was well used and only 15% believed that they delivered business benefit.’17 One has to ask the question why this should be the case, and then also consider how to create an intranet strategy which will achieve the objectives that are outlined in that strategy.

Benefits of intranets There are a number of major advantages in having an intranet, such as: • • • •

ease of use; single intuitive user interface (namely the browser); widespread industry support; ability to link up legacy systems (both applications and databases).

Commentators acknowledge that intranet equipment will outsell that used for the Internet by a considerable margin. This begs the question of why there has been such a huge take-up of intranets. The reasons why intranets are so successful are: •

•

Platform independence—web technologies allow a whole range of different platforms to be linked by a common interface. Quick wins—an intranet can be set up very cheaply, but if it is well designed it can make a 15


•

big impact upon internal communications. Something as simple as putting the phone book onto the intranet can save a large organisation thousands of pounds on reprographics, and the end result is a list that is always up to date. There is no longer the danger of some copies being up to date, and others being six months out of date. Cost savings—there are a number of potential cost savings. These include user support. On an intranet, all the processing and applications sit on the server. It is only necessary to update the software on the server, instead of on each individual user’s pc. Another area of cost savings would be in network management, since there would be a move from a multi-protocol network, to a single protocol network, namely TCP/IP.

The ‘emptynet’ phenomenon Just because people have discovered intranets doesn’t mean all companies should get one simply because their competitors have got one. Information Technology departments must enter into a dialogue with their firms’ senior management in order to try and understand what the key issues affecting the business are, because these should be what drives development, not IT issues. Unless this point is fully understood, businesses run the risk of failing to exploit the strategic and competitive advantages which are potentially available to them through investing in intranet technologies. 16

1. Intranets

It is easy to envisage the chief executive of a company going along to lunch with his counterpart in a similar organisation. When he has lunch, his counterpart sings the praises of the wonderful new intranet that they have just installed in their organisation. On his return from lunch, the chief executive calls in the IT director and says, ‘We must get one of those’. And so, an intranet is duly installed, and the chief executive can now look his peers in the eye and say that his company also has an intranet. How many times do people find out that their competitors have a particular piece of software, so they must get it too? What is important, of course, is not whether or not an organisation has an intranet, but rather to what uses it is being put. Over and over again, when you ask people what their intranet contains, you find a remarkable unanimity amongst organisations, where the intranet basically contains the telephone directory and the menu for the staff restaurant, but nothing of any substance. I was amused to learn that this type of intranet has a name—they have been dubbed ‘emptynets’. It is easy to mock such things, but it very much depends upon the future development plans that an organisation has for its intranet. If a company just puts up the phone directory and the menu, and thinks that it now has a fully-fledged intranet, then something is wrong. But if, however, that organisation has put up those applications deliberately as a ‘taster’ of what an intranet looks like, and as a means of getting people interested in the idea of an intranet then clearly there is the potential to ask the users what they would like to see on the intranet, and how they would like it to 17


develop. It is vitally important for companies to realise that an intranet is something dynamic. It has the potential to grow into something that becomes a natural part of office life, just like using the photocopier or the fax machine. Once people grasp that there is a developmental process involved, then the intranet could lead on to an extranet, and indeed to electronic commerce (also known as e-commerce).

Stages of intranet development Surfing the web for information about intranets, I came across an item18 which breaks down the stages of intranet development into four levels:

level 1 static access to static data

level 2 dynamic access to static data

level 3 dynamic access to dynamic data

level 4 total access to all data Figure 3: Stages of intranet development

18

1. Intranets

In order to consider the possible ways in which an intranet might develop, it is probably best to try and illustrate the different stages or levels of intranet development. One of the first stages in the development of an intranet might be to use it in place of much of the tedious passing back and forth of static information such as phone lists, meeting schedules, announcements, appointments and so on. Indeed, this point is also made in a white paper on Netscape: The focus of intranets to date has been to distribute company-wide information such as company news, corporate policies, employee information, internal job postings, bulletin boards, phone directories, press releases, and computing policies. The results have been dramatic. For example, General Electric is saving $240,000 a year in printing costs by using its intranet to publish a simple directory of company information.’19 According to KPMG, the problem is that many organisations stop at this point. In their report ‘Intranets: a guide for business users’, KPMG say that ‘perhaps the immediate benefits which an intranet can provide may be seen as reward in themselves and so dissuade the enterprise from further consideration of what intranets really represent in strategic, operational and organisational terms.’20 But, as I said earlier, an intranet should be seen as something that is in a continual process of development. I believe that an intranet has to evolve. It is not possible to somehow create the perfect system right from the start. Inevitably, you have to go through a series of stages in order 19


to develop, design and create a system which works for your own organisation. That is the crux of the problem. What works for one company is not automatically guaranteed to succeed in a different working environment. You also have to learn by your mistakes—and it should be pointed out that unless you are willing to take risks, unless you open yourself up to the possibility of failure, you are never going to truly succeed with an intranet. Perhaps the next stage after putting up documents like the telephone list or the menu for the staff restaurant is to radically overhaul the channels of communications within the firm, using the newly installed intranet as your opportunity. Whilst an intranet is not going to succeed without an information sharing culture, some would argue that the implementation of an intranet within a company can of itself lead to a change of attitude towards information sharing. Anyone thinking of introducing an intranet must recognise that an intranet is not a panacea. In and of itself, the introduction of intranet technologies is not going to change the way an organisation works. But if the management support is there, if there is a culture in which people are willing to try out new ways of working, if there is adequate hand-holding and training, then you are in with a real chance that the intranet might revolutionise the way work is done. A third stage in the development of an intranet could be the placing onto the intranet of a number of key applications which are essential to the smooth running of the organisation. I suppose that these 20

1. Intranets

might be referred to as the ‘killer’ applications, the ones which will ensure that the intranet is used and used heavily. Undertaking an information audit will help you find out what makes your organisation tick, what the information needs are. The audit process reviews the information assets of the firm, and it will hopefully be at this stage that you ought to be able to identify the killer applications. If it is done properly, you should end up with a wellresearched plan for your intranet which ensures that it is tied in clearly to the business processes. In a professional services organisation, for example, time recording, billing and accounts are business critical applications. If these move over to the intranet, then most people within the firm will have to use the intranet. To get to this stage, you must first have built up a level of acceptance and support for the intranet, and be confident that your company is ready to take the leap onto that next level. And you must be fair to the people who are going to have to use those applications within an intranet environment, by ensuring that you earmark adequate resources to provide a good training programme, and someone to call whenever they need help. The staff time required to provide a good helpdesk support function should not be underestimated. I have just outlined three stages in the development of an intranet. Of course, there is no set number of stages. Where an intranet is concerned, every company will have its own requirements and its own preferred way of working. But the real point is that an intranet has to go through a process of development before it can evolve and mature into 21


something that becomes an integral part of every employee’s work.

Cultural issues According to an article in Information World Review in May 1997, ‘Web-based technologies provide a common user interface across disparate platforms, enabling the development of cross-platform applications, the integration of existing legacy applications and databases, and enhanced communications and information sharing among the intranet users.’21 In order to achieve the business benefits which an intranet can undoubtedly bring, you have got to address the cultural issues. You have to face headon the question of how you can create a culture within your organisation which will encourage all your staff to use the new technology and to share information. What you should be aiming for is a learning organisation, one that is able to learn from experience, and one which doesn’t continually reinvent the wheel. That means having the confidence to try things out, being willing to fail in order to learn how to succeed, finding out what works and what doesn’t. This isn’t going to be easy—who wants to share their failures with work colleagues? But, if they do so, then hopefully together employees can help each other along the road to success. The collective brainpower of an organisation is clearly far more powerful than that of any individual. If everyone is working together, then they will bring together collectively a number of 22

1. Intranets

different thoughts, ideas and perspectives. To achieve this, there must be an information sharing culture. A number of organisations which have already made considerable progress with groupware or intranets as the mechanism for an information sharing environment, are having to ask themselves: ‘How do we reward people for sharing knowledge and ideas? How do we reward them for learning? It is not only our management structures that have to change. Our value and reward structures also need to be examined. We must look for ways to reward people, both financially and in terms of influence, for creating and furthering general knowledge.’22 I think that one important factor is to ensure that employees feel that it is worthwhile sharing information, or providing feedback and suggestions about the intranet. This doesn’t have to be about monetary rewards. Rather, it is about demonstrating that you value their efforts. Show them that you have taken on board their comments and suggestions, and that you have acted upon them. Or, if for some reason the comments are impractical to implement or don’t fit in with the overall strategy; take the time and effort to explain why.

