By Beth Schultz
IntraNet, 4/21/97

3M, the master of adhesives, is stuck on Web technology.

And that's good, because when 3Mers put their minds to something, positive results tend to happen. Witness those ubiquitous Post-it Notes, born of one employee's tinkering with funky, nonbinding adhesives and another's wish for sticky bookmarks for his hymnal.

The Post-it note story is just one of many 3Mers tell of innovations spawned by the company's encouragement of experimentation and creativity. Company executives expect each division to generate one-quarter of annual sales from products and services that are no more than five years old. Technical people are actively encouraged to spend up to 15% of their time on projects of their own choosing.

More than the grind

3M did not officially back the effort, but informally sanctioned the work through the 15% rule, McGaffigan says. The team, which deliberately avoided the words "intranet" and "Notes" when it named its effort the Corporate Information Sharing Standards (CISS) project, ascertained early on that Internet technology would play a key role.

But the team knew 3M's thousands of Lotus Development Corp. Notes seats and terminal-based desktops using IBM's PROFS/Office-Vision weren't going away. So it had to find a method for providing this diverse universe with a way to access information at the click of a button.

The CISS team figured publishers ultimately would have to be able to post information on Gopher, Notes or Web servers to accommodate the mixed environment. IT would help them figure out the right tool, develop a menu structure that provided visibility for their information and support their server free of charge, McGaffigan says.

So the CISS team, comprising individuals from the corporate marketing and public affairs and IT departments, began a step-by-step approach to building this all-encompassing corporate Web. A lot of the team's energy, in fact, has focused on bringing the company's large Notes population onto the intranet.

Bringing on Notes

For example, a communications newsletter can be created in Notes to take advantage of the document management capabilities. Then, using InterNotes, it can be copied to a Web server so a broader audience can look at it.

Some Notes databases from corporate marketing and public affairs already have been published on the Web and others have been targeted, says Mary Junker, CISS team member and office systems supervisor for 3M corporate marketing and public affairs.

But when it comes to really integrating Notes and the intranet, the CISS team is counting on Domino 1.5, which essentially is an HTTP server that runs on a Notes server. It also allows Web users without Notes to get real-time access to those databases and participate in discussions.

Because Domino 1.5 requires Notes 4.5, each of the 22,000 Notes employees will receive that upgrade by year-end, McGaffigan says. And that means they'll get access to the intranet because Notes 4.5 comes with a built-in Web browser.

"Domino can be a big way for 3M to move our intranet forward aggressively," McGaffigan says.

A potential downside is confusion for publishers. Do they stick with Notes or publish on a Web server? The IT de-partment helps publishers grapple with this and other technology decisions. If they have proprietary information, for example, they'll need to publish in the more secure Notes environment, McGaffigan says.

Once publishers have determined the intranet is the place for them, they head to a special group within 3M's marketing organization for additional guidance. The year-old group, called the Communications Resource Network (CRN), recommends tools and helps prototype the sites and test applications.

3Mers have had plenty of time to warm up to the idea of an internal Web, given that the CISS team launched the first corporate intranet site in 1995. Called the 3M Gopher Hole, it provided employees a common online location for getting at internal information.

"We took all the corporate information that was in the PROFS environment and gave people a view to it through text [Gopher] browsers. It was very simple, but we got incredible response because people could access information they never could before," McGaffigan says.

Down a Gopher Hole

"There were three different paths for getting to the same information, so it was a hard environment to administer," says Joseph Payne, an Internet services specialist with 3M Information Tech-

nology in St. Paul, Minn., and a CISS team member.

"Just putting the data in a Gopher hole, and providing a simple client to access that database, meant a lot timewise and moneywise. We offered the convenience of sharing information and a real way of saving money for the corporation without a loss in communications," Payne says.

"This was our first success story," McGaffigan adds. "It had high visibility so everybody could see its worth."

JIS still resides in the Gopher environment of VM servers, but 3Mers can get to it through a Web interface now too, Payne says. "It remains by far and away the most popular site."

Going graphical

and VM platforms; the Internal Information site was the first to be based on Web servers.

Even with the addition of the Web servers, the intranet was simple, if not boring, in appearance - but with good reason, McGaffigan says. The CISS team did not want to isolate users who had text browsers by adding graphics those users would not be able to see, she says.

The 36,000 employees using PROFS/ OfficeVision and the 8,600 3Mers with Digital's All-in-1 software probably appreciate that logic. They can use their text browsers - Charlotte and Lynx, respectively - to click on hyperlinks that take users to information hosted on the MVS, VM and now Web servers. Likewise, users with Web browsers can tap into information on the Web servers or the MVS and VM machines, McGaffigan explains.

Not that the users really knew or cared where the information was stored, CISS team members say. The important thing was they could easily get their hands on information previously un-available to them.

3Mers appreciated the quick information access, but they told the CISS team they wanted the intranet to be more dynamic. So a scant six months later, the CISS team launched its third corporate site. That site, called 3M Frontier, greets employees with hot news items and links to various other sites.

This iteration is a bit brighter than its predecessors, but still relies more on text hyperlinks rather than jazzy icons that only those users with graphical browsers would be able to see.

While the CISS team has been improving the corporate site, it also has been marketing the intranet throughout 3M. Interest is not a problem, CISS team members say.

The CRN prototype group has at least a dozen intranet projects in progress, says David Mickelson, technology project leader for the CRN and a CISS team member. Corporate marketing and human resources are readying big internal Web sites, but there are a number of smaller sites in the works too, he adds.

To keep some semblance of order as the 3M intranet grows, the CISS team has established a three-tier structure for the corporate Web. Sites are categorized as personal, business unit or enterprise. Personal pages are posted by individuals for publishing business-related information such as quarterly reports or project status. Managers can access these sites and use the information to keep track of departmental activity.

Business-unit pages are owned by department managers, who use these sites to post documents all their staffers need to see.

Enterprise pages comprise the 92 top-level sites directly accessible via the Frontier pages maintained by the CISS team, Junker says. Corporate marketing, for example, has an enterprise site for posting documents such as the annual report, environmental brochures and information on community programs. Another enterprise site provides details about the standard desktop tools em-ployees now get.

Anyone who registers a site will require a manager's signature, a designated Webmaster and a separate infomaster, McGaffigan says. Webmasters are the technical people handling the site and the infomasters are those 3Mers responsible for the content. Then, if something goes awry, CISS team members know where to turn.The team has always relied on Webmasters, but only recently began using the infomaster designation. "The CISS committee can't be expected to know what's up-to-date - that's the infomasters' task," Junker says.

Personal evolution

That didn't happen for McGaffigan until about three years into the CISS initiative. As of May 1996, she shed her workaday responsibilities so she could focus on developing the corporate Web.

The decision to relieve McGaffigan of her regular IT job was like a neon sign flashing top-level acknowledgement of the internal Web's importance.

"Management has a strong belief that this is goodness. It's looking at how to make the intranet pervasive throughout 3M, especially for application-based, legacy, transaction-oriented systems," says Norman Hickel, manager of Internet and marketing applications at 3M Information Technology.

Ultimately, 3M expects to extend its intranet to partners and customers. "There's simply no question about this - management expects us to get there."

The CISS team has its work cut out. It's got to move Frontier from the static publishing platform it primarily is today to a fully interactive, dynamic environment. No doubt that will take much of the same gumption 3M developers have used for years to get innovative products such as masking tape and Scotchgard Fabric Protector to market.