Companies that are best at controlling health care costs are more likely than their poorer performing counterparts to offer multifaceted Internet tools that help employees model health care options, a study by Watson Wyatt and the National Business Group on Health has found (see Internet Tools Can Encourage Appropriate Health Care Decisions).

• 58% of the 585 companies surveyed provide intranet/Internet resources that allow employees to compare health care insurance options side by side
• Companies that are best at controlling costs offer additional intranet/Internet tools and are…
• 38% more likely to provide quality comparison tools and
• 36% more likely to provide tools to model the tax impact of health care decisions, such as signing up for a flexible spending account. 
• While only a small number of companies offer intranet/Internet resources for provider pricing, those best at controlling costs are 108% more likely to do so.

Read Internet Tools Can Encourage Appropriate Health Care Decisions

For more intranet news visit www.IntranetReport.com

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

There exists a huge list of applications that originated on the Internet that have migrated to the intranet: search, content management, surveys, portals, wikis, blogs, podcasts, etc.  The reverse – applications migrating from intranet to Internet – is far more rare.

Sean McGrath of ITworld.com hypothesizes the reasons for the asymmetric flow of applications and why capitalizing on intranet investments for commercial resale is a tough hill (see The Asymmetric Web):

"Then came a period when Intranets were common and all of a sudden, software companies were not only hosting their own applications online but also making them available for deployment on intranets for a suitable fee. I would argue that part of the (fading) attraction of a big application framework such as, say, J2EE, was the idea that once developed as a J2EE webapp, an application can be hosted locally in exactly the same way as it is hosted on the Web.

Then began an awful period - which continues to this day, sadly -- of companies developing intranet applications and then concluding, erroneously, that the application can be deployed on the Web by just flicking the proverbial switch. There is an important asymmetry here between intranets and the internet. Applications can scale downwards - from internet to intranet - easily but the reverse direction - from intranet to internet - is rarely simple and often impossible. Millions of users, flash flood characteristics[1], five nines availability[2] are just some of the reasons (collectively referred to as "non-functional" requirements) why this asymmetry exists."

There are a few applications that originated inside the enterprise that have made it onto the commercial web such as financial systems (e.g. QuickBooks), customer relationship management (e.g. SalesForce.com), and others. Perhaps the biggest grand-daddy enterprise application moving to the Internet is electronic health records (see EHR enhances the doctor-patient relationship  and The business case for healthcare technology investment ).

The point though is simple: don’t develop intranet applications based on a business case of reselling that application on the Internet! An intranet application has a very defined focus – serving employees.

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

“Consider search. Can you instantly find everything -- at company, departmental, or workgroup scope -- that you’re allowed to see? I thought not,” asks Jon Udell in his InfoWorld article Reinventing the intranet.

“It ought to be the other way around. Inside the enterprise, teams, tasks, products, and services define metadata vocabularies that the Internet search giants would kill for. Exploiting those vocabularies to deliver search results that are better than what’s available on the open Web is low-hanging fruit. As we roll out SOAs that route well-formed messages through a fabric of intermediaries, it’ll get even easier. What Verizon’s CIO calls “Googling the enterprise” should be the rule, not the exception.”

Udell cites the advantages of social media – such as social bookmarking (see Social bookmarking the intranet) – for improving the total value and efficiency of the corporate intranet.

Check-out the recommended Ning a free online service for “cloning, customizing and sharing Social Web Apps.” This is an online service that allows you to create your own applications such as a blog tool, photo sharing tool, or ratings site – either from scratch or from ‘cloning’ another application already created on the Ning network. There are a couple of other options too.

Ning is the new pet of Netscape co-founder Marc Andreessen. I’m not entirely floored by this site or the clone tools but I’m very intrigued about the potential and possibilities. Though I think the potential for the intranet is far less limited given that Ning is an ASP model that will depend on advertising revenue. In the meantime, I think Ning will more appeal to the My Space audience which is typically a lot lower than IntranetBlog.com’s audience.

RELATED READING:

Social bookmarking the intranet

Bill Gates announced at the CEO Summit the latest and greatest intranet offers namely Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 and Windows Live Search.

• Windows Live Search has  the ability to search by:
• file shares
• SharePoint sites
• Websites
• exchange public folders
• lotus notes databases
• customer repositories

The last two options are fascinating. Microsoft knows that a lot of companies use Lotus Notes and not SharePoint. But MS wants a piece of the Lotus pie.

Customer repositories mean customer databases and CRM systems. The MS octopus tentacles are reaching further

For example, new capabilities in Windows Live Search will provide a single point of entry and user interface to unify multiple search solutions. In addition, enhancements to Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will enable people to quickly connect with other people or subject matter experts and will add options that make search capabilities available to customers that might not be able to implement a full collaboration or portal solution.

Live Search

Rich filtering and customizable controls allow users to personalize their Live Search.

