By Mark Gibbs
Network World, 4/27/98

"When I use a word,'' Humpty Dumpty said, in a rather scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean - neither more nor less.'' - Lewis Carroll, Through the Looking Glass

Dustbinizing.'' I just made up the word. And like Humpty Dumpty, I get to choose what it means. I coined the word to describe how intranets can turn into digital dustbins. When an intranet is dustbinized, it has turned into a place for storing collected data about operations. It is not being used as a strategic tool for acquiring knowledge about business.

Don't get me wrong: Collecting data matters - in the first phase of intranet development. This phase is about educating the organization, building intranet infrastructure, determining goals and testing your theories.

By the second phase, when your intranet is running as part of day-to-day operations, the collected data and what is done with it becomes increasingly important. In this phase, you can find the telltale signs of dustbinizing by looking in the file system and Web server access logs. There you'll discover that new content is constantly being added, but is hardly used. And you'll find scores of documents that rarely come up in searches.

Of course, there will always be a core of corporate content that changes slowly and is accessed infrequently. But that content should be a mere blip compared to the data needed for doing business. That's not to say that all of this new, disregarded content will remain useless - it may have relevance to future decisions and strategies. But if the patterns of use don't change continuously, if the same files are being used over and over again and the new content is always ignored, the chances are that your intranet is dustbinizing.

The prime reason for this phenomenon is that the intranet's contents aren't relevant to the organization's core objectives. Unless you can integrate your intranet with your business processes, you'll be accumulating business data - stuff that is easy to get - rather than applying that data to improve business - something that is difficult to do.

You see, if your intranet doesn't reflect your organization's business, it is really only a glorified filing cabinet. So you've got to build your business into your intranet.

And here lies one of the great challenges: How does your business actually function? I can guarantee that most of you don't really know. Sure, you know the high-level work flow, but how familiar are you with the grounds on which a thousand low-level but vital decisions are made?

Revealing these grounds is astonishingly difficult. Witness how tough it is to get groupware running successfully. Few companies have found groupware, such as Lotus Notes, to provide the total business solution for which they had hoped.

What these companies wanted was a system for doing business better. They wanted to reduce costs, prevent errors and understand the details of their business operations. In effect, they wanted to embody their organizational expertise in software.

Dig a little deeper and you'll find that Lotus Notes could do the job, but was too demanding. With Notes, you've got to analyze in detail how you do business, and we know that is really, really hard to do. You must then translate all of the business processes into the Notes model, and then rebuild your business around the use of Notes. There's no room for leaving part of your business outside of Notes. Do that, and the payoff is reduced dramatically.

The result of a less-than-complete business solution using Notes (or any other groupware product) is that the system soon loses relevance to the organization as a whole. Groupware eventually becomes a glorified e-mail or bulletin board service.

On the other hand, without much fuss, intranets give you a quick way of building a data warehouse that reflects your business processes. You don't have to find a new way of doing business.

But if that data is to be relevant to how you operate, you must plan to collect it directly from business processes - it must be "live'' data. The place to start is wherever you make money, and that, typically, means with the sales process.

You've got to tie the core sales processes into your intranet so they generate content for it. For example, information on customer orders needs to be generally available. Then, if marketing wants to promote a product, it can look at the history of buying patterns and create its promotion from there. Once you've accomplished that with sales, move onto other parts of the company until all processes are reflected on the intranet.

I'll bet that over the next few months, many intranets will gain a huge amount of more-or-less real-time content because of the huge benefits that come from making business processes visible. We talk about intranets as a common infrastructure that allows organizations to manage their business information. But unless that information is derived from hour-to-hour business data, it has considerably reduced value and your intranet just fills up with junk.

Even worse, writers start making up words such as dustbinizing.

Gibbs can be reached at imcolumn@gibbs.com or (800) 622-1108, Ext. 7504.