The Triple Revolution confronts companies with only one real way to win - by networking the company within a networked business system and accepting that the state of the art is purely temporary. That route will alter management in all aspects and processes and is the way to form and achieve ambitious, shared strategies. It is no panacea, however. The network leaves management open to abuse and abusing, unless top managers themselves can radically change their behaviour patterns. Leading the revolution is what it says: a leadership issue.
Bad, ill-led behavioural patterns are the principal shackles that confine major corporations to their over-prescriptive, over-restrictive ways. Writing in Fortune, Michael Schrage gives a chilling example of the old mentality at work in the new clothes of the IP revolution. Intranets enable collaborative working and information flows across the entire business, from top to bottom. They also, however, allow the bureaucrats to impose new rules and regulations, and to check on the level of obedience.
Schrage explains that major Intranet users like General Electric and ABB 'now store databases enumerating the performance standards and process practices deemed "best"...[which] create brave new infostructures that effectively enforce employee compliance with organisational norms'. A brand-new brainwave for reengineering customer service stands less chance of acceptance when 'best practice' is already enshrined on the database, and when its controllers can check whether or not you have applied the 'best'.
'Just how sustainable are "best practices" in a world built on the premise that change is the one constant?' Schrage's question plainly begs the answer: 'not at all'. The network must be a living entity, which guides managers, not towards the controlled environment of the past, but towards the directed anarchy, the managerial jazz, that responds to new stimuli all the time and sets nothing in concrete. The network is a neural system, not a rulebook. Abusing the nework is a dereliction of leadership, and a misuse of its power.
Visit a comprehensive Intranet like British Telecom's, and you get a swift awareness of that power. Start with the Directory: enter someone's name, and in a flash you get the phone number and what the person (one of 75,000 employees) is doing that day. If he's away at a seminar, the Intranet tells you - and you won't waste a phone call. Another click or two, and fuller details of the person flash onto the screen. Anybody can have their own home page. In the case of a particular manager, for example, it says what work his team does and has done. It has pages which contain the department's management system, meeting minutes, training records, and so on.
All the department's documents and templates are on the site as well. These savings in paperwork are repeated thousands of times over. Then, there's BT Today, which contains all the information coming into the company. News flashes range from the CEO, Sir Peter Bonfield, addressing US investors (with the speech text complete) to secretaries taking the blame for missing messages. The share price is the permanent top item. There's also an unofficial Website giving further information about the shares (which caused the system to crash when, to the enormous interest of the employee/shareholders, they went through £10).
Another Intranet feature, the ISIS Library, is an enormously rich source of information. Type in 'creosote' or anything else and the Library will produce every reference to the subject. Technical information is thus available in seconds, where it once took weeks. It can be accessed in any office, anywhere in BT, and also out in the field. In mid-1999 multi-media kiosks, a relatively primitive and unsatisfactory system, were still being used for this purpose: palmtop PCs will take over in due course.
There are believed to be two million pages on the BT Intranet. Any such quantity would be grotesquely prohibitive in printed form. They are handled with consummate ease in a digital format: you see only the single page at any time, and the system guides you at a click to where you want to go, efficiently ignoring all else. The efficiency doesn't happen by itself. There is a steering group, with a manager, and there are 'franchise holders': but the system really revolves round information owners' and 'information providers', who sign up to abide by the guidelines.
Among the multitude of Web services is 'Job News'. Employees can see what jobs are available, what skills they require, what the jobs pay, how to apply, and so on. Then there's multimedia: one of the services here is 'Superoute 66', which shows and tells you the position of buses travelling between BT's labs at Martlesham, Suffolk, and the train station. Satellite TV is the key to this minor marvel. You can also summon up a video picture of traffic conditions around the lab - very useful in the rush hour.
THE INTRANET MILLIONS
That, no doubt, is a tiny piece (if any part) of an Intranet business benefit to BT that has been put at an extraordinary figure, £750 million. The saving from the first applications, the directory, came to £900,000 on printing bills alone. Measured as return on investment, the benefit has been put at 1,700%. The precise numbers may be arguable, but this is another way of saying that the cost is relatively small and the returns huge - if you go the whole way. BT's Intranet is in the first of these six categories of wiring-up:
• Broad operational application-supporting sites (addresing multiple operational areas or broad business processes).
• Narrow operational application-supporting sites (addresing a single, narrow business process or application, such as benefits enrollment)
• Intranet/extranet hybrids (intranets that selectively admit customers to password-protected areas)
• Customer-care Extranets (full-featured customer-service/self service or commerce-supporting sites
• Advanced knowledge-management sites
True leaders encourage their networks to evolve. Like BT's, Intranets and Extranets customarily begin as what CIO WebBusiness Magazine (the source of the above definitions) calls 'fat, happy buckets of information'. But the time comes to 'go out there and do something' - to take 'aim at operational targets, providing some fairly ambitious transactional capability'. This time has arrived far faster than the magazine's own experts predicted. Of the 50 winning sites announced in July 1998, '31 performed predominantly operational roles in the form of robust transactional, process-interaction or workflow-enhancing capabilities'.
Not that the remaining 19 intranets were purely passive. Though mainly devoted to sharing information internally, decision support or knowledge management, 'most offered implicit (and some explicit) benefits to internal decision-making quality, employee productivity, customer satisfaction or product-deliverey cycle time'. As the magazine says, 'nothing to sneeze at'. Plainly a successful Intranet expands its powers exponentially. The result can be paradoxical, as an executive at the pharmaceutical giant, Glaxo, told the Financial Times:
'We think of the Intranet as the telephone. It's just part of the fabric...The people who said it would never work now say that it was their idea'.
In other words, proof-seeking Pragmatists are converted to risk-tasking Visionaries as more and more applications are put on the Intranet or Extranet. WebBusiness gives some killer app examples from Chrysler Corp.: competitive intelligence, collaborative work group support, HR self-service applications (including records administration), financial modelling tools, company news, a vehicle-build tracking system, manufacturing quality statistics - plus a 'dynamic' stock market site.
The Net promises to revolutionise government as well as business. Not only can transactions between the citizen and the state be processed in cyberspace at huge savings, but the bugbears of civil administration - overlaps and poor communication between agencies - can become horrors of the past. Moreover, internal relationships can be greatly improved in government, just as in business: here (for one example) the Lucent Technologies site proved valuable in establishing the company's separate identity after spin-off from AT&T.
Distribution networks can be transformed by keeping information current and available to all participants in the supply chain. As a result, Allied Van Lines estimated savings by its 500 agencies at over $6 million annually. Geographic dispersal can also be managed far more effectively with Intranet help. Houston Industries thus gives its electric and gas facility managers real-time data for use in power generation and transmission and in buying fuel: 'the availability of this operational information has created a flatter process-management structure that delivers improved efficiencies'.
Not surprisingly, one of the most striking Intranet operations has been built by Perot Systems, founded by failed Presidential candidate H.Ross Perot after parting with General Motors and his original computer services company, EDS. Perot's TRAIN system, a knowledge management Intranet, is said to have cut the time taken over developing proposals for customers by 40%: time on developing proposals by 60%: cost of developing proposals by 45%: travel time for business development by 35%: and time to market for new offerings by 40%. The TRAIN traffic is enormous: 2.1 million hits weekly from 4,800 employees.
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