A "superbrowser" shell or portal simplifies navigation among all the tools a service representative needs when answering a caller's questions or processing benefits-related transactions. The representative can jump from one application to the next by clicking on hot links and can even use the browser interface to manage the phone headset.

And that's just the beginning. "Most customer interaction is going from touch-tone or service rep to Internet based," Jessel says. Eventually more than 80% of all inquiries will be handled via the browser interface, without a call-center representative ever accessing the base applications.

Towers Perrin is also developing custom Internet interfaces for companies that want to provide benefits information electronically, potentially saving the $25 per employee it costs to send out glossy paper brochures. Jessel predicts that this fall, one-third of new participants in flexible-benefits programs will enroll via the Web. The browser brings data from disparate systems into screens designed around customer inquiries, essentially treating the underlying applications as stateless, and avoiding the rewriting of base applications.

On the consulting side of Towers Perrin's business, where the company advises other businesses on how to manage benefits programs, the browser is also important. "We have a huge investment in moving away from paper-based, traditional consulting to providing services using technology," Jessel says. The company plans to use Lotus Notes and Domino R5, with its browser interface, to create electronic-consulting communities that will let Towers Perrin consultants leverage the company's past work, easily collaborate, and receive a constant flow of information about clients and clients' businesses.

Towers is building a prototype of a shared module for its retirement practice before the end of next month, with the hope of deploying it to other practices in the company in the second half of next year. The creation of such communities "is a hard problem not from a technological standpoint, but from a behavioral standpoint," Jessel says. "In order to take a report that you did for a client and generalize it, so it's useful to other people in the firm, you need to do additional work that doesn't result in more revenue for you personally. That's a big change in consulting."

But sharing knowledge is important in the knowledge industry. That's why Booz, Allen & Hamilton Inc., a business consulting firm, is building a new application architecture that is also centered on Web portals. "A lot of people had the objective of retrieving information in a universal way and collaborating in real time," says Booz Allen CIO Daniel Gasparro. "We haven't been able to do it because of dissimilarities in application architecture. The Web has been the great neutralizer."

The portal architecture will enable Booz Allen consultants to develop reports on the fly about a client project, how much revenue it's generating, and whether the right human resources are dedicated to that client. The content for such a report can be maintained in its original state but accessed via a portal and viewed differently by different people, depending on their needs. Someone in finance might view the information one way, while the client may view it another way.

"If I'm the person working with the customer, I have different desires than someone responsible for financial performance," Gasparro says. Access and security will be controlled using a metadirectory and a metadata architecture.

In the past, Booz Allen could generate such reports, but they were tied to a specific application, instead of something that could be generated on the fly. Year 2000 remediation provided Booz Allen with the opportunity to purge legacy financial and human-resource systems and create a new application architecture based on portals.

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