InformationWeek
Defining The Business Value Of Technology
June 21, 1999
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With Livelink, users can create a document in the most common desktop productivity applications, such as Microsoft Word and Excel, and then drop the file into a Livelink folder to post to the Web. Van der Burg set up Livelink so materials are organized around the various projects the organization is undertaking. The projects are subcategorized by countries or other factors.
Every folder has its own administrator and set of employees who are automatically notified via E-mail when any change occurs, such as someone editing a document or adding a new one. Since the folders are set up in a cascading hierarchy, administrators of folders that contain other folders are also notified of changes anywhere in the group. To tap into company knowledge collected on the intranet, Livelink comes with a powerful search engine, much like the ones for the Internet, a feature van der Burg says is one of his favorites.
Many of the challenges associated with these tools aren't technical, but managerial. Van der Burg knows that firsthand. One of the biggest obstacles he faces is that the employees at many organizational units within Care Canada are used to passing along information over the phone. Van der Burg and his assistants must sit down with these groups and help them define their workflow patterns and translate those methods to electronic communications. It's not an easy change for anyone.
Then van der Burg must recondition the employees to use computers to communicate instead of the telephone. Realizing the challenges of his task, van der Burg has placed the rollout of the intranet using Livelink from Open Text on a multiyear time line. "As you can imagine, change management issues are not small and this one was a biggie," van der Burg says.
Like other executives implementing these tools, van der Burg says he can only guess at the cost savings garnered from streamlining intranet document management. But he views the improved access to company knowledge as the biggest payoff. "Our intranet would not even be possible without a product like Livelink," van der Burg says. "A Webmaster could never keep up with all the information."
Back From The Brink
Some companies early into the intranet effort need to pull their intranets from the brink of disaster. Take The Salt River Project, in Phoenix, the third-largest public utility in the country. Salt River jumped on the intranet bandwagon in 1994 and turned control of the Web operation over to its various business units.
Such decentralized control of the intranet helped inspire Salt River's 4,200 employees to actively publish to the corporate communications site. In five years, they published 5,000 Web pages and 30,000 files. Such an unstructured publishing process led to chaos, explains Michael Puhala, the company's Web architect. The site lacked documentation or interface standards, and navigating through the reams of ad hoc Web pages was at the least extremely confusing, Puhala says.
Late last year, the company began an implementation of TeamSite from Interwoven. TeamSite provides workflow management control of intranet documentation from creation to publication. Puhala says TeamSite is about 80% deployed, but it's already showing benefits by providing such features as document access controls, version controls, workflow management via E-mail, and directories for hierarchical structuring of the site.
Puhala admits implementing TeamSite hasn't been easy. But he gives the software high marks for bringing a management system to an intranet that was spinning out of control.
Forrester's Manning says many of the two dozen or so Web file-management workflow products are equally effective, and a choice among them often depends on a company's computing infrastructure and size. Some tools, such as the Internet Publishing System from FutureTense in Acton, Mass., are closely aligned with Netscape. Others, such as Eprise's Participant Server, are focused more on mid-size companies or divisions running on Windows NT. Many of the tools are fairly open, Manning says, and rely on common development languages, such as C++.
Though they're effective, most of these tools don't come cheap. Forrester's Manning says many of the tools start at a base price of about $50,000. Most companies interviewed wouldn't reveal prices paid for their software, indicating they received proprietary discounts.
Most of these tools also require a database, such as Oracle or SQL, which companies usually buy separately. And implementation costs can start piling up. "Prices will creep real fast," Manning says.
Analysts and executives who have deployed these tools say these solutions are difficult to analyze for a return on investment. But Michael Harrison, VP of corporate affairs at The Minacs Group, a Pickering, Ontario, call-center outsource service for large companies, was easily able to justify investment in NCompass Lab's Resolution application. His budget for paper to document information for call-center service representatives alone was $150,000, which he mostly eliminated by converting such documentation to an electronic format, moving it to an intranet, and managing it with Resolution.
Not a bad deal: a free ride past the Webmaster bottleneck.
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