Intranets and knowledge management Now that knowledge management has come to such prominence, software suppliers are making great claims for their products. One example reads, ‘Mine 23


the riches of your corporate knowledge’ 23 (presumably for knowledge nuggets). But I would like at this point to sound a note of caution. Intranets are currently the dominant technology for effective knowledge sharing and creating. The heading of a piece in Information Outlook24 recently declared that intranets are not instant knowledge management systems. It is also the case that putting in place an intranet does not automatically create competitive advantage. But, if the organisation develops a knowledge management strategy, then the intranet can be used as the basis for capturing, sharing, distributing and utilising corporate knowledge. Knowledge management is not simply an extension of information management. Latham25 says that ‘being able to access electronically from one source the financial, statistical, customer, and personnel data of the organisation, is only the beginning. You will have a useful tool for management and staff if you provide electronic access to the myriad of reports, accounts, standards, policies,and other data prepared by the organization, but you will not have tapped the intellectual capital of the organization’. The point here is that there is so much knowledge held in people’s heads, and a company has to find a way to capture that knowhow and knowledge in a form which can be retrieved, shared and used at a later date. Ciaran Morton of the Dialog Corporation says that ‘traditionally, knowledge was stored with independent employees, or employee groups, or on independent systems. Organisations now want to share this knowledge, and use it collectively, to become more productive, innovative and profitable.’26 24

1. Intranets

A KPMG report 27 says that more of an organisation’s know-how resides in the heads of its people, who are more mobile and less loyal than ever before. One small step in creating a knowledge management system might be to prepare an expertise directory which outlines the work experience, areas of knowledge and expertise, and key skills of staff. This could then potentially lead on to something much more sophisticated, including developing communities of interest, with discussion lists etc. on the intranet. Cambridge-based Autonomy, which specialises in intelligent agent software, has come up with a technology to capture ‘tacit’ knowledge: that which is held in people’s heads, as opposed to ‘explicit’ knowledge stored on computer systems in documents, spreadsheets, emails and databases. The technology is based on neural-network pattern recognition technology developed by the parent company Neurodynamics. Autonomy has launched two products with this technology for the corporate market: Knowledge Server and Knowledge Update. ‘Using this technology, we’re able to work out what people looking at information are interested in’ says Richard Gaunt, co-founder and technical director of Autonomy. ‘You can’t do that with text searches using keywords. Because we work on the basis of contextual understanding, we’re able to work out what you’re looking for.’28

25


Procedures manual Eddie Short 29 of KPMG says that ‘without some carefully policed rules for the establishment of the intranet pages, the result is a flurry of activity, followed by disillusionment and information fatigue. Eventually, the intranet may become so clogged with irrelevant and out-of-date information that it ceases to be useful, or used, as a source of information’. A successful intranet requires a lot of careful thought and planning. It should be something that is properly managed—in other words, someone should be appointed as webmaster. It should also be subject to a set of guidelines. This is a delicate tightrope to walk, because on the one hand you want to ensure that the information on the intranet has a consistent look and feel to it, that it is regularly updated, and is well indexed, whilst on the other hand you don’t want to create so many bureaucratic hurdles that you put off anyone from ever trying to contribute material to the intranet. In a large organisation you may find that without some sort of central control, many departments have enthusiastic individuals who have created their own set of intranet pages, each of which has its own style, and many of these duplicate or maybe in some cases even contradict one another. Perhaps the best solution here is to devolve responsibilities to a series of local webmasters who work to a set of standards and guidelines which are managed overall by the firm’s webmaster.

26

1. Intranets

It is essential that for all information on the intranet it is clear who the ‘owner’ is, and also the date on which the information was created. This is because that person should be responsible for updating their particular section on the intranet. I have heard of one well established intranet where there is an automatic procedure in place so that anything which has been on the intranet for 6 months generates an email to the information ‘owner’ saying that if it is not updated within a week, the pages will be removed. Some employees may be so enthusiastic about using the intranet for internal communications they may be tempted to transfer large quantities of data across onto the intranet. However, in order to avoid the danger of information overload, a company should have in place a procedure for managing and controlling the content and access to the intranet. Each category of employee may have a designated level of access. This is important, and staff obviously need to feel safe in the knowledge that certain types of information are only accessible to certain nominated individuals. Sensitive information might include payroll data, or budgetary information, for example. By restricting access to information which is either inappropriate or not relevant, the chances of experiencing information overload are minimised. There is also the issue of content, not just access. What you want is information that is relevant, timely and up to date. There is no point in putting onto the intranet huge quantities of information for the sake of it. Rather, it would be much better to put a smaller amount of quality information on, 27


knowing that you are going to be able to provide the necessary resources to check and update it as appropriate. Content is king. If an intranet is going to succeed, then the information must be of a high quality.

Intranet deployment checklist Talk to the users Ensure you know what they want. Put in place mechanisms for feedback, and demonstrate that you do take on board their comments.

Get top-down management support This should include encouragement of information sharing.

Keep it simple It must be easy to use. Put bluntly, if it is easy for people to connect, communicate, and share knowledge, they will do it. If it isn’t, they won’t.

Project must fulfill business needs Make sure your intranet meets both business and application requirements.

Plan the roll-out in phases Begin with a pilot group to trial it, and ensure at all stages that you can support that many new users in one go.

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1. Intranets

Provide adequate staff resources If you bring in outside consultants, make sure that you have the necessary skills in-house to be able to maintain your intranet on an ongoing basis, and don’t underestimate the effort involved in keeping the content up to date.

Training and helpdesk support Provide plenty of support and assistance in the first few weeks, but don’t forget the need for ongoing training and support, and the requirements of new staff. Key lessons and good practices should be shared and incorporated into staff development and training courses.

Decide who is to manage both content and access Team work and partnership is needed between information managers, IT, marketing, and personnel, where each has a clearly defined role.

Appoint an intranet project leader It is best to have a champion for the project in each department or business group, but there is a real need to ensure that things are co-ordinated by an overall project leader, so that things are done consistently according to one corporate style.

Content is all Think carefully about what the users really need. Undertake an information audit.

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Dos/don’ts Do • • • •

Involve users. Market it. Allocate sufficient resources. Provide adequate training.

Don’t • • • •

Promise what you can’t deliver. Forget to keep the content up to date. Go ahead without management support. Just copy your Internet site.

Who should be involved? One of the most difficult issues with an intranet is deciding who should be responsible for it. In some organisations everything is dealt with by the IT department. But is that a sensible approach? Time and again, people talk about projects which have either failed or only been a partial success, and a key factor has been an overconcentration on the technology at the expense of considering the real purpose behind the application. I would suggest that the approach adopted should be a collaborative one. This could involve the IT staff in carrying out the networking and software installation, whereby the IT professionals have responsibility for purchasing, installing, and maintaining the networking tools, whilst 30

1. Intranets

information staff are responsible for managing and updating the system. In this scenario the information professionals would be responsible for the acquisition, organisation and dissemination of content. Even a joint effort between IT staff and information professionals is not necessarily enough. Surely it should be a truly collaborative effort, in which ‘ownership’ of the intranet is the responsibility of cross-functional teams, instead of being exclusively managed by central service departments. Certainly, experience with knowledge management, as shown in Webb’s research30 in legal firms, suggests that multidisciplinary teams would better represent the needs of the organisation as a whole and link the intranet more closely with overall business objectives.

Out of the box v. tailor made In the past it was often the case that know-how or knowledge management systems would be specially developed for a company. There were many problems associated with this approach. Whether an existing software package was taken as the starting point for adapting to the needs of a particular organisation, or people chose to write a software application from scratch, the users would be the only people using that particular configuration. They would be unable to learn from the experience of others—indeed, so far as knowhow and knowledge management are concerned, this is perceived to give a company competitive 31


advantage, and they would be very wary about sharing their experiences of implementing and managing such a project. The users also have to ‘road test’ the product. They have to find the bugs in the system. It won’t have been beta-tested elsewhere. When, at a later date, people want changes to be made to the application, they may well find that the person most closely involved in developing the original product has now left the organisation, and the expertise doesn’t exist inhouse, or else they have to call in consultants at considerable expense to make even the most minor of changes. As a result of all of the above, there has been a marked shift towards purchasing an off-theshelf solution. Companies will obviously have to draft a specification of what they want out of a product, as a checklist of features against which to measure the likely contenders. Being realistic, they won’t find something which meets their wishlist 100%. But they will then have to decide whether the outstanding items are really need to have’s, or whether they are actually nice to have’s. If you buy something off-the-peg, it is realistic to expect routine helpdesk support from the supplier instead of the cop-out that, ‘Oh, your software has been changed so much from the basic product that we would only be able to help you if you book some consultancy at £750 (or whatever price applies) per day, and, by the way, there is a lead time of three months for booking any consultancy.’ Intranets have revolutionised the sharing of information within organisations, largely because they are easy to use. This does depend in part upon how well designed the intranet is, whether it is 32

1. Intranets

arranged logically and is easy to navigate. But the use of a web browser allows users to search across a range of disparate sources of material. They are often familiar with web browsers because of having a home computer. The software is intuitive and requires minimal training. Intranets are an ideal way for an organisation to share information between departments or business groups. It makes things more democratic—the information is there for everyone. This makes people more responsible because they can’t say that they have mislaid a document, or that they have never received a copy. Chris Mathias, chairman of technology consultancy Conduit Communications, says that ‘knowledge is power and if everyone in an organisation has equal access to information it leads to a culture change. Employees at the bottom feel empowered; they feel more a part of an organisation and less like a cog in a machine. Businesses become more of a meritocracy.’31 Intranets are an ideal way for companies to share information across a multi-site operation or to allow staff who work from home to dial in to the intranet, provided that all the security issues have been satisfactorily resolved. With teleworking becoming increasingly popular, there is certainly a growing need to allow people working from home to have access to the full range of information resources.

