Article about the power of an Intranet - Can the Web truly be the paperless dream fulfilled?
 

And so it goes for another two hours and two dozen agenda items. The meeting, taking place several miles from Sandia's home on the Kirkland Air Force base in Albuquerque, N.M., has brought together members of the lab's imperfectly acronymed EVE team (Enterprisewide-information Viewing Environment) with trainers, internal consultants and liaisons to the information-provider community. These 20 people have until Feb. 1, 1996, to resolve a slew of Web-related issues and get all of Sandia's administrative materials online. In the process, they are using a very new technology to chase some old organizational hares, including ubiquitous information, cross-platform communications and the ever-elusive paperless office.

The EVE projectwith its emphasis on internal communication and absence of external marketing goalsis atypical of current Web initiatives. But that's going to change: In a recent survey of more than 150 companies, the Business Research Group of Newton, Mass., found 23 percent had implemented or planned to implement internal Web sites and another 20 percent were thinking about it. For now, most of the innovators in this area are high-tech companies or public/private hybrids like Sandia, which conducts projects for the Department of Energy and other government agencies but is managed by Lockheed Martin. Such organizations are focused more on cutting costs and bureaucracy internally than on captivating the world at large. (Sandia does have an external Web site at http://www.sandia.gov, but it is a separate project and not as elaborate as the internal system.)

But in other ways, Sandia's experience with the Web is not so unusual. As in most organizations, its road to Damascus began in the engineering department, where Fran Current was on a team investigating ways to apply the principles of electronic commerce to the organization's dealings with electronic-components suppliers. "We looked at VANs, we looked at the Internet, and that's when we stumbled across the World Wide Web," says Current, who is co-leader of the EVE team (ask a Sandian for anything like a formal title and the response is typically polite bafflement). "Immediately upon seeing what the Web was capable of, I realized that was what we needed at Sandia for an internal information system."

This was about 18 months ago, and major changes in the organization's information architecture were already afoot. Sandia had just boosted Mike Eaton out of the electrical engineering ranks to become its first-ever CIO, with a mandate to create a coherent, corporatewide network from the existing jumble of LANs running on a mix of PCs, Macs and Unix machines. The e-mail situation (six incompatible systems and nearly 100 post offices) was symptomatic of the chaos Eaton hoped to dispel. "With all these local solutions, people were using e-mail inappropriately, as a means of sharing data within their enterprises," he says. "They were trying to make a freight hauler out of a notification device."

The new CIO barely had time to settle into his office before Sandia's Web evangelists came knocking on his door. "I took one look [at the Web] and I said, ÔThat's our freight hauler!'" recalls Eaton.

Having blessed the Web as Sandia's best hope for a corporate communications vehicle, Eaton established a core team of eight people (Current and a few other engineers actually transferred into IS) and told them to go forth and build prototypes. Eschewing the need for elaborate cost justifications, he readily agreed to fund the project at roughly one million dollars a year. "My philosophy has been to try to avoid getting myself involved in ROI until people can actually see and feel what the capabilities are," says Eaton. "If you get all hung up on that you may get yourself started, but the sword will come back and kill you, as the overall cost rises with the addition of capabilities and services."

Thus anointed, the EVE team rapidly arranged TCP/IP installation training for Sandia's LAN managers, who then fanned out across the organization delivering Web connectivity wherever they went. By late summer, approximately 6,000 of Sandia's 10,000 employees and contractors had Web access: The goal is 100 percent penetration for regular computer users. (Computerless Sandians, such as forklift operators and machinists, will be able to get at the Web through standalone kiosks supplied by Lockheed Martin as part of an ethics training program.) As for the corporate Web servers, Eaton directed that they be established in Sandia's brand-new customer service units (CSUs), geographic divisions created to serve as focal points for network management.

Meanwhile, the team's programmers were working on getting the newly Web-enabled something to access, starting with a searchable corporate phone directory and a property-management application that enables employees to track computers and other inventory registered in their names. When this information lived on Sandia's mainframe, "access was very complicated, and only 2,500 people could get at it directly," says Current. "I didn't have a mainframe account, so if I wanted to get my property information I had to go to my organization's property coordinator and that person would get on the mainframe, generate a report, print it out and give it to me. Now I can go directly to the Web and get it, along with 6,300 other people." (Another advantage: Web applications are very easy to write. Senior Analyst Pat Milligan, who created Sandia's conference-room scheduler, says that writing a similar program for the mainframe would have taken at least four times as long.)