For example, through a single UI, information workers will actually be able to choose when and where to search based on multiple toolbars and query refinement options. Using natural search terms, Windows Live Search can return results in whatever way makes most sense to each information worker – inline, grouped by category, etc. Powerful previews and visualizations of the data can then help people more quickly determine what action to take.

 

To illustrate, a sales representative trying to find information about a customer she plans to visit could gather the needed data by accessing Office SharePoint Server 2007, initiating a search and pulling business data from a Siebel application in addition to gathering data off her desktop using Windows Desktop Search. However, the same search could be performed from within Windows Live Search to produce all of the relevant desktop, e-mail, intranet and Internet results. Furthermore, when the sales representative clicks through the results, she will see they are actually displayed from that same window. Windows Live Search displays full results without navigating away or opening additional applications.

According to IDC estimates, the expense of not finding the information needed costs an organization employing 1,000 knowledge workers is about US$5.3 million per year. While several major vendors have invested heavily in search across the Internet, computer desktops and company intranets, the search is ultimately over once the content is found.

Microsoft doesn’t view search as a standalone activity or the end goal, but rather a means to a greater purpose of finding the information a person needs to accomplish a specific task. The fact is, merely searching for and finding information isn’t useful by itself. People must be able to create, find, use and share information. More specifically:

• Create: Give people the software tools to capture and report about their knowledge and projects.
• Find: Improve individual and organizational productivity by quickly, seamlessly and securely connecting people to relevant information and expertise.
• Use: Enable people to easily organize and manage information so they can effectively analyze and apply the data to create or do something new.
• Share: Achieve greater business success by allowing people to clearly communicate and quickly share information with other people.

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, People and Expertise Location

Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 will unify information management capabilities such as portals and collaboration, enterprise content management and forms, enterprise project management, and business intelligence. In addition to helping people share information, enterprise search is also a core area of investment with enhancements in relevancy, security and scalability. The upcoming release will provide powerful new information access and management tools through the Business Data Catalog, which allows people to search for structured data in line of business applications like SAP and Siebel.

One of the key technical challenges that companies face today is identifying individuals with key undocumented relationships or expertise and tapping into it. The U.S. will soon face the largest wave of exiting information workers as the baby boomers begin their retirement years. In fact, it has been estimated that in the next seven years as many as 25 million employees will exit the workforce. When they leave, the information and relationships that they’ve built over their careers leaves with them.

Office SharePoint Server 2007 adds a new dedicated Search Center tab for searching for people. This allows customers to connect with others in new ways by grouping people search results by "social distance." In addition, by leveraging the power of Active Directory, information workers can refine their people searches by department and job title.

A new add-on called Knowledge Network for Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007, expected to be available with the 2007 Microsoft Office system later this year, will further extend people and expertise search capabilities. Knowledge Network for SharePoint Server 2007 creates an automated profile that each user reviews before publishing to a server, making it easy to identify people by their undocumented knowledge and relationships.

For instance, to find someone in an organization with a specific skill, a person could enter search terms such as “C# programmer” and then refine the search by job title and department to find the appropriate levels of expertise. Information workers can even initiate a "brokered" introduction that leverages relationships across the organization to connect with other people by using the "Find People Who Know this Person" feature. The results then show the shortest path to a person by ‘social distance.’

Watch the Bill Gates webcast of this announcement: http://www.microsoft.com/events/executives/billgates.mspx

Lotus is still a very prevalent and common intranet platform. In fact, it might be the most common platform in a highly fractured marketplace that includes custom built, portal products, content management systems, e-commerce engines, etc.

John Roling has written a decent article on open source options for those that use Lotus-Domino or are considering it as a new intranet platform:

In addition to creating custom applications yourself (which you can always do) you can easily leverage the work that has gone on in the Notes and Domino open-source community.

OpenNTF.org is an online community of open-source Lotus Notes and Domino programmers. Their projects cover almost every aspect of Notes and Domino-based intranet functionality you may be looking for. I'll introduce you to a few of the projects here today, and in the coming months I'll go into more detail on what some of the individual applications can do for you and your company.

John cites a number of key applications up for grabs including:

• DominoWiki - wiki solution
• domBulletin - bulletin-board solution
• Blogsphere - blogging template

I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan of Domino as an intranet or portal platform, but am hugely respectful of Lotus as collaborative work tool. Though, I give IBM credit: the move towards open source is very worthwhile for Domino. Domino however still has a huge uphill battle…

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Nearly two years since InfoWorld proclaimed 2004 the “Year of the Enterprise Wiki,” wiki technology is still a nascent, but promising addition to most enterprise intranets.

Few organizations use wikis, though they are becoming more common place.

Helping the wiki increase in popularity is no doubt the resemblance to and the blurring of the line that separates this budding technology from the content management system (CMS).

“A wiki is a collaborative website where users can create and edit pages. Wikis fall conceptually under the broad concept of content management, and you could certainly use your existing CMS to create a wiki-like site,” writes consultant Mark Choate in What makes an enterprise wiki? “However, wikis bring unique characteristics that differentiate them from a run-of-the-mill content management systems.”