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Immaturity dictates cautious approach to newest collaborative environment
Many compelling factors combine to give government hope that its internal Internet networks will help smooth the waters of information flow and, of course, save on the cost of deployment. Experts discuss some of the caveats, too, such as the mess that a hastily set-up intranet could leave in an organization.
All the type and verbiage aside, the truth is that intranets are transforming the way government runs. Never have so many IT decision-makers across all levels of government decided so resoundingly and immediately to embrace a single technology.
Unless you've been in a coma, you know the basic rationale for the move -- low deployment costs, open standards and reduced expenditures. But don't let the obvious merits lull you into thinking an intranet will solve all your internal networking woes. This particular lane of the information highway may be especially smooth, but it still has its potholes.
There will come a time in the not-too-distant future when we won't be able to envisage an organization without an intranet, says Gordon Benett, author of Introducing Intranets: A decision maker's guide to launching an Intranet and publisher of the e-zine Intranet Design Magazine (www.innergy.com).
We're going to see Web and intranet technologies really dominate [in the next few years]."
The intranet is already dominating. A recent study by International Data Corp. shows it's the fastest growing segment of corporate computing and will continue to surge until, presumably, a saturation point is reached.
Intranets have caught on like wildfire for good and obvious reasons, beyond the economic ones. They capitalize on the user-friendly ubiquity of browser technology. They promote collaborative work, a growing trend. And they enable electronic publishing and, in the process, eliminate the headaches and costs of constantly printing and distributing documents within a large organization.
Intranets do to organizations what hyperlinks have done to reading," says David Weinberger, vice-president of strategic marketing for OpenText Corp., a Waterloo, Ont.-based intranet company whose Livelink software is achieving international recognition for its document management and workflow automation capabilities. (In fact, Hewlett-Packard has just acquired licences to install Livelink in its worldwide corporate offices.)
That's not to say intranets aren't without a downside. Despite being cheap to deploy, there's growing...