Intranet market

The global financial crisis, spreading recession, financial market correction – whatever the moniker turns your crank – presents an interesting dilema for the corprate intranet. Viewed by senior management with skepticism if not outright incredulity, the intranet rarely gets the respect it deserves. In this tough economy, the intranet's repuation is going to get further stung.

A virtual roundtable A revolution is brewing. The support for conducting business between companies--trading partners, supply chain members, important customers--electronically is fast becoming the primary focus of many of the solution providers who serve the document, workflow and knowledge exchange marketplace.Why? It's an enormous business opportunity. Forrester Research (www.forrester.com) places the value of goods and services traded between companies at $8 billion (that's 1,000% over last year!). By 2002, that number will reach $327 billion.

FINANCIALGerman bank chooses KM solutionGerman savings and loan Kreissparkasse Hannover (KH, Hannover, Germany) has chosen Excalibur Technologies' (Vienna, VA) RetrievalWare as a knowledge retrieval system. Via the bank's intranet, approximately 1,400 employees in 100 offices will be able to search and extract information including legal information and procedures. KH will integrate the system with its existing Oracle databases and will consider expanding the number of licenses to allow customers to access information about real estate, the insurance market and the private investment market. Guenther Kunze, the director in charge of the project, said, "Excalibur RetrievalWare will not only enable us to satisfy the market needs, but also significantly increase our productivity."

BackWeb (www.backweb.com) provides accelerator applications that deliver information, sales tools and document updates, automated delivery and alerting technologies to hasten the response to change. The first of those modules, the Market Intelligence Manager Sales Accelerator, is specifically for business intelligence. It gathers information about competitors, customers and the marketplace from any Internet or intranet location. According to Mark Gaydos, BackWeb product manager, installing a BI system requires buy-in from the IT department as well as line of business managers. "You have to be sure both the user and the network administrator have a positive experience," he said. One way BackWeb excels in that area is in delivering content. "We call it polite communications," said Gaydos. "We back off if you go to use the network." An additional network feature is a "Bandwidth Regulator," which limits the amount of bandwidth used by the system

User stories from the knowledge frontThe maker of more than 300 brands “you know and trust,” as the company says on its Web site, Procter & Gamble is using knowledge sharing to enhance innovation and time to market.After a four-month pilot project, the company recently purchased a second installment of AskMe knowledge sharing software. The integration of the solution with the company’s largest intranet site, Innovation Net, will encourage greater employee collaboration and enable more consumer-driven innovation, according to a press release from AskMe. Innovation Net reaches 18,000 employees at Procter & Gamble in such departments as Research and Development, Engineering, Purchasing, Consumer and Market, Patent/Legal, and Business Information Systems.