But while these first applications aimed at bringing mass exposure to formerly reclusive databases, EVE never lost sight of the real enemy. "It's paper," explains Rich Graham, who, as executive coordinator for information providers, helps groups and individuals get their materials online. "We have these manuals: corporate procedures and policies, environmental safety and health, travel, compensation, procurement, and on and on. There's a whole shelf of this stuff, and every manager has to have them, and every manager has to add paper updatessometimes two or three a month. Some people would actually print the entire manual over again" every time new information was added.

It is these 30 or so manuals that EVE plans to make Web-accessible by February, as an icon under the "Administrative" label on Sandia's internal home page. Other applications in that category include "Communications" (special reports and regular publications); "Applications" (conference-room scheduling, order-tracking, etc.); "Corporate Policy" (vision, mission support, etc.); "Organizations" and "Services." Users can also access information from the technical side of the house, although "to this point we have hit the administrative side more heavily," says Eaton. But as the administrative task is completed, EVE's attention is turning back toward applications that would, for example, enable technicians to share drawing packages over the Web, or post animated mechanical designs. "The Web here had its roots in engineeringif just barelyand now it's our job to get those people back into it," says Eaton.

But the Web isn't just something you build, it's something you live with. While EVE wrestled with brick-and-mortar issues of security, archiving and server configuration, others were questioning how Web information should be managed and presented, and how the new technology could be made most useful to internal customers.

Out of these concerns was born WebCo, a service organization that acts as a consultant for groups putting material on the Web and educates Sandians about things like common look and feel and writing for online consumption. "EVE is like Ford Motor Co. in Detroit and [WebCo. is] like Rich Ford here in Albuquerquethe distributor who services the cars and makes sure the customer is happy," explains Jennie Negin, manager of WebCo. "They do the engineering; we do the applying. They do the technology; we do the information management."

When Negin talks about "Information" you can hear the capital "I" in her voice. That may be the legacy of years spent managing corporate libraries, an experience that has also largely formed her take on the Web, which she believes fulfills a similar function. "Much of library work is really brokering information," Negin explains. "The librarian doesn't say, well, this piece of information is formal and this piece is informal; and that's internal and that's external; and that's computer- based and that's on paper. No, the librarian listens to the information you need and uses the appropriate resources to give it to you. And that's what the Web does."

But that model only works when information is presented thoughtfully, with an eye toward how and by whom it will be used. WebCo's mission is twofold: to help information providers design and implement effective pages (or to do it for them, for a chargeback fee) and to train them in subjects as mundane as browser usage (Sandia supports both Netscape and Spyglass) and as esoteric as "hyperthinking." The hyperthink class, which is currently in development, aims to get people past the one-information-format-fits-all mind-set. "The universities have taught us to write these 20- and 30-page papers, and somewhere in there is buried a piece of useful information," says Web Training Coordinator and Instructor Tamara Orth, one of five training consultants and developers. "We're trying to get people to identify that piece of useful information, extract it, and that's what they put up there."

But short and sweet is only part of it. "We took this technology that for science and research could be very free and open, and we started using it for administration," says Negin. "That meant it had to be predictable." Predictability, for Sandia, means consistent informationpage title, page creator, page owner and review datein a consistent position on every document. That review date, by the way, is a kind of freshness stamp, to alert content owners when something they've posted is getting a little overripe. "It's the responsibility of the owners to maintain their documents, but I know myself that I've put things on the Web and forgotten they were there," says Graham. "Our vision is that we will have a script file that will go out and look at the review date and then fire the owner an e-mail notification" if the date has expired.

Another brow-furrowing issue isnot surprisinglysecurity. A proxy server stands between internal users and the badlands of the Internet at large; the machine keeps intruders at bay and filters potentially dangerous files that might harbor a virus. But the Web group is also evaluating authentication and security software for internal use, so that employees can update their own training and personnel records without worrying that someone's going to sneak in and erase a couple of zeros off their salaries, as well as get access to management information and sensitive stuff like weapons data. Currently, certain human resources records are available on a read-only basis; other applications rely on the honor system. "You just have to hope that if you use the conference-room scheduler to arrange something, someone else doesn't go in there and unarrange it, because basically they can," says Orth.

EVE co-leader Long says that resolving some of these problems and keeping the Web development process on track has had a unifying effect on Sandians. The Web group presides over periodic meetings of information providerssome of whom had never previously metto discuss differing interpretations of the policies and procedures being posted. In order to achieve a consistent presentation, for example, departmental financial officers have had to stop using terms to mean whatever they want them to mean and instead work together on a set of common definitions. "They have to get together on these things so people have a basis to talk to one another," says Long. "This is the first time there's been a mechanism for that to happen."