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2. Extranets It is interesting how Internet technologies have brought with them a whole new set of computer jargon for us to get used to. One commentator said that the term ‘extranets’ sounded like a reference to a heavy duty pair of tights. Here are a few definitions of what ‘extranets’ really are:

Definitions ‘An extension of a corporate intranet using world wide web technology to facilitate communication with its suppliers and customers. An extranet allows customers and suppliers to gain limited access to a company’s intranet in order to enhance the speed and efficiency of their business relationship.’32 ‘Secure interconnection between two or more intranets to facilitate joint working between identified users on these separate systems.’33

Development of web technologies Extranets are a logical progression for organisations which already have a well-established intranet. Indeed, I believe that there are a number of distinct stages in the development of web technologies, as illustrated below:

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Figure 4. Development of web technologies

It was only comparatively recently that commercial organisations began to use the Internet to obtain information or to market themselves. Mosaic Communications launched their web browser in October 1994, and this is really what tamed the World Wide Web. Web technologies such as the TCP/IP protocol and browsers were then used to manage the internal information held by companies. Intranets linked people together within an organisation, whether they were on a single site or based across many locations. But the distinguishing feature was that the intranet was a closed user group, one which was not accessible by the outside world. It is possible for intranets to be set up so that some or all of the people on the intranet can connect up to the Internet. But this is not necessary for an intranet to function. Indeed, creating links to the Internet raises the issue of security and the need for a firewall to stop anyone from the outside world gaining access to a company’s internal data.

36

2. Extranets

A logical progression from an intranet is the ability for a select group of external people to have access to part of an intranet. This would typically be trusted clients or customers, business partners, or suppliers. For example, a customer might be able to check up on the progress of their transaction, they could check on the fees so far accruing, or they could change the date and time of an appointment with their client account manager. Eddie Short of KPMG says that ‘for regular suppliers from whom a substantial amount is purchased, it may be worth automating the entire process. This could involve giving the chosen supplier access to the relevant section of the intranet (good security procedures are, of course, vital to protect other areas of the intranet from unwelcome visitors) so that it is able to collect new purchase orders and feed these directly into its own delivery and billing routines.’34 This is an example of where an organisation has moved on from the extranet stage to that of electronic commerce (or ecommerce). The Department of Trade and Industry believes that it is vital to ensure that UK industry participates fully in the development of extranets. Indeed, in the first report of the department’s Future Unit, DTI asserts that: ‘Extranets provide a potential “double win” for both new and existing manufacturing industries. They can greatly shorten the time required for product design or for order information to flow accurately through a supply chain of manufacturers, contractors, sub-contractors, and so on. At the same time they broaden the scope for effective 37


competition at each level and reduce the volume of inventory required to be held’.35 Bernard Liautaud of Business Objects says that ‘business today is converging on the Internet. This creates a great opportunity for organizations to communicate and share data over the web with customers, partners and suppliers.’36 Whilst Bernard Liautaud’s quotation doesn’t expressly mention the word ‘extranets,’ clearly it is the use of extranets that makes it possible for a number of companies to link together their internal communications networks (or intranets) to give limited access to each other to particular parts of their intranet. According to research by Novell, by the end of 1999, more than 40% of large organisations will use extranets to communicate with business partners.37 Extranet technology enables companies to form closer links with their key suppliers, customers and partners, giving them secure and managed access to a subset of internal systems and information and enabling a level of co-operation and communication not previously possible. This is nothing less than a revolution in the way in which IT supports business processes, one in which a Virtual enterprise’ is enabled in which a set of companies work closely together to provide a seamless product.

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3. Groupware The word ‘groupware’ is really a term that was coined by marketing people in the period around 1995. Essentially it means software that facilitates group working. But here are a few definitions:

Definitions ‘Groupware are computer based systems that support groups of people engaged in a common task or goal and that provide an interface to a shared environment.’38 ‘Groupware is the networked hardware and software which allows people to support each other in their efforts to achieve their work goals, irrespective of when or where they might want to do this.’39 ‘A network-based application that lets users collaborate.’40

Suppliers These days the term ‘groupware’ is being used less and less, probably because intranets have become much more popular. When people refer to groupware, it seems to be almost synonymous with two products: Lotus Notes and Novell Group Wise. The move to web-based applications led Lotus to develop their Lotus Domino software which allows databases created in Lotus Notes to be made available in a web environment. 39


Lotus Notes and Novell Group Wise are, however, certainly not the only groupware software available. Other examples would be: Microsoft Exchange, and Netscape’s enterprise products Communicator and Suitespot. Netscape provides software solutions for enterprise messaging and collaborative working applications. The main products which Netscape offers in this field are its Communicator client, which is an integrated suite of tools for communicating, accessing and sharing information on the Internet/intranets and also its SuiteSpot enterprise server.

Functionality Groupware functionality is roughly synonymous with collaborative computing, embracing, for example: • • • • • • • •

document sharing; collaborative authoring; versioning; messaging; secure access; search/retrieval; discussion forums; database integration.41

One component which is not included here is application development. This is a significant omission, since Jenny Mill says that ‘because it is essentially an application development platform, Notes cannot be taken out of the box and installed as 40

3. Groupware

a business application. It requires the right people skills to develop applications for it.’42 I think that a number of organisations make the mistake of thinking that groupware is an off-theshelf solution that merely requires installation, and will inevitably succeed. Mill says that ‘many companies fail to reap the benefits of collaborative computing technologies such as groupware, workflow and document management, because users are often left to their own devices rather than being helped to identify and build business applications that exploit the technologies.’43 Collaborative or group working is precisely what its name implies. It requires people from a number of different disciplines or specialisms within a company to work together to create a solution that works for them. If there are strong business benefits to introducing collaborative working, these need to be disseminated to employees. For example, by sharing knowledge, an organisation can work together to create new product ideas. In 1994 the Department of Trade and Industry set up a Computer Supported Collaborative Working Programme. This came to an end in 1996 when the funding ran out. However, what emerged as a result was something called Team IT which is a forum for suppliers, users, academics, and government agencies to discuss team working. Its membership includes Microsoft, Lotus and Novell.44

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4. Case Studies BT 45,46 BT has more than 100,000 employees scattered in 38 countries. Keeping everyone up to date is an immense task. Back in 1994 the company began building an intranet. For every important policy document it transfers to the intranet, BT reckons to save £20m. One example is BT’s price list. This two volume A4 document covers 7,000 products, eats up £860,000 of paper to publish, and costs £20m to edit. In the first two full years of intranet use, the total savings were in excess of £1 billion. Wayne Donaldson, who oversaw the project said, ‘Just mailing that to each salesman was an immense cost…Now it goes out on the intranet so there’s no danger of them quoting prices wrong. We’ve also set it up so if they click on a product, it will reveal a host of uses for it.’47 Mr Donaldson added that, ‘Beyond the immediate cost savings the intranet has ushered in a new working culture among BT staff.’48

BBC In October 1997 I attended a fascinating presentation given by Ian Adams, the BBC’s Internal Communications Manager to members of the Institute of Public Relations49, and subsequently found a write up of the BBC’s intranet as one of the case studies on the Corporate Intranet Forum web site.50 43


The BBC’s intranet project commenced in the spring of 1995. There was a pilot in November 1995, and the intranet has been in full production since February 1996. ‘There has been considerable demand for access to the intranet among staff…. The idea really caught on, with the intranet developing as a business based system,’ says Adams.51 The vast majority of the BBC’s 15,000 desktop users are now linked up to the intranet, with the residue representing only pockets where deployment has yet to take place. There are another 7,000 BBC staff who currently do not use PCs, such as technicians, sound crews, and the like. The BBC wants to give these people access to the intranet resources, so experiments are taking place with touch screen kiosks located in restaurants and other shared spaces. Mr Adams believes that such a move will help avoid the potential disenfranchisement of technical and support staff from the intranet.52 ‘We are looking at more elements to add to the intranet, mostly involving business process transactions as opposed to pure information. We are investigating real-time elements. This could start with simple things, such as ordering taxicabs, and other resources via the intranet. Another application planned for the BBC intranet is a pensions database set up by the human resource department. Employees will have access to pension records and even buy additional contributions options, among other services.’53 ‘Moving forward we expect to recoup efficiencies on the business administration side, such as ordering cabs online as well as sharing information on areas like digital production technology. It is 44

4. Case Studies

possible for people to share opinions on particular products, such as new lightweight digital cameras. Purchasing managers will be able to make better informed decisions,’ Adams reports. He believes that one of the biggest challenges facing the BBC is to keep a high level of interest in the intranet among staff. A guide to usage of the intranet has been published in the printed staff magazine, with Adams reporting that actual usage of the network doubled in the following fortnight. Individual groups also need to be encouraged to contribute content as well, rather than just seeing what is available from elsewhere. Mr Adams says that an intranet is only as good as the content it contains. If the content is static and poorly maintained, then an organisation might as well not bother with an intranet at all.54

