By Beth Schultz
IntraNet, 3/24/97

Building an intranet while your company is downsizing - or rightsizing, as the euphemism would have it - can be rather dicey.

It's hard enough to collect Web content in the best of times. Imagine the challenge when individual content owners - not to mention whole departments or even business units - might disappear overnight. Add to that the difficulty of pumping up enthusiasm and getting employees to provide fresh material when their futures are uncertain.

The intranet development team at Westinghouse Electric Corp. knows these challenges well. Since Westinghouse formally launched its intranet initiative at the close of 1995, the corporation has either sold or spun off a number of business units. Those efforts culminated this past November when Westinghouse announced plans to separate into two companies.

Westinghouse would like to split its broadcasting and industrial businesses. It's awaiting federal regulatory approval for these plans.

The organizational gyrations slowed intranet development, says Ken Wagle, manager of research and development at Source W, the Westinghouse business responsible for developing intranet content.

Yet Westinghouse executives are looking to the intranet for stability and consistency during the corporation's transformation. They have mandated that the company's intranet home page comes up by default when employees turn on their computers, Wagle says. 'That's where they want employees to begin finding their information.'

On Nov. 13, 1996, for instance, browser-enabled employees who logged on could find the information about the latest Westinghouse makeover plans. A click on the prominently placed 'Separation Announcement' button provided details about the plan to split the industrial and broadcasting businesses.

But Westinghouse executives see the intranet as more than just a basic information delivery vehicle. They view the intranet as a strategic asset: It gives Westinghouse a way to retain knowledge and expertise.

'Through the restructuring efforts, people with years and years of knowledge end up in different roles, or not with the company at all,' says Terri Marts, managing director of Source W. 'The intranet provides an archive of valuable information we can continue to draw and build upon.'

The intranet, called Westinghouse Info Web, is part Marts' brainchild. A longtime manager at Westinghouse, Marts was a member of a corporate team charged with figuring out how to bring in state-of-the-art hardware, software and network technology and to help the corporation restructure and become more efficient.

One of the team's recommendations was that business units streamline publishing processes. Marts took on that responsibility for Source W, which was providing graphics, audio-visual and printing services to Westing-house. 'I was asked to take on this business and learn more about the technologies that were available for rapid publishing and distribution of information,' Marts says.

The Internet proved inspirational.

'I came up with this idea of an information web and thought it would be a way we could take the information we already had in digital form and make it available throughout the corporation,' she says.

In early November 1995, Marts met with an IS manager to discuss her plans. As it turns out, IS also had identified the need for this type of information publishing system and already had formed focus groups to help it gauge interest. 'Terri had her vision, and we serendipitously found that IS had the same idea. This confirmed her concept,' says Jerry Boyle, a creative producer with Source W.

Source W and IS decided to partner on the intranet project. As luck would have it, IS had just begun a corporate-wide upgrade to TCP/IP as part of the effort that included migration to bring new technology to Westinghouse. And Source W was looking for a way to get better use out of the digital files it had been creating for various corporate projects.

'We decided if we do the central infrastructure piece, and have Source W do the fit-and-finish pieces, then that would enable the creation of local pages with less decision making about what the intranet should look like,' says Dennis Kelly, lead systems analyst in Westinghouse's IS department.

In late November, Source W and IS delivered a proposal to the chairman and chief executive officer, the controller and the chief information officer. The executives almost immediately gave them the go-ahead. They recognized Westinghouse Info Web would make it easier to find information, result in cost reductions and help usher in the new corporate culture for which they were striving, Marts says.

'The culture of Westinghouse was business unit-oriented and focused on departmental needs, with systems built to control a large corporation. We want to become a small, lean, agile company with collaboration across many functions and units,' she explains.

To help Westinghouse break out of its traditional mold, the first thing the intranet team did was blur the departmental lines, Marts says. Employees won't find won't Human Resources or Finance or Corporate Communications buttons on Info Web. Instead, content has been categorized into Corporate Information, Policies & Procedures, Corporate Services and Employee Services segments.

If a Westinghouse team is researching a business opportunity in a country in which it hasn't yet worked, for example, it would need to check on that country's environmental policies. Previously, that sort of information required wading through various documents maintained by the environmental affairs department. Now the team heads to the Policies & Procedures site and conducts an online search for the information.

To meet their goal of getting Westinghouse Info Web up by April 1996, intranet team members met with about 20 or so departments to help them identify potential uses. The departments were receptive to the plans and relatively excited about this new opportunity, says Alexis Joseph, who, as the Source W account representative for Westinghouse, was involved in those presentations.