The Web has also furthered integration of Sandia's Albuquerque campus with a much smaller site in Livermore, Calif. (The two are connected by similar projects, a common culture and a T3 line.) "The Web allows a diverse population to access applications and documents across platforms and across sites in a way that probably wouldn't be possible anywhere else except in a small company," says Tracy Walker, a senior member of the technical staff in California. "It reinforces the fact that we are all one Sandia."

- Leigh Buchanan

Inside Moves

EVE Project Leader Fran Current sounds like he's speaking for the whole team when he describes his goals for the internal Web initiative: "I would like to see the Web become the single, virtual source for all information within Sandia, the first place somebody looks when they need to know something." In addition to posting things like policy manuals and vacation balances, the Web group has developed some ingenious applications that go a long way toward making that vision a reality. Here are a few:

Conference-Room Scheduling: All conference rooms at Sandia are not created equal. That's hardly surprising when you consider that the sprawling campus is a patchwork of comfortable offices, bleak technical buildings and remote trailers. Employees wishing to reserve just the right venue for their meeting can now do so over the Web, by plugging in their social security numbers and choosing from a list of several dozen specifications (overhead projector, whiteboard, handicapped access, coffee pot, etc.) Senior analyst Pat Milligan hopes to enhance the program by enabling users to schedule multiple rooms for multiple days and by posting photos of the 50-or-so available spaces.

Financial-Management Query: This project-management tool enables users to enter a project case number and find out immediately how much is being spent on procurement, labor and other factors. "In the past, if I wanted this information I had to go to an administrative assistant who had an account on the mainframe to get it for me," says Current. Other internal tracking tools remind employees what inventory they are responsible for (and where it resides) and check on the status of anything they may have ordered.

Knowledge Preservation: Like any venerable organization, Sandia possesses a wealth of information and experience that resides principally in the heads of its employees. In order not to lose this resource as people retire, the organization is videotaping departing staff members as they hold forth on their areas of expertise, then putting transcripts of those sessions on the Web. (As the EVE team increases its use of video, it may make the taped versions available online as well.)

Official Airline Guide: This application might more aptly be named the Official All-Travel Guide, since it includes car-rental and hotel-availability information as well as everything you ever wanted to know about airline schedules. (For security reasons, employees can't yet use the guide to make reservations.) Milligan hopes to add foreign-travel authorization to the application's capabilities: The current process involves routing paperwork to six different people.

Subscription Service: Now that Sandia is putting its manuals, Weekly Bulletin and other publications on the Web, employees no longer get the paper versions pushed at them all the time. Concerned that the out-of-sight/out-of-mind rule might mean information getting overlooked or ignored, the Web group created an online subscription service. Through the Web, employees simply indicate which publications they're interested in; then, when an update or new edition is posted they are notified immediately via e-mail.

SAND Reports: Whenever researchers make a discovery or complete a project, they generate SAND reports, which are like scientific journal articles for internal reference. The paper versions are housed in the corporate library, but online abstracts searchable by key words are now being placed on the Web.

-L. Buchanan

Paper View

That's more than just an educated guess: Perrine recently asked a random sample of employees if they preferred reading Sandia's Weekly Bulletin on the company's Web site or on paperpaper won out by a margin of three-to-two. In addition, only 40 percent of employees who knew that the Bulletin was on the Web had actually read it there.

Still, more folks are starting to come around. Last spring, when Perrine first announced the availability of the Bulletin on the Web, about 10 percent of Sandia's employees and contractors asked that they no longer receive it through their mailboxes. That means a 10 percent smaller printing run and a consequent cost savings. "We're on an educational curve, and as people get trained on this, I'm sure we'll be able to make further cuts," says Perrine. (Interestingly, Sandia's much smaller California site has had better luck with online delivery. A daily newsletter sent by e-mail and posted on the Web has completely replaced the old paper version, reducing paper distribution to the tune of about 13,000 pages a week.)

Perrine also expects usage to rise as the Web becomes a more effective vehicle for news delivery. Already it is being used to supplement major announcements; when Sandia's new president was named in August, for example, employees could turn to the Web for press releases that were formerly seen only by media outlets. It may also help fill the void that would be created if the organization's radio station closes next year, leaving readers to click on rather than tune in.

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