Theodore Goddard At Theodore Goddard a current awareness service is provided in the form of a daily bulletin to staff consisting of lists of the latest press releases issued by the UK government and the European Commission and also items added to Lawtel in the past 24 hours. When this service started to be provided electronically, the Library and Information Services Manager checked with the information providers that we would be allowed to distribute the data in that way. The Lawtel database consists of case law, indexes of statutory instruments, green and white papers, and articles, progress of bills and so on. The bulletin consisted of details of everything 45


added to the database, regardless of subject and as a result it was only possible to show headline information for each item. The disadvantage of this was that lawyers had to read through long lists of material to find the smaller number of items which might be of interest to them. And if, for example, they did find a case report which was of relevance, the headline information was often inadequate and they would then have to contact the library in order to request the full headnote. In a conversation with Lawtel’s commercial director, Rachel Lesiter, Paul Pedley said that what he could really do with was a more tailored bulletin for each practice area. This led to the development of the push technology service that Lawtel now provides. By selecting from a list of around 100 subject headings, lawyers can have a customised daily bulletin sent to their email box each day containing only those records that match their user profile. Details of any changes in the law in their practice areas are sent directly to their email address each morning. If preferred, the daily bulletin is available as a customised web page. Since they will receive only a smaller, precisely targetted number of records than are added to the database as a whole, it is possible for them to get the full records, such as headnotes of cases, instead of brief summaries. With the daily bulletin which contains headline information for everything added to the Lawtel database, this would have been impractical. The development of the tailored bulletins by Lawtel is an example of how information practitioners can work with information providers and develop products which meet the needs of their users.

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5. Push/Pull Technologies A number of commentators have somewhat prematurely written off push technology as an idea that never really got off the ground, and one which never really found its niche. There are a number of reasons why push technology has, understandably, been viewed as creating more problems than it solves, and I would like to look at some of these later. But for the moment I would just like to mention one of the problems that critics identified—that of bandwidth. According to Bud Smith,55 dial-up users of PointCast (which is one of main push providers) may find that they have to pay for an additional hour of connect time each day; while users on a company network may find that the updates for PointCast cause network slowdowns for other users. But before people write off PointCast—and indeed push technology generally—too quickly, there was an article in Network Week56 in September 1998 which said that PointCast had introduced Intranet Server which achieved bandwidth savings with its caching manager of between 70% and 90%. The article says that ‘PointCast’s Internet newsdelivery software is being welcomed by a growing number of US corporations, and re-appearing in companies that had previously banned the product because it used too much bandwidth.’

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Definition Push (or webcasting) technology automates the search and retrieval function based on user defined criteria. A push application will automatically search a database for specific information and deliver it when and where the user directs: usually straight to their desktop Publish and subscribe (push) technology is used to publish information across the Internet and World Wide Web on an individual basis direct to the user’s hard drive. The information which is sent to users is based upon a predefined list of that users’ interests and wishes. The information delivery mechanism is a process which is similar to the long established selective dissemination of information (SDI) services of the traditional online hosts.

SDI For many years librarians have been providing current awareness services such as SDI. This worked on the basis that computer power was used to track information of interest to library users by undertaking a regular search of a specific dataset of information based upon a user profile. When new items had been added to the database which matched the users interests, these would then be printed out and sent to the user. This could even be done by getting the database provider to post out the printouts directly to users. The practice of undertaking regular online searches for their users is something that librarians 48

5. Push/Pull Technologies

have undertaken for many years. It is effectively ‘pull technology’, even though we never knew it as that until ‘push technology’ came along. Pull technology is very much in evidence today. Internet users make use of search engines such as Yahoo! or Excite in order to browse through information on the World Wide Web, moving from page to page in order to decide which data to download. The distinguishing characteristic of ‘pull technology’ is that the user has to make a conscious effort to connect online and then to ‘pull’ files down onto their computer. The key distinguishing feature of push technology is that users are automatically sent tailored information matching pre-defined criteria. The whole aim of the technology is to help users by going away and searching on their behalf for relevant and meaningful information, rather than the user having to consciously make the effort to connect to the web and probably have to spend hours surfing web sites for information that might be of interest. But push went out of fashion. The reason for push’s lack of success was quite simply that users tired of the constant flow of information and turned it off. The initial enthusiasm for push technology was driven by the deficiencies of the current Internet pull model. Whilst there may be many millions of web pages out there, they vary in quality considerably, and many of them may be completely useless. The Internet is certainly a good mechanism for disseminating information, but it is not so good at enabling users to quickly search for and identify the nuggets of information that they require. 49


Indeed, before they can pinpoint a useful and relevant piece of information, a user may well have had to first undertake a frustrating and timeconsuming trawl through the hundreds if not thousands of results that came up on a particular search engine. Rather than having to connect online and conduct a lengthy search for information that is just sitting there waiting for someone to look at it, push technology completely turned that on its head and offered a solution in which users would automatically be sent relevant information direct to their desktop. Push technology has itself gone through a number of stages of development. The early versions of push have been transformed by a high degree of personalisation. Ultimately the aim is to create The Daily Me’, whereby users get only customised alerts containing information which is directly relevant to them and highly focussed. In order to achieve such levels of personalisation, a number of suppliers have based their products on intelligent agent technology. Peter Cochrane says that ‘push technologies and their derivatives give us the first glimmer of hope that a future of “The Daily Me” may just be possible.’57 Just as push technology has gone through a radical transformation over the past couple of years, so the push companies have been ‘recasting’ themselves. For example, Back Web has recast itself as a knowledge management vendor with its InfoCenter software which is aimed at organising and distributing information sources on intranets; whilst Marimba has focussed on application distribution management, distributing software 50


applications via the Internet. Other companies have been ref ocussing as providers of personalised news services. Push technology makes it possible to keep up to date with information on the Internet and/or on an intranet by delivering the content you want without you having seek it yourself. Information is automatically sent to your computer at regular intervals. The method that works best is automated pull, where the information is updated at intervals rather than in real time. This is because the open Internet is not really set up to handle true push [network traffic] hence the bandwidth problems, so most true push use is on internal corporate networks.

Delivery methods Push information can be delivered in a number of different ways:

Web site subscriptions It is possible to ‘subscribe’ to a web page, so that when the page is updated you are sent a notification. This could be in the form of an email. You might also wish to view the new content off-line using products called off-line browsers or web whackers.

Channels The most popular push applications provide subscriptions to ‘channels’ that offer ready-made content.

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The information that is delivered using push technology could be sent to a user in a number of different ways. Delivery methods currently available include: • • • • •

screen savers; rolling tickers; flashes; onscreen alerts; channel viewers.

Chris Marsters says that ‘push technology can take the form of email updates to users; broadcast or wireless via TV and paging frequencies; off-line browsing or polling (software that periodically polls web sites and pulls any changes since the last download); or multicast or personal broadcast networks, which update users through network servers’.58 The content might consist of a mix of advertising with current awareness and/or entertainment. This is because a number of the push services are free of charge to the users, but in order for the companies to fund such services some are funded by sponsorship through advertising.

Data Products This section is intended to give just a flavour of some of the push products that are currently available. It is certainly not intended to be a ranked listing in order of importance, nor is it an exhaustive list. The products listed below are my own selection to 52


illustrate the range of push services available, they are not necessarily the most well-known, or the heaviest used services. I think that it is worth mentioning that in Knowledge Management magazine59 there was a very useful article about the key players and their products, which also included a number of case studies of organisations making use of push products.

Dialog Corporation LiveIntranet Launched at Online Information 98, LiveIntranet is a web-based information management system. Using Infosort, the Dialog Corporation’s proprietary indexing technology, the service allows companies to automatically index and categorise both internal and external knowledge using the same methods. LiveIntranet combines both the push and pull approaches to accessing information. Using push technology, LiveIntranet provides near real-time alerting to new information on the desktop at three different levels—individual user, departmental and corporate—according to pre-defined profiles. The Dialog Corporation offers a choice of sources from which customers can create their own customised corporate database. This includes sources of news information, as well as market, broker, country and company information. But LiveIntranet is designed to combine external data with an organisation’s in-house information.

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LEXIS-NEXIS The InfoTailor product is an alerting service which offers a personalised daily briefing service that allows users to specify up to 7 profiles. Alerts are delivered either to a mailbox or as a personal web page.

PointCast PointCast broadcasts news and corporate information to the user’s desktop via the Internet and intranets.

NewsEDGE Desktop Data’s NewsEDGE has four ‘product families’ NewsEdge Live, NewsEdge Insight, NewsEdge NewsTools and NewsEdge NewsPage. Product capabilities range from filtered, real time scrolling news to editorially enhanced news briefings presented by topic, industry or company.60

Ei Village Engineering Information Village (Ei Village), owned by Elsevier Science, allows subscribers to the print editions of the Elsevier journals who are also subscribers to Ei Village to access the journals in electronic form for a modest per-journal surcharge. Where additional articles are required beyond the subscription titles, Village residents can have instant access the other Elsevier titles or obtain next-day Internet fax copies at a set fee. Users have access to over 3 million articles, which is claimed to be the 54


largest single inventory of technology articles available today.61 The service also offers a push-toemail alerting service.

