Internet II: the adventure continues.

• Author: Esch, Arthur, Jr.

At the Core

This article:

* Defines what the Internet II is

* Identifies the impact that the evolving Internet will have on business transactions

In 1999 and 2000, pundits referrred to the Internet with adjectives centered around the theme of revolution. "The Internet is revolutionizing information management ..." "The Internet is revolutionizing the automobile industry ..." "Young people will rule the world ..." "You're over 40? You're washed up. You need to retire."

Then the dotcom explosion gave the pundits new stories to tell. "The world had been led astray by a strange group of kids ... Real business people who understand the good old ways of earning profits will continue to rule the world."

What if the pundits were dead wrong, both times? The dotcom bubble was a seminal event when wealthy people indiscriminately gave money to venture capitalists, who in turn gave money indiscriminately to young technical people who had a new appearance and a new vocabulary. Venture capitalists are, after all, pundits who love using new vocabularies.

The couple of hundred billion-dollar investments in dotcom land probably accelerated the growth of the Internet by five or six years. The world got a whole new communications infrastructure and a staggering array of new communications tools, and e-mail became the most popular communications technique in business and at home.

Historians will likely peg the 1996 -- 2001 dotcom era as the most dramatic communications growth period in history. In fact, this will be sufficiently important to fit into the grandparent-to-youngster folklore.

The whole dotcom phenomenon was not a revolution. It was an exuberant infusion of capital into building a communications platform for businesses and consumers. The real revolution is happening in 2002 as traditional businesses learn how to use the Internet to improve business productivity and profitability. Today's Internet is different from the original Internet: The infrastructure is maturing, and reliability of the Net is increasing. The client-side software or browsers have matured. Content is more standardized and displays more accurately on user machines. A serious new communications platform has been built.

Putting It into Perspective

It is important for information technologists to step back occasionally and put events into a non-technical perspective. For example, the last two decades altered business dramatically. The period of 1980 -- 1985 was the birth of personal computers, but there was little practical impact on business. The 1985 -- 1995 period saw personal computing revolutionize offices. Typing pools, office secretaries, and many other administrative roles were given over to workers and managers using personal computing.

The greatest challenge to the personal computing era was getting the individual computers to talk to each other. Local area networks (LAN) were hard to implement and harder to keep in production mode. Cross-LAN communication was the next challenge, plagued by a selection of incompatible proprietary communications protocols.

Internet One

Transmission control protocol/ Internet protocol (TCP/IP) was on the IT scene for 30 years, yet it had a very small following until the communications system was fitted with an addressing scheme. This addressing system, euphemistically referred to as the World Wide Web, took years to implement all of the components.

The next challenge was a display technique that empowered users to create attractive content. Ultimately, hypertext mark-up language (HTML) provided a solid standard. But even with HTML, it took years to build functional content creation systems.

By 1995, the world began understanding that non-technical business people could effectively accomplish communications among personal computing devices. Then there was a five-year seminal infrastructure building period fed by the hundreds of billions of investment dollars currently mislabeled as the dotcom era.

Internet Two

What makes the Internet Two era fundamentally different is the applications. Hardcore business functions are moving to the Internet and being accomplished with greater speed, less human energy, and, therefore, more economically -- sometimes even more profitably.

Management specialists say that the average businessperson is spending just short of two hours each business day doing e-mail. More likely, the two hours are a combination of personal communications in the form of e-mail, plus a number of other business functions -- reviewing public relations, marketing electronically, being marketed to electronically, buying online, and playing international water cooler (gossiping).

Business Functions and Internet Two

Yes, the new model is two hours each day, or 25 percent of on-the-job work time, using "connected personal computing" to accomplish business functions. The secretary is gone, and e-mail is infinitely faster. Making announcements to the press and reading announcements from others is accomplished rapidly and more completely than ever before. Virtually every business function has a supporting Internet system.

It is the challenge of each information professional to figure out what tools their organization needs to best support specific business functions in Internet Two. This literally starts with the press release; goes through marketing, sales, and delivery; and includes accounting and reporting to the stakeholders on the organization's results.

As was true with the early software industry in the 1960s, most of these...