By Elisabeth Horwitt
IntraNet, 2/17/97

Lockheed Martin Corp. Web architect Alan Fine has been through corporate mergers with and without the presence of an intranet. He has no doubt as to which scenario he prefers.

An employee at GE Aerospace when the company merged with RCA, Fine recalls it taking 'months and months' for people to get to know each other and start working as a single, cohesive unit. In contrast, when GE Aerospace, and later Loral Corp., became part of Lockheed Martin, people quickly acclimated themselves through use of the intranet.

'The floodgates opened, and people poured into [the corporation's internal Web],' Fine says.

Once on the intranet, called the Lockheed Martin Network, the newcomers found the information they needed to hit the ground running in their new corporate environment. Web content ranged from a central archive of corporate policies and procedures to profiles of Lockheed Martin businesses, including listings of major products and customers.

Indeed, the intranet has been a major facilitator in turning a loose confederation of some 80 businesses into a cohesive corporate unit that is greater than the sum of its parts, says Bill Buonanni, program manager for World Wide Web Initiatives at Lockheed Martin's Enterprise Information Systems (EIS) division, headquartered in Orlando, Fla. 'Lockheed Martin has gone through many mergers over the past few years, and the most important job for the intranet is to share information among these companies,' he adds.

Given that many Lockheed Martin businesses are former competitors, the potential is huge for leveraging product lines, development tools, information and people resources that overlap and dovetail, Buonanni says. First, however, businesses have to identify these redundant and synergistic efforts. And that's where the intranet comes into play.

An internal Web search engine has greatly aided the partnering process, according to managers at EIS. 'If I were building a satellite and looking for a particular type of mirror to put on it, for example, I could run a search on that product name and maybe find someone building that mirror,' Buonanni says. 'So I can order it internally instead of buying it from an outside vendor.'

Starting point

Maintaining consistent policies across all projects and businesses is particularly crucial for a government contractor, Buonanni explains. EIS was finding the job nightmarish, however, with documentation residing on a mainframe, in hard copy, on a publishing system and often on non-networked systems.

What's more, different versions of the same document existed in more than one spot, and it was nearly impossible to keep track of all the versions and who was responsible for maintaining them, Buonanni says.

EIS needed to convert the hodgepodge of documents into a universally formatted, centrally managed archive. It also needed to make the archive accessible from any desktop anywhere in the company. This second agenda item proved to be the catalyst for Lockheed Martin's purchase of a corporatewide Netscape Communications Corp. Navigator license and its implementation of an intranet infrastructure.

To a heterogeneous conglomerate such as Lockheed Martin, being able to use a single user interface across a mix of desktop operating systems translates into big cost savings, notes Neal Blan-chard, senior systems architect at the company.

Indeed, a growing number of users are asking EIS to reface legacy applications with a Navigator front end, says Bill Andiario, technical lead of World Wide Web Initiatives at EIS. That re-quest often follows after a business group sees EIS' cost analysis of right-sizing a mainframe application, he adds.

Replacing 3270 terminals with brow- sers is a lot less expensive than rewriting the application for a client/server environment, particularly since there are tools for translating 3270 datastreams into Web protocols, EIS staffers say.

EIS' rollout of the Policies & Pro-cedures system began in the spring of 1995 and went through the end of the year. Documents are organized hier-archically and linked via URLs, enabling a user looking for, say, a travel policy, to begin at the corporate level and drill down to sector- and then business-specific documents.

Converting the broad spectrum of document formats to HTML was the hairy part, Buonanni says. It took five people approximately one year to convert the untold numbers of corporate- and sector-level policy documents. Then EIS visited each business unit, giving HTML tutorials so people could convert their own business-specific documents. The group set up an HTML primer on the intranet so people could also get online help.

'We thought we were done, then the Loral merger came along,' Buonanni says, recalling the April 1996 deal. 'And there have been some smaller acquisitions, as well.'

Fortunately for EIS, the onslaught of mergers has slackened. This year, a task force of about three people is working to finish the Loral conversion.

The return on investment for the Policies & Procedures system has been enormous: 'It's in the ballpark of the 1,000% over three years that Netscape advertises,' Buonanni says.

More importantly, EIS and Lockheed Martin's technically savvy users quickly began taking advantage of the under-lying infrastructure to start building corporate resource- and information-sharing applications. 'What's nice [about the intranet] is that everyone can get at it, and it's inexpensive compared to other implementations,' Buonanni says.

One such application is Job Information Systems (JIS), a central job requisition system that allows employees to search through and apply for jobs available in the corporation.

Under the old system, in order 'to find out what jobs were available, you had to go to a book that was updated periodically and not very accurate,' Blanchard says.