Librarian’s Channel The Librarian’s Channel was introduced by Blackwells to illustrate to library and information professionals the potential of push and pull technologies. Information on the channel includes library news, conference information, tables of contents of several professional journals and new books, and new series titles. The Librarian’s Channel project has a number of content partners including H.W.Wilson Company, the American Library Association, Medical Library Association, Special Libraries Association, the UnCover Company and the Weather Services Corporation. Details of the service are available on the Internet at http://www.blackwells.com/bis-eservices/ libchannel.html

Deficiencies Many users became disillusioned with so-called push technology, because it began to clog corporate networks with data traffic. As I mentioned before, some of the earlier push technologies did eat bandwidth, particularly centralised services such as PointCast. Indeed, a number of claims were made that push technology services accounted for a significant percentage of all Internet traffic, and that if webcasting continued to grow unchecked, it could sink the Internet. 55


Software distribution Push technology is being promoted as a method of distributing software. The whole area of software distribution and maintenance is particularly important for the corporate market. IT professionals dread the prospect of updating software on a large, complex network if it means having to visit each individual client machine. It becomes unwieldy and impractical, and as a result IT staff understandably want to be able to undertake the updating of any software applications centrally if that is possible. In a number of cases, push technology is being used to overcome that problem so that updates, bug fixes and so on can be loaded automatically.

End-users These days, it is more and more the case that information is being made available directly to the end user. In an article in Managing Information,62 Moira Duncan says that ‘After years of talking about it, there is now a genuine opportunity to reach endusers in their thousands with services they find completely intuitive…. The concentration now is on applying new technologies, such as intranet applications for harmonising internal and external knowledge, to prevent end-users from floundering or spending their time badly.’ However, for information professionals working in a networked environment, where end-users have been given access to a range of information products, I would sound a cautionary note, and especially where push 56


technology is concerned. By making information products available from users’ desktops, you actually need to ensure that you build an ever closer relationship with your users. The fact is that they will be faced directly with a range of online and Internet products and services, and unless you take the time and trouble to check on a regular basis that they are happy with the use that they are making of those products and services, you are in danger of having a group of very dissatisfied users. Inevitably, with push technologies, you are not going to be seeing the exact combination of information that your users are seeing. You are not to know if something is not quite right, unless they take the time and trouble to tell you. In my experience, you cannot rely on that. I had a situation where I had set up a regular alert on a major online system for one of my users. Each day they were receiving headlines directly into their email box. But many of the stories were a complete and utter waste of time, because the headline information didn’t tell you enough about the story to decide whether or not it was worth looking at in full. Unfortunately, this particular user did not have web access direct from their own desktop, so each time a story might be of interest they would then have to ask the library to go online and pull off the full story for them, which rather defeats the whole idea behind push technology. It turned out that there was one particular source which came up every day on the user’s alerts, and this was because the company that he was following featured in this particular source and every day all it was doing was giving the share prices of hundreds of companies in one ‘story’. It was only by accident 57


that I found out about this. I went to see the user on a completely different matter, and when we got talking I learnt that he was unhappy about his daily alerts; and, indeed, he was systematically avoiding reading the automatically generated emails from the online host every day. Thankfully, as soon as I found out about the problem, I was able to amend the user’s profile so that it excluded that particular source from the search. There are other examples of where you absolutely must keep in touch with your users, in order to ensure that they are getting the most out of the tailored alerts that have been set up for them on various push services. In one case, I learned that the user was sometimes getting alerts which contained so much information that the email system was unable to deliver the alert in full. The only way round this would be for the user to have to save the email as a WordPerfect document, through the SoftSolutions document management system. It is certainly not an ideal solution, but at least the user now has a means of overcoming the memory or capacity limitations of the email system. In another case, a user was getting frustrated when they received tailored bulletins which said something along the lines of ‘click here for the full text’. But the message appeared within the body of an email, and when the user tried to follow the instruction, nothing happened. It turned out that the information provider had not taken account of the fact that some users were accessing their tailored bulletins as emails and did not have full web access from their desks, whereas other users in different organisations were accessing them as customised 58


web pages. By keeping in touch with your users, you should be in a position to find out what problems users of the push services may encounter. And often, you need to develop a good working relationship with the information providers and put pressure on them to take account of these problems when they enhance their products.

Intelligent agents According to Mike Lynch,63 the solution lies beyond pull and push in the personalisation approach. This is based on intelligent agent technology. Agents are intelligent (they understand the user’s interests and can search for content or perform services related to those interests), mobile (they live on a user’s PC or a publisher’s web site and travel from one to the other to perform a task), truly personalised (they learn about user interests and remember them for future use) user-friendly (they accept information in plain English with no need for complicated queries), and dynamic (examining content as it is being posted in real-time as well as existing content). Mr Lynch says that this technology is based on neural network technology, the roots of which can be traced to Bayesian probabilities, which date back to the 1760s. The agents have ‘brains’ in that they understand what the user is interested in on a contextual basis. Once the agent learns about the user’s interests it is able to use its ‘legs’ to go out on the Internet and retrieve information relevant to that user. 59


The technology offers true personalisation through understanding concepts, as opposed to the alternative push and pull solutions which are limited to using a few keywords and offer only a restricted level of user specification of interests. Mr Lynch believes that the technology solves the content navigation/distribution problem and delivers to users truly personalised content in a oneto-one narrowcast fashion. Further, he thinks that personalisation is the future and only when ISPs, content publishers and IT managers realise this will the Internet and corporate intranet become a truly useful resource.

Portals Users became frustrated with the inadequacies of some of the push technology services, and they began to ask questions about whether push technology really did live up to its promotional promises. As push technology became less fashionable, the new hot topic was portals. These are effectively gateway web sites. The user becomes accustomed to a particular portal site and uses it routinely as their way into the web. According to Louise Kehoe,64 portals are designed to make web use simpler: ‘With search facilities, messaging service, telephony and shopping, they make it easier for users to find their way round the web. Also like push channels, web portals are designed to grab user’s attention for long enough to show them lots of advertisements.’

60


Push technology and information overload The Internet’s growth has undoubtedly led to a proliferation of useful content and information. However, it has also led to a proliferation of useless, out-of-date and irrelevant information. Whilst the Internet is a wonderful mechanism for transmitting information, it is not such a wonderful mechanism for searching for, editing, aggregating, filtering or prioritising information. Push technology is a term for various methods which attempt to solve this problem. The theory is that they help users to receive just the information they want, when they want it. It also helps content providers ensure users receive not only the (free) information they want, but also the advertising that helps pay for it. It is also being promoted as a method of distributing software. For a commercially available push technology service to genuinely add value to an organisation’s information flows, it must satisfy a number of key requirements: • • •

content; filtering; delivery.

Content The most important consideration is that of content. The idea of being able to automate a traditional press clippings service sounds fantastic. But is there a single commercially available electronic source which is going to have access to all of the sources 61


that your users need? If the full text of The Financial Times is only available through the FT’s own information products, for example, what if your users rely heavily on material based in that newspaper? Or, if you try and produce your own tailored press clippings service on your intranet, what about the fact that the Newspaper Licensing Agency’s electronic extension, which is available to holders of the NLA’s main licence agreements, does not cover the four newspapers produced by News International? One large organisation that I spoke to said that they had tried one of the main push technology news products, but that it had not been the trailblazer that they had originally hoped for, and was not as robust as they had expected. The main shortcoming, though, was that certain key sources simply weren’t covered by the service. As a result, the firm has been forced to continue with its manual press cuttings service.

Filtering The next issue is that of filtering. Early push products tended to be based on channels, where information was grouped into a few key themes or headings. But if push services are really going to succeed, they have to provide a much greater degree of personalisation, so that users get a truly tailored daily update. This might be achieved through a much larger number of topics or subject headings, or it may rely on the use of intelligent agents to deliver ‘hits’ that are ever closer to the user’s areas of interest learning all the time about what the user is really interested in. Failure to adequately tackle and deal with the question of filtering will only lead to 62


information overload through a regular flow of unfocussed data with little of real value.

Delivery The third key point for a successful push service is the method or mechanism of delivery. Ideally, users should have a choice of delivery mechanism, so that they can select the one which they prefer to work with. Otherwise, providers are in danger of providing users with services which deliver information in a way which only serves to distract or annoy them.

