Corporate Intranets
Put yourself in my shoes. I'm the chief technology officer at Network Computing's mythical AppLogistics Inc., and I represent an international group of people with different companies and different names, selling different products to different customers with different systems, in different states, regions and countries. Our corporate imperative is to ensure that these disparate entities present a single, unified image to the market. I'm the guy who has to sell this to them or else jam it down their throats. I'm the one telling them they have to become a new sales and marketing organization. What's the quickest way to get them up and running? What's the best way to support them? An intranet, that's the ticket! With an intranet, you point your browser at your new server and away you go. We decided we'd issue an RFP for a packaged application and Web infrastructure. Then we'd issue a second one with AT&T, MCI or some large Internet service provider (ISP) for the virtual private network (VPN). They'll mail our users the browser disks, they'll handle the setup and user support. Bang! we're up. No problem, right? Well, let me tell you what really happened. CMP Network Computing
ReadEducation And Replication: No Free Ride
Both corporate IS and users are under the mistaken impression that they need not pay for the cow if they can get the milk for free. This month's RFP feature illustrates two distinct examples. First, many decision-makers are outsourcing the education and architecture process by ineffectively commingling it with the RFP process. Second, many users--with the encouragement of middleware vendors--are assuming connected and disconnected mean the same thing. We discovered this because our RFP was targeted for sales and marketing users, many of whom are laptop users on the go. The solutions suggested by most of our bidders went to incredible lengths to propagate data down to each laptop. Example One: Unrealistic Expectations for the RFP Process When I spoke with management about their procurement process, I encountered a lot of chest-beating and unrealistic expectations. I recently overheard the following: "I can get any vendor to do anything for nothing." There's your first mistake. Next I overheard: "I use vendors for education. Let's use this RFP process as a way to get up to speed." There's your second mistake. Just because you agonized for five months about whether or not to upgrade to Office 97, doesn't mean you can make an informed decision about the intranet. CMP Network Computing
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