JIS lets employees search a single, corporatewide job database based on criteria such as job type, location and salary range, Blanchard says. Users also can create and maintain resumes, apply for jobs and check the status of those positions online.

Developmental milestone

The browser provides the user interface and data presentation. At the functional layer is a Web server that sends Common Gateway Interface scripts written in Perl out to an Open Environment Corp. Entera remote procedure call middleware platform. Entera fetches the data from the third tier, an Oracle Corp. job requisition database. Perl scripts on the Web server reformat the data as a Web page to be downloaded to the client.

The implementation of JIS last spring represented a milestone for Lockheed Martin, Blanchard says. 'It demonstrated that we could create Web-enabled applications involving databases, not just document sharing,' he says.

Being a bleeding-edge user meant finding homegrown solutions to Web limitations that have since been addressed by vendors. Early on, for instance, Lockheed Martin intranet developers faced the challenge of maintaining state through multiple client/ server interactions, Blanchard says.

Now, however, a comparatively stable, functional and scalable infrastructure is in place. EIS one year ago formed Webserv.EIS, a group that focuses on providing Web services to the corporation and facilitating intranet projects. And users are coming up with a growing body of applications - many of them geared to cross-unit collaboration.

EIS itself now uses the intranet for the general purpose of 'keeping our virtual project teams tied together,' Fine says. A project team scattered across the country can use the Web to share documents, specifications, test plans and work status. A common, Web-based project file allows EIS to reuse lessons learned and things coming out of projects, he adds.

On the business front, a recently implemented intranet application enables different business and product groups to coordinate their presentations at major industry trade shows. For example, 20 units might be planning to show products at the Farnborough Air Show, a major industry conference, Buonanni says.

Users can call up the trade show home page and click on the Farnborough show, which lists all divisions attending, what products they plan to display and who is responsible for each. This enables different exhibitors within Lockheed Martin to minimize duplication of effort and possibly share costs on materials and facilities.

Also on the application's Web site is the layout and style all Lockheed Martin units will be using for their posters at the show. 'Business units can put in any graphic they want, but the style will be consistent,' Buonanni says.

The final result of the preshow networking: 'The corporation goes to a trade show as a unified whole,' he says. 'Instead of 20 different business units selling their own products, we are selling Lockheed Martin.'

Making the big move

'When you're starting out [building an intranet], it's OK to say, 'Joe's got a spare server, let's make that our Web server,'' says Bill Buonanni, program manager for World Wide Web Initiatives at EIS. But that haphazard approach only works so long, he notes.

At Lockheed Martin, management and administration in particular became crucial 'when the intranet became part of everyday jobs, supporting business-critical, production-level applications,' Buonanni says.

A mandate for WebServ.EIS' 30 employees is to ensure a stable underlying infrastructure for the intranet.

For example, WebServ.EIS wrote Web site maintenance policies that are similar to those followed by Internet service providers, Buonanni says. Rather than having hundreds of Web servers scattered around the company, WebServ.EIS will probably cluster five or six large servers in the data center with 24-by-7 coverage and backup, he explains.

In addition, WebServ.EIS has been drafting policies for authoring Web pages, developing templates for particular businesses and creating Web design guidelines, Buonanni says. It gets input from Web application developers through a forum called the Web Authors Guild.

WebServ.EIS' role is not only to control, but to encourage Web development. 'We're trying to enable more and more applications through a Web interface,' says Buonanni, pointing to the myriad time-keeping systems across Lockheed Martin. 'We're trying to come up with common Web-based systems, and save a lot of money.'

Making it tick

Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator was just coming into its own as the leading browser, so the company bought a corporate license in April 1995.

Netscape had no server product at the time, so the company went with a combination of Unix-based servers. Those servers are still around, but EIS is now pushing Netscape's Enterprise Server as the predominant, if not standard, corporate platform, says Bill Andiario, technical lead at EIS.

The explosion of Web tools and platforms has complicated things. EIS is now questioning whether to stay with Navigator, change to Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer or allow both, Andiario says.

In addition to Explorer, EIS is evaluating Microsoft's Internet Information Server and ActiveX.

Last month, EIS began supporting Open Text Corp.'s LiveLink spider and search engine. The product replaces a homegrown search engine that intranet applications have outgrown, Andiario says.

LiveLink will let users perform intuitive, keyword-based searches. For example, they can look for a travel policy document in the Policies & Procedures system by keying in 'travel,' 'policy' and a specific business such as Lockheed Martin Missiles & Space, Andiario says. Before, users had to navigate according to a strict hierarchy, starting at the corporate level.

Right now, EIS is fine-tuning the server architecture. It's replacing a group of small, application-specific servers with high-end Web, database and development platforms, says Bill Buonanni, program manager for World Wide Web Initiatives at EIS. The organization spent $140,000 last year on server systems, upgrades and software.