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6. Information Overload My son, there is something else to watch out for. There is no end to the writing of books, and too much study will wear you out. (Ecclesiastes, chapter 12, verse 1265)

In today’s competitive marketplace, the capacity to access the right information at the right time is critical both to personal productivity and firm-wide success. Information is indeed an asset. Many companies are overwhelmed by a constant flow of raw data, and feel overwhelmed by it. But those organisations which are able to deal effectively with corporate information have a crucial competitive advantage. The problem is that it is far easier said than done. I believe that one of the reasons why information overload happens is that people think knowledge is power, and that therefore they must have access to all information even when they don’t really need to know about some of that information at all. It reminds me of an episode of the wickedly funny BBC series Yes, Prime Minister66 where Sir Humphrey is keen to find out what is going to be said at a meeting to which he has not been invited. In conversation with Sir Humphrey, Bernard says ‘But you only need to know things on a need to know basis,’ and Sir Humphrey responds by saying, ‘I need to know everything. How else can I judge whether or not I need to know it?’ 65


What Sir Humphrey is really saying is that he has to know everything that is going on in order to be sure that he has not missed something important. But on that basis, he would have to be told about many things which he has absolutely no need to know about just in case he might be missing out on something important. It is precisely that way of thinking which is causing many people to suffer from information overload. The truth is that, these days, so much information is being produced across such a range of formats—books, journals, web pages, Internet discussion lists, and much more— that even if they wanted to keep up with events, it would not be humanly possible to do so. Some level of selectiveness has to be employed, in order to make the amount of information to be digested even remotely manageable. In 1996 Reuters published its report Dying for Information?67 The survey, which is based on research conducted by Benchmark Research, found that 50% of UK managers suffer from information overload and that new technology, instead of making their jobs easier, creates more stress and reduces productivity. The report says that ‘professional and personal survival in modern society clearly depends on our ability to take on board vast amounts of new information. Yet that information is growing at an exponential rate.’68 The Reuters report provides us with a rather sobering thought when it claims that ‘a weekday edition of The New York Times has more information in it than the average 17th century man or woman would have come across in an entire lifetime.’69

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6. Information Overload

In 1997, Reuters produced a guide to good information strategy which took the idea of information overload one stage further, saying that ‘constant information overload may eventually lead to a condition termed information fatigue syndrome.’ 70 The preface to the guide says that ‘disorderly or poorly managed information actually impedes knowledge, rather than increasing it. As the Information Age reaches maturity, the most pressing concern for many businesses today is not how to obtain the information they need, but how to control the information they have.’ (A subsequent report71 suggests information overload is no longer a problem; but others may not agree.) The whole theme of information overload has continued to attract attention. In 1997, for example, David Shenk published a book entitled Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. And more recently, yet another phrase has been used to described information overload—namely: Too Much of Everything Syndrome (TOMES). An item in the consumer magazine Red points out that ‘the concept of more seems to have become equated with the concept of better.’72 In an article which tries to do some future gazing, Jackie Fenn73 mentions the problem of information overload—indeed, she refers to it as a current preoccupation. She asks whether we will learn to handle information and use it efficiently or whether the situation will just get worse. She concludes that all the indications are that by 2002 the speedy growth in the popularity of knowledge management and technologies that encourage even more collaboration at work will inevitably mean that far 67


more employees will be potentially overloaded by information and messages. When people set up an intranet, they must ensure that they earmark adequate resources to maintain and develop it. It is all well and good to input large amounts of information, but if the information is not regularly monitored, the intranet could quickly become something of an embarrassment, containing erroneous, out of date, irrelevant or duplicate information, and this would reflect badly on the organisation. By contrast, a well organised intranet would contain highly focussed, relevant material which had been sifted and was well structured. It would be easy to navigate with the aid of hyperlinks, and because of the time invested in organising the information, it becomes ‘value added’. Whilst the use of Internet technologies has made the sharing of information feasible, technology of itself is not a panacea. A successful intranet also depends upon having proper procedures in place to manage information, or in other words it requires having an information strategy. Information providers have been developing ‘push technology’ services over the past few years, and through the medium of intranets they have been able to deliver tailored updates or bulletins to each user’s desktop. The technology has also been used to alert people to internal material of relevance to them which has just been added to the intranet, not only externally available information. The problem is that this has to be carefully monitored, in order to ensure that users don’t feel as though they are being

68


overwhelmed by large amounts of irrelevant and unnecessary information. According to Mike Lynch, 74 ‘the current technologies of push and pull are both flawed in their delivery and have only gone part of the way to solving the problems. Neither has delivered on the promise of streamlining directly relevant and personalised content for the user.’ I believe that push technology has tremendous potential to help keep people up to date with events and developments in their particular area of expertise. But I also believe that in order to ensure that it really does measure up to those expectations, it must be closely monitored and, when the push services are configured, that careful thought should be given to what the users really need. Just because a technology comes along which makes something possible, it doesn’t necessarily mean that it is really desirable and that we must adopt it. We must have an open mind, being ready to accept that some services do not give us the business benefits that we had hoped for. It may simply not suit our organisation, rather than it being a bad product. Some of the push services can be incredibly expensive, and we cannot afford to get it wrong. I would advise anyone thinking of installing a push service to trial it first with a carefully chosen group of users. There are a number of issues to consider when choosing customised electronic information services. You need to be clear about what your users actually need, and to determine the value of any push service against that yardstick you need to take into account both the form (or method of delivery) and the frequency of updates—How good are the 69


mechanisms for filtering the information? What level of precision in defining and searching sources can be achieved?—and then, finally, there is the whole question of how much the push service would actually cost if it were made available to staff throughout the organisation.

End-users As professional staff in organisations—such as lawyers, accountants, bankers, or engineers—have direct access to an ever wider range of information products from their desktops, so the information professionals must work ever more closely with their users in order to ensure that the balance of information delivery versus information overload is correctly judged. Information professionals need to check that their users are happy with the amount and relevance of the information being delivered direct to their desktops. This might involve altering the choice of subjects upon which the user profile is based, or reducing the number of topics monitored. Or it could mean opting to subscribe to a different information provider whose product might be able to meet users requirements more closely. The key to avoiding information overload is to ensure that there are effective mechanisms in place for filtering information. These can in part be technology-based mechanisms, but they might also involve the use of information professionals as intermediaries. The problem is that end-users need to feel reasonably confident that the filtering mechanisms can be trusted. Is it really only 70


irrelevant and unimportant information that is being filtered out? Some people have considered the use of intelligent agents to help provide highly relevant, tailored updates because of the fact that over time they can learn more about what people are interested in. The problem is that whilst people might know that a particular piece of information is of interest when they actually see it, they are not necessarily able to describe precisely the characteristics of what it is that they are interested in, and to do so in a way that is meaningful for a computer program to be able to rely on for delivering a push service. David Shenk says that ‘The glut of information no longer adds to our quality of life, but instead begins to cultivate stress, confusion, and even ignorance. Information overload threatens our ability to educate ourselves, and leaves us more vulnerable as consumers and less cohesive as a society. For most of us, it actually diminishes our control over our own lives, while those already in power find their positions considerably strengthened.’75 People often think that they have to have access to as much information as possible, because knowledge is power; but they forget that information is not the same thing as knowledge.

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Appendix 1: Key Players and Products Push technology PointCast Inc http://www.pointcast.com PointCast 2.6 Marimba http://www.marimba.com Castanet™ Product Family Backweb http://www.backweb.com BackWeb Infocenter client, Backweb Server/Con sole Intermind Corporation http://www.intermind.com Intermind Communicator Microsoft Inc http://www.microsoft.com Internet Explorer 5.0 73


Netscape Inc http://www.netscape.com Netscape Communicator, Netscape Navigator, Netscape Netcaster INCISA http://www.incisa.com Wayfarer Active Business Intelligence TIBCO Inc. http://www. tibco.com TIB/ActiveEnterprise, TIB/EventConsole, TI ContentBroker Verity http://www.verity.com Verity’s Agent Server software routes information intelligently to individuals or workgroups based on user profiles, which are a form of stored queries.

Groupware Lotus http://www.lotus.com Lotus Notes and Domino

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Appendix 1: Key Players and Products

Novell http://www.novell.com Group Wise

Extranets Business Objects http://www.businessobjects.com Weblntelligence Netscape http://www.netscape.com Process Manager Nestcape’s Process Manager offers companies the ability to rapidly create, deploy and manage extranets over the Internet. It comprises of four modules: the Process Manager Builder develops the applications, the Process Manager Engine is used for deployment, the Process Manager Administrator centralises the process management and the Process Manager Express module is a browser. Microsoft http://www.microsoft.com Site Server, Windows NT server Ariba http://www.ariba.com Operating resource management (ORM) system 75


Oracle http://www.oracle.com Infobank http://www.infobank.co.uk InTrade™ Purchasing, In Trade™ Distribution, InTrade™ Supplier According to an article in The Times (‘Extranet set to offer relief from frustration,’ by Chris Ayres. The Times, May 7, 1998), Infobank claims it is the only quoted British company dedicated to developing extranet technology, and sees its main competitors as being Ariba and Commerce One of the US. Commerce One http://www.commerce-one.com Commerce One BuySite, Commerce MarketSite, Commmerce Chain Solution

Intranet-related tools Lotus Development Corporation (IBM) Internotes Web Publisher Domino SmartSuite Weblicator Microsoft Corporation Exchange Server 76

One

Appendix 1: Key Players and Products

NetMeeting Office 97 Internet Information Server Internet Explorer Frontpage Netscape Communications Corporation SuiteSpot Netscape Navigator Gold Fast Track Server Netscape Communicator Novell, Inc IntraNetWare (network operating system) Groupwise Oracle Corporation Oracle Applications for the Web Oracle InterOffice Oracle Enterprise Groupware Verity Intranet/Internet Spider Agent Server Key View Pro CD-Web Publisher 77

Appendix 2: Useful Information Sources Web sites BRINT: Business Research in Information and Technology Site represents the launching pad for initiatives that aim to address the contemporary business and management issues related to information process, information systems and information technology. http://www.brint.com BRINTbook Showcase Researchers are invited to publish announcements of books, articles, papers, journals, special issues, conferences, expositions, calls for papers, and online publications relevant to contemporary business, management and information technology. http://www.brint.com/brintbook/brintbook.html Complete intranet resource—intranet reference site http://intrack.com/intranet/ Department of Trade and Industry Future Unit http://www.dti.gov.uk/future-unit email: [email protected] 79


The Intranet FAQ http://www.innergy.com/ifaq1.html Intranet/Knowledge Management Resource Center Results of research of graduate student Michael Epple at Hohenheim University, Stuttgart. Good resource list with literature and World Wide Web links. http://www.uni-hohenheim.de/~miepple/ikcenter.html Knowledge Associates

Connections.

