Inside four intranets.

• Author: Gerstner, John

Just when you thought you had the Internet licked, along comes the company's intranet. But can it really make your employees more productive and the paper chase obsolete?

CASE STUDY

Your boss just asked you, "What will an intranet allow us to do?" While many companies start by putting their employee telephone directory and internal memos on their intranets, others are going beyond that first step and pushing for real productivity and cost savings.

For example, Tyson Foods reports its intranet allows it to bridge the time gap between its East and West Coast facilities, making it much easier to coordinate operations. Sandia Laboratories' intranet includes a project-management tool, which lets project participants immediately find out how much is being spent on procurement, labor and other areas. Eli Lilly posts changes in laboratory procedures on its intranet, ELVIS (Eli Lilly Virtual Information Service), eliminating the need to manually insert new pages into lab books at 40 laboratories around the world.

But as with any other new tool, companies are still trying to work out the best way to use it. Take the cultural obstacles, for example. Chrysler managers now post car-design changes on the company intranet to reduce interoffice mail, but many employees still print an "official" copy. Bechtel has found that convincing employees they can benefit from the intranet is easy, but getting them to share information with one another is a bit trickier.

Still, plenty of companies find ways to get a big bang for the buck from their intranets. Here's the inside scoop from four companies.

TOOL, NOT TOY by John Gerstner Employee communications manager, Deere & Co., Moline, Ill.

Who runs it: One webmaster and one technical person to write HTML

Who uses it: 15,000 employees out of a total of 35,000

John Deere is a decentralized company, so it's not surprising that our intranet began as a grassroots effort. But we recognized early on that having dozens of home pages with no oversight only creates a giant, mangled mess that isn't user-friendly and isn't the best use of resources and time. We felt we could really leverage our technology better if we did some things centrally, such as instilling some publishing guidelines and policies.

For example, we look at graphics as a business tool. What's the point of showing a color picture of our headquarters building, for instance, when everybody knows what it looks like? We have a standard look for our headers and footers. They're in black and white, although we allow color as an option. We chose this style to signal that the intranet is a business tool, not a toy, and we've also posted our rules through our online Intranet Resource Center.

That said, we're pushing hard to make sure our employees have equal access to the intranet. The Internet Steering Committee's goal is to deliver access to all Deere employees by April 1998. That includes our international subsidiaries; in fact, we already have intranet sites in Mexico, Germany and South Africa.

Not every employee will be able to get onto the intranet via his or her desktop, so we'll use kiosks to bridge the gaps. Also, we plan to take obsolete computers and make them web browsers to get employees connected.

One of our most unique uses of the intranet is an online photo application, which took us about two years to develop. Deere has its own photo department, and employees can now access online the thousands of photographs we take of our products every year. If you have a presentation to do on a certain product, you can download the product images to your desktop, selecting from side, front and rear views and five different printing resolutions.

The development of this application happened to coincide with a...