Despite the changing climate at Westinghouse, Joseph attributes the departments' willingness, and in some cases eagerness, to participate in large part to a letter they had received from the executive management team asking them to contribute to the effort. 'It's great to have a high-level buy-in that's communicated downward,' Boyle adds.

The departments also had another incentive for early intranet involvement: IS was picking up the cost of having Source W convert documents to Web-ready formats during the rollout. Its goal was to get the departments involved, then turn over creation of simple, static Web pages to department content providers. Toward that end, IS is training authors on Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Assistant and giving them access to the folders on the intranet in which their documents reside. Content providers, then, are responsible for keeping information accurate and up to date.

The goal is to get virtually everyone - from secretaries on up - involved in the process. 'With the downsizing, section managers are busy taking on more responsibility. They'll need help with the content,' Wagle says.

When content providers or even whole departments disappear as part of rightsizing, the intranet team tries to get someone to take charge of the information or take it off the Web, says Lee Averbeck, a technician at Source W. The team encountered this problem earlier this year, for example, when the corporate library was eliminated. The team was able to transfer responsibility for the documents that library had posted on the Web to one of the business unit's technical libraries.

As of last count, which occurred around the time activity began tapering off because of the separation announcement, Source W had put up approximately 500 HTML pages and 75 portable document format (PDF) files on the intranet, Averbeck says. Many PDF files, he notes, account for hundreds and hundreds of Web pages.

And now activity is starting to increase. 'It's kicking up again. Everybody's rethinking how to use the intranet,' Joseph says.

And now activity is starting to increase. 'It's kicking up again. Everybody's rethinking how to use the intranet,' Joseph says.

For example, three groups recently began posting weekly newsletters on Westinghouse Info Web. Team members expect this to renew interest in and increase traffic on, Westinghouse Info Web as other departments follow suit.

Source W and the IS department expects the intranet's nature to shift a bit this year as they attempt to make Westinghouse Info Web more than just a place to publish static information. 'We need to concentrate on applications that will save money, like processing forms, and on making the intranet more dynamic, through database access,' says Gary Ellis, an of corporate engineering manager at Westinghouse.

The trick, Kelly notes, will be figuring out what applications are the good ones and to which databases to connect. 'A lot of people have applications they'd like to try on the intranet,' he says, 'but given Westinghouse's current situation, we want to make sure there's business value in what we do.'

Juggling existing files

Source W's tool of choice is Acrobat from Adobe Systems, Inc. (www.adobe.com/prodindex/main.html). Using this software, content developers took hundreds of existing digital files, converted them to Adobe PDF and posted them on the Web. PDF keeps the original file's formatting - graphics, fonts and color, for example - intact.

'We use Adobe Acrobat for delivering charts, brochures, manuals and printed pieces because of design considerations or if electronic files are available,' says Joe Small, advanced technology group lead at Source W in Pittsburgh.

The possibilities seem endless. 'We've used Acrobat to deliver the Westinghouse annual report, organizational charts, community service award nomination forms, brochures, employee gift matching forms and ethics manuals in multiple languages, to name a few,' Small says.

Employees get the Acrobat plug-in as part of the standard desktop. This means, for instance, that a salesperson in the field can dial in to the Westinghouse Info Web, call up data sheets, product brochures and other documents and have them printed on-site. Customers will see exactly what they previously might have waited a week or so to get in the mail.

Source W would like to start integrating the forms capabilities available in Acrobat 3.0 to make the intranet more interactive. Human Resources, for example, could take advantage of the forms capability to allow online benefits enrollment. For now, employees have to print the forms presented to them on the intranet and mail or fax them to the appropriate destination.

To the state of the art

Westinghouse launched that effort, called the Strategic Information Technology Initiative (SITI), as part of a corporate reengineering plan devised in late 1995.

Through SITI, Westinghouse is moving from a mixed Ether-net and token-ring NetWare environment to an all-Ethernet, TCP/IP- and Windows NT server-based switched infrastructure, says Gary Ellis, manager or corporate engineering at Westinghouse. The standard desktop gets Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT or 95 and Office95 suite, Netscape Communica-tions Corp.'s Navigator 2.0 browser and Adobe Systems, Inc.'s reader for portable document format files.

Specifically for the intranet, Westinghouse uses Netscape's Commerce Server Version 1.3.

It runs the software on a multi-purpose IBM RISC System/6000 SP system. 'During the daylight hours, it's concentrated on browser and newsgroup functions.

In the depths of the night, it's doing backup,' says Dennis Kelly, lead systems analyst at Westinghouse.

IS also has a few specific-purpose Web servers, Kelly says. One of those servers, for example, delivers personal database information to human resources managers for administrative tasks.

Westinghouse plans to wrap up the rollout this year.