David

Skyrme

Pages aimed at giving you insights in the emerging global networked company, where intangible assets, such as information and knowledge, will determine future competitiveness. http://www.skyrme.com Knowledge Inc. A monthly executive newsletter that covers trends in knowledge and intellectual capital management. http://www.webcom.com/quantera/welcome.html Netscape Netscape web site has various white papers about latest developments in this field. http://home.netscape.com/products/index.html

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Appendix 2: Useful Information Sources

Special Libraries Association Selected references on intranets. Lists useful articles, books and web sites about intranets. http://www.sla.org/membership/irc/intranet.html Yahoo! Yahoo! Computers and Internet. Communications and networking. Intranet http://dir.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Intranet/ Communications_and_Networking/Intranet/

Journals Computer Weekly ISSN 0010 4787 Reed Business Information Quadrant House The Quadrant Sutton Surrey SM2 5MS http://www.computerweekly.co.uk Database ISSN 0162–4105 Online Inc. 462 Danbury Road Witton 81


CT 06897 http://www.onlineinc.com/database/index.html Information Outlook (previously published as Special Libraries) ISSN 1091–0808 Special Libraries Association 1700 18th Street, N.W. Washington DC 20009–2514

Information Today ISSN 8755–6286 143 Old Marlton Place Medford NJ 08055

Information Week EMAP Computing Ltd Greater London House Hampstead Road London NW1 7QZ http://www.iweek.co.uk

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Information World Review ISSN 0950–9879 Learned Information Europe Woodside, Hinksey Hill Oxford OX1 5BE http://www.iwr.co.uk

Internet World VNU Business Publications VNU House 32–34 Broadwick Street London W1A 2HG http://www.iw.vnu.co.uk

Intranet Communicator: the strategic technology publication for the communications professional ISSN 1365–7011 Ark Publishing 352–354 Fulham Road London SW10 9UK http://www.intranet-communicator.com Intranet Design Magazine Inergy Online inc. 83


20 Mall Road Burlington MA 01803 http://www.innergy.com/

Intranet Journal http://www.intranetjournal.com/

Intranet Magazine ISSN 1363 9161 EMAP Computing Greater London House Hampstead House London NW1 7QZ

Knowledge inc: the executive report on knowledge, technology and performance Quantum Era Enterprises 946 Hope St, Suite 209 Stamford CT 06907 Tel. 203 363 0995

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.Net Future Publishing Ltd 30 Monmouth Street Bath BA1 2BW

Network Week EMAP Computing Ltd Greater London House Hampstead House London NW1 7QZ http://www.futurenet.com/

PC Week ISSN 0269–3011 VNU Business Publications VNU House 32–34 Broadwick Street London W1A 2HG http://www.pcweek.co.uk

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Exhibitions/Events Butler Group Hesslewood Hall Hessle East Yorkshire HU14 0JF [email protected] Tel: 01482 642 700 Fax: 01482 642 694 http://www.butlergroup.com The Butler Group holds a number of management briefings on topics which include intranets, extranets, and knowledge management. Details of these are available on their web site under the link for ‘Events.’ Miller Freeman The company organises a number of exhibitions such as Intranet Expo 98, which is in its second year; and Document ‘98 (http://www.documentexpo.com). First Conferences http://www.firstconf.com They organise a number of conferences around the world on topics such as intranets for knowledge management, or industry specific conferences such 86


as electronic commerce for oil and gas. Details of forthcoming events are available on their web site.

The Corporate Intranet Forum c/o The Intranet Academy Ltd Hammond House Caterham Surrey CR3 6PD Tel: 01883 344 799 Fax: 01883 344 296 email: [email protected] http://www.corporate-intranet.com. This claims to be ‘the established meeting place for executives responsible for planning intranet projects’ (http://www.corporate-intranet.com/forum/ index.htm).

Internet World UK This conference has been going for around five years or so, and runs each spring. It bills itself as the UK’s largest Internet, intranet, and World Wide Web exhibition and conference. The conference is organised by Mecklermedia. http://www.internetworld.co.uk

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Training courses A wide range of organisations provide training relating to intranets, web publishing, end-user access and so on. The organisations listed below are just a sample covering both companies whose primary market is library and information service professionals as well as firms whose main business is computer training. Computer Seminars Ltd One of the courses offered is entitled Building Web Sites and Intranets, and the course is run in various locations in England and Scotland. Computer Seminars Ltd The Kingsgate Business Centre Kingston upon Thames Surrey KT2 5AA Freephone: 0800 834 838 IIR Training Details of the company’s training courses are given on the web site. These include courses on intranet project management, and hands-on networking with TCP/IP. IIR Training Market Towers 88


1 Nine Elms Lane London SW8 5NQ Tel: 0171 344 3900 Fax: 0181 344 3920 Email: [email protected] http://www.iir.training.co.uk

South Bank University Courses include intranets for business, and web publishing with FrontPage. 103 Borough Road London SE1 0AA Tel: 0171 815 7875 Fax: 0171 815 7846

TFPL Recent courses have included Intranet Management; Intelligent Agents: Today’s SDI; and Desktop Delivery: Support for the End-User. Details of forthcoming courses are on the web site under the heading for training. 17–18 Britton Street London 89


EC1M 5NQ Tel: 0171 251 5522 Fax: 0171 251 8318 http://www.tfpl.com UK Online User Group (UKOLUG) The group arranges a number of meetings. For example, the 1999 programme includes meetings entitled ‘Intranets—do they deliver’ and ‘Current awareness services’. Christine Baker UKOLUG Administration The Old Chapel Walden West Burton Leyburn North Yorkshire DL8 4LE Tel & Fax: 01969 663 749

Useful Addresses AIIM International (The Association for Information and Image Management) AIIM is a global association for people who have questions about information, document and workflow technologies. Provides access to 90


independent information about products, services, standards and companies shaping the industry. PO Box 165 Winchester Hampshire SO22 5XE Tel: 01962 868 333 Fax: 01962 868 111 email: [email protected] http://www.aiim.org

Team IT: the forum for computer supported collaborative working Alexander House 50 Station Road Aldershot Hants GU11 1BG Tel: 01252 317337 Fax: 01252 317339 email: [email protected] http://www.team-it.org.uk

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References 1. Library Association Record 100 (9), September 1998, p. 462. 2. ‘Intranet poised for take-off.’ BBC News (http:// news.bbc.co.uk/), Tuesday April 7, 1998. 3. Op. cit. 4. Op. cit. 5. ‘Netscape aims for billions in the corporate intranet business,’ by Toh Han Shih. Business Times (Singapore), 10 March 1997. 6. ‘Novell and Netscape unite in fight for intranet market,’ by David Crowe. Australian Financial Review, 24 March 1997, p. 30. 7. ‘Enterprise requirements fuel growth as internet/intranet market soars to $562 billion.’ Business Wire, 28 July 1998. 8. Op. cit. 9. Online/internet industry review—intranets, marketing, mobility, publishing, regulation, resources and security, by Business Communications Company, March 1998. 10. ‘Business enters the extranet era,’ by Nicholas Booth. The Times, January 28th, 1998. 11. Spiller, David, Creaser, Claire and Murphy, Alison. Libraries in the workplace. Loughborough: Library & Information Statistics Unit (LISU) 1998. (LISU occasional paper no. 20. British Library Research and Innovation report 124.)

