By Paul Korzeniowski
Network World, 7/27/98

For Prudential Insurance Co. of America, Inc., the intranet began by taking Notes.

It all started in the summer of 1996, when Prudential decided to replace its IBM mainframe e-mail system, Professional Office System (PROFS), with Lotus Development Corp.'s Notes. Corporatewide messaging was the sole intent.

Fortuitously, while Prudential was deploying its new messaging infrastructure, Lotus began articulating its Web strategy. It soon became clear that the company would be able to build an intranet on top of Lotus Notes.

The intranet may have been an afterthought, but it isn't any longer. As of the last count, Prudential has developed more than two dozen applications for the intranet. The applications improve internal communications and lower operating costs. One business unit, for example, will save $100,000 annually because it no longer prints a monthly employee newsletter.

A CHAIN OF INFORMATION OFFICERS
Building the intranet applications meant finding a middle ground between the autonomy desired by Prudential's six business units and the centralized approach needed for a common computing infrastructure. Prudential has long had a federated organizational model in which each line of business has a chief information officer who oversees its computers and software. These CIOs report to a corporate CIO, who is responsible for the corporate network and sets Prudential's technological direction by establishing companywide standards.

Despite this structure, the business units - Prudential Insurance, Prudential Investments, Prudential HealthCare, Prudential Securities and a diversified group that comprises Prudential Real Estate and Prudential Bank - still operated autonomously. This is partly because of PROFS, which made it difficult for employees at different units to share information easily.

But increasingly, the company saw its competitive advantage stemming from the business units' ability to do just that. If the various business units could readily exchange customer profiles, it would become possible for a telemarketing rep to pitch a Prudential Insurance customer in good standing on a new Prudential health plan, for example.

"Historically, we could have had several connections to a customer and never even known," says David Marden, a systems technical specialist at Prudential in Roseland, N.J.

PROFS had to go, but Prudential could keep its close working relationship with IBM by going with much more flexible Lotus Notes messaging. The company started to deploy Notes 4.1 servers running on PCs with Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system.

Ironically, installing the Notes servers was simpler than upgrading desktop computers, which in many cases were old 386 or 486 PCs running Windows 3.1.1 or Windows 95. "Because most of the processing with our applications was done on mainframes, we had a lot of outdated, low-end machines," explains David Kennington, vice president of IT at Prudential.

Now employees who need new desktops get PCs running Windows NT.

Prudential, which spends more than $1 billion on computer technology each year, determined that the Notes client/server architecture would make application development simpler and less expensive than it was with the mainframe.

The CIOs determined that moving to Notes would provide employees with an easy-to-follow user interface and departments with the ability to develop applications quickly. As the new infrastructure took shape, departments started populating Notes databases - there are now 4,000 such databases at Prudential.

Information is stored in the closest Notes database and replicated to servers at Prudential's six data centers. The company has one data center in London, a second in Hong Kong and four in the United States - in Roseland; Ft. Washington, Pa.; Jacksonville, Fla.; and Plymouth, Minn. A frame relay network connects the data centers and other Prudential facilities.

The architecture provided employees with access to mounds of corporate information, but the users didn't have a way to sift through the data using the Notes client. That's when IT began thinking intranet. IT began outfitting users with a Notes client it modified to act like a browser or with an actual Web browser. The aim was to give users the ability to locate information by simply pointing and clicking on screens.

In January 1997, Prudential conducted a pilot with 500 employees to determine how well the approach would work. By April, the company decided this was the proper direction and started to examine what changes would be necessary to its computing infrastructure to support intranet applications. It began supplementing the Notes infrastructure with Internet capabilities, such as those available via Lotus' Domino Web server. Last summer, the company formed a steering committee with approximately 25 to 30 employees from the various businesses units. Meeting as frequently as once per week as the project gained momentum, the committee outlined standards so applications would have a common look and feel, and development would be consistent, says Stephen Wasdick, director of internal communications at Prudential and committee chairman.

One challenge was providing users with access to information stored in a variety of databases. The IT department selected Percussion Software, