Our first look at Xerox Back to the IntraNet page

By Beth Schultz
Network World, 2/23/98

If the Xerox-Wide Web (XWW) is nothing else, it's a victim of its own success.

Since we last visited XWW in July 1996, the number of intranet users has doubled to more than 46,000, applications have become increasingly interactive, and the enterprise infrastructure has been fortified to handle the extra network load.

Intranet developers, it seems, have more than overcome the cultural hurdle that had loomed before them as they rolled out this new communications medium (IntraNet, July 1996, page 35). "We wanted to democratize information, and we've done that. We wanted to grow this into a place for Xerox people to go, to come into the office and check, and we've done that,'' says Cindy Casselman, who had been manager of strategic communications and intranet development until Feb.1, when she began an 18-month fast-track program with the head of advanced technology. Her work on XWW led to this opportunity, which is typically reserved for engineers.

While accomplishing most early goals, the intranet team has failed to meet one of its chief objectives: to elevate responsibility and, perhaps more importantly, funding for XWW to a corporate, rather than departmental, level. The corporate communications department has been driving intranet development but does not have any real authority. "We have a major crying need right now for a formal steering committee," Casselman says.

While short of Casselman's ultimate desire, a recent change is a step in the right direction. The information management (IM) department just last month established an Office of the Intranet. After dismissing intranet application development for more than a year, the IM department now has embraced Web technology.

The office is run by intranet team member David Woodruff - actually, the Office of the Intranet and Woodruff are one and the same. "It's just me, at least until I come up with specific plans and deliverables,'' he says.

Woodruff will create guidelines, policies and procedures for intranet sites and will advise people on the technology and tools they'll need to do things on XWW. He also plans on building application cost models.

Until this move, intranet developers have been frustrated by IM's, as well as corporate management's, lack of commitment to XWW. The intranet team lost a big IT advocate when Malcolm Kirby, who had been an IM manager, left the company in July 1997. Casselman, Kirby and Richard Beach, a Xerox scientist, had envisioned and then set about building an internal Web well before the term "intranet'' thrust itself upon corporate America.

It's not that Woodruff, who succeeded Kirby on the team, isn't a believer. It's just that his boss wasn't an ardent intranet backer, so the group lost its strong IT hook.

"From a technological standpoint, a little more than a year ago IM considered the intranet a minor way people might communicate,'' Woodruff says.

Rather than rolling out Web-based applications or retrofitting legacy applications with browser access, IM devoted its energies to infrastructure-related issues. These efforts centered on users' needs to access and download information from the Internet.

"We changed our entire structure in terms of the way people get things from the outside world,'' Woodruff says. The company added more outside connections, pumped up bandwidth on some circuits, upgraded to higher speed routers, built a 100M bit/sec Ethernet "demilitarized zone'' and installed firewalls. "Our network used to represent 50% of the latency of getting to a site outside. Now it represents only 1% of the delay,'' Woodruff says.

As important as fortifying the network has been, it came at the expense of XWW, the intranet team says.

But now, while IM continues building the infrastructure, it is embracing the Web. Its newfound commitment centers on the realization that a tremendous, but unspecified, amount of money will be saved with the intranet compared to its traditional client/ server architecture, Woodruff says.

Establishment of an Office of the Intranet coincides with IT's big push to Web-enable everything in 1998, Woodruff says. He explains IM's vision as such: "By the millennium, if you don't turn on your e-mail and browser when you walk into your office, then we should take away your computer.''

Woodruff says he doesn't expect Xerox employees to resist IM's new mandate. XWW is generating a lot of excitement, he adds, citing as an example casual conversations he's had with fellow employees. "When I fly to Stamford, [Conn.], people on the van out to Xerox headquarters talk about what great things they've found on our Web - without knowing that I'm involved with it. All anyone used to talk about was the Knicks.''

This may be attributable to the fact that XWW developers have shifted their focus from workgroup- to division-level applications. "We've gone from working with groups of 100 to 200 people to groups of 5,000 or so,'' Woodruff says.

Simultaneously, the status quo has moved from electronic publishing to collaborative communications, Woodruff says. The transition is simple and painless given that employees have ready access to DocuShare, Xerox's Web-enabled document management and group collaboration software.

IM, however, will need to increase its educational efforts and provide better stepping stones for groups heading toward the intranet. That's why creating an Office of the Intranet became an imperative, Woodruff says.

And, Woodruff emphasizes, XWW still needs the big executive-level buy-in. "Web-enabling everything is an IM vision; we're still pushing for a corporate champion.''

Why will Woodruff keep trumpeting this cause? Because, he says, it's difficult getting funding for XWW-related projects despite the fact that the intranet has become an essential tool for most employees.

Intranet developers, naturally, would like XWW to become an indispensable tool for all employees. Although on average, high acceptance of the intranet is not consistent across divisions. "In some areas of Xerox, the intranet is both strategic and tactical, but in others, it's being completely ignored,'' Casselman explains.

A corporate mandate would go a long away in accomplishing this goal. Top executives see how useful the intranet is and how successful the team has been and they're satisfied. "But we know it could be used even more productively and powerfully if there was a centralized function providing some value,'' Casselman says.

And, when it comes to creating content at the divisional level, Woodruff says, oftentimes it's difficult justifying the expenditure. What's more, he adds, it's hard to deliver the infrastructure out to remote areas.

Despite continued frustration with getting the intranet effort elevated, Casselman has no doubt that one day intranet development will become a centralized function. Electronic commerce, she says, will force the issue.

"I believe that e-commerce is not just about interfacing with your customer and not just about the Internet - it has to have back-office support. So I think it's only a matter of time before people will say, 'Wow! Look at all the things we need to do in the back office, on the intranet!' "