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12. ‘Intranets for lawyers,’ by Nick Shepheard. New Law Journal March 27, 1998 p. 443. 13. US-based IT firm, Claremont Technology Group Inc., quoted in Information World Review, May 1997, p. 22. 14. The Intranet FAQ at http://www.innergy.com/ ifaq1.html 15. Microsoft Bookshelf computer and Internet Dictionary. Microsoft Corporation, 1997. 16. ‘Intranets for lawyers,’ by Nick Shepheard. New Law Journal March 27th, 1998, p. 443, 17. h t t p : / / w w w . t f p l . c o m / c o n s u l t / intranet_management98.htm (Gives details of the new TFPL report—Intranet management—a TFPL guide to best practice). 18. Intranet & extranet & webcasting. http:// www.busn.ocok.edu/tips/info-int/intranet.htm 19. Navigator Gold 3.0 The new way to share workgroup information, http:// home.netscape.com/navigator/vgold3.0/whitepaper/ index.html 20. Intranets: a guide for business users. KPMG, p. 2. http://www.kpmg.co.uk/uk/services/computer/ index.html 21. ‘Focus: publishing on intranets: information for all, but managed by whom?’ Information World Review, May 1997 p. 22. 22. ‘Intranets: the new knowledge base,’ by Steve Tellee. Oracle Magazine, September 1998. http:// www.oramag.com/oracle/98-sep/58ind.html 23. Intra.doc! brochure, p. 4. Downloaded from http://www.intranetsol.com 24. ‘Intranets are not instant knowledge management systems,’ by John Latham in the 94

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Trade and Industry. Future Unit. September 1998, p. 13. Business Wire, Monday 13th July, 1998. ‘Business enters the extranet era,’ by Nicholas Booth. The Times, January 28th, 1998. Groupware: issues and experiences in groupware and computer supported cooperative working by C.A.Ellis et al., edited by R.M.Baecker. Morgan Kaufmann, 1993. ‘The evolution of interpersonal computing in groupware in the 21st century,’ by T.Dale, edited by Peter Lloyd. Adamiantine Press, 1994. BT intranet services jargon buster, http:// www.btintranet.com/yelljb.htm The Intranet FAQ at http://www.innergy.com/ ifaq1.html ‘Collaborative working,’ by Jenny Mill. Information Week, 1–14 April 1998, p. 62. ‘Collaborative working,’ by Jenny Mill. Information Week, 1–14 April 1998, p 60. http://www.team-it.org.uk/ ‘BT sees it’s good to talk intranet.’ The Sunday Times, 5 October 1997. ‘Intranet poised for take-off.’ BBC News (http:// news.bbc.co.uk), April 7, 1998. ‘Intranet saves millions for BT.’ BBC News (http:/ /news.bbc.co.uk), April 7, 1998. Op. cit. ‘Gateway—the BBC’s open intranet for staff’, presentation to IPR by Ian Adams, Internal Communications Manager, on 14th October 1997. http://www.corporate-intranet.com/library/case/ cas1004.htm 96

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Op. cit. Op. cit. Op. cit. Op. cit. Push Technology for Dummies by Bud Smith. IDG Books Worldwide, 1997. p. 56. ‘PointCast gets second bite at cherry,’ by Andy Patrizio. Network Week, 9 September 1998, p. 19. ‘Connected: roll on, The Daily Me hard drive,’ by Peter Cochrane. Daily Telegraph, Thursday March 5, 1998. ‘Push on the intranet,’ by Chris Marsters. Managing Information, May 1998, pp. 28–29. ‘Key players and their products.’ Knowledge Management, June 1998, pp.30–33. http://www.desktopdata.com/offerings/index.htm ‘Ei village adds 600 Elsevier journals and e-mail push technology.’ Business Wire, Thursday June 18, 1998. ‘All systems go: the electronic library (part 2),’ by Moira Duncan. Managing Information, September 1998, pp. 33–36. ‘No more push-me pull-you,’ by Mike Lynch. Computer Weekly, 17 July 1997, p. 30. ‘Pushing at the portals,’ by Louise Kehoe. Financial Times, May 20 1998, p. 20. Holy Bible. Good News Edition. The Bible Societies, 1976. ‘Man overboard.’ Yes, Prime Minister, series two, by Anthony Jay and Jonathan Lynn. BBC. Originally broadcast in 1987. ‘Dying for information’? An investigation into the effects of information overload in the UK and worldwide’. The report is based on research 97


68. 69. 70. 72. 73. 72. 74. 75.

conducted by Benchmark Research. ISBN 190124900X. Op. cit., p. 2. Op. cit., p. 2. The Reuters Guide to Good Information Strategy by Jane Bird, Reuters, 1997, p. 9. Out of the Abyss: surviving the information age. London: Reuters, 1998. Red, September 1998, pp. 22–23. ‘21st century vision,’ by Jackie Fenn. Information Strategy, November 1998, pp.18–21. ‘No more push-me pull-you,’ by Mike Lynch. Computer Weekly, 17 July 1997, p. 30. Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut by David Shenk. HarperEdge, p. 15.

98

Further Reading Baker, Richard H. Extranets: The Complete Sourcebook. McGraw-Hill, 1997. Baker, Richard. Building Corporate Extranets. McGraw-Hill, 1997. Bayles, Deborah L. Extranets: Building the Business to Business Web. Includes CD-ROM. 1998. Bernard, Ryan. The Corporate Intranet. John Wiley, 1998. Bird, Jane. The Reuters Guide to Good Information Strategy. Reuters, 1997. Bort, Julie and Felix, Bradley. Building an Extranet: Connect Your Intranet With Vendors and Customers. John Wiley & Sons, 1997. Bremner, L.M. Intranet Bible: Learn the Fundamentals of Intranets, Today’s Hottest Topic in Computing. Jamsa Press, 1997. Covill, Randall J. Implementing Extranets: The Internet as a Virtual Private Network. Digital Press, 1998. Falkner, M. Using Lotus Notes as an Intranet. John Wiley, 1997. Includes CD-ROM. Gonzalez, Jennifer. The 21st Century Intranet. Prentice Hall, 1998. Hopkins, Bryan. How to Design and Post Information on a Corporate Intranet. Gower, 1997. Intranet and Web Databases for Dummies. IDG Books, 1998. Includes CD-ROM. 99


Intranets: Strategies and Technologies for Building Effective Enterprisewide Intranet Systems. Computer Technology Research Corporation, 1998. Keen, Peter G.W., Mougayar, Walid and Torregrossa, Tracy. The Business Internet and Intranets: A Manager’s Guide to Key Terms and Concepts. Harvard Business School Press, 1998. KPMG. Intranet Research Report 1998. http:// www.kpmg.co.uk/uk/services/manage/research/intran98/ index.html KPMG. Intranets—A Guide for Business Users, http:// www.kpmg.co.uk/uk/services/computer/index.html Lloyd, Peter and Boyle, Paula (editors). WebWeaving: Intranets, Extranets and Strategic Alliances. Butterworth-Heinemann, 1998. Loshin, Peter. Extranet Design and Implementation. Sybex, 1997. Miller, Mitra et al. Managing the Corporate Intranet. John Wiley, 1998. Pfaffenberger, Bryan. Building a Strategic Extranet. IDG Books Worldwide. Reuters. Dying for Information? An investigation into the effects of information overload in the UK and worldwide. Reuters, 1996. Based on research conducted by Benchmark Research. Rohner, Kurt. Intranet Management: Revolutionizing Internal Communications for Competitive Advantage. John Wiley, 1997. Shenk, David. Data Smog: Surviving the Information Glut. HarperCollins, 1997. Smith, Bud. Push Technology for Dummies. IDG Books Worldwide, 1998. 100

Further Reading

Starnes, Jane K., Graves, John and Justice, Jacqueline. The Complete Intranet Source for Information Professionals. Special Libraries Association, 1997. Includes Resource Guide, Workbook, and CDROM. Szuprowicz, Bohdan O. Webcasting Strategies: Effective Push Technologies for Intranets and Extranets. Computer Technology Research Corporation, 1998. Tanler, Richard. The Intranet Data Warehouse: Tools and Techniques for Connecting Data Warehouses to Intranets. John Wiley, 1997. Tittel, Ed. The Intranet Bible. IDG Books, 1997. Includes CD-ROM. Wagner, Ronald L. and Englemann, Eric. Implementing and Managing Intranets. McGraw-Hill, 1997. Webb, Sylvia P. ‘Know-How’ and Information Provision in Legal Firms. British Library Research and Innovation Report 1. Berkhamstead: Sylvia P. Webb, 1996. White, Martin et al. Intranet Management—A TFPL Guide to Best Practice. TFPL, 1998. White, Martin. ‘Intranet resources on the web.’ Free Pint 13 (tips and techniques), http://www.freepint.co.uk/ issues/300498.htm

101

Aslib Know How Guides Assessing Information Needs: Tools and Techniques CD-ROMs: How to Set Up Your Workstation Copyright for Library and Information Service Professionals Developing a Records Management Program Disaster Planning for Library and Information Services Effective Financial Planning for Library and Information Services Email for Library and Information Professionals Evaluation of Library and Information Services How to Market Your Library Service Effectively How to Promote Your Web Site Effectively Information Resources Selection Installing a Local Area Network The Internet for Library and Information Service Professionals Intranets and Push Technology: Creating an InformationSharing Environment Job Descriptions for the Information Profession Knowledge Management: Linchpin of Change Legal Information—What It Is and Where to Find It Legal Liability for Information Provision Making a Charge for Library and Information Services Managing Library Automation Moving Your Library Performance Measurement in Library and Information Services Preparing a Guide to Your Library and Information Service Project Management for Library and Infor Researching for Business: Avoiding the ‘Nice to Know’ Trap Strategic Planning for Library and Information Services Teleworking for Library and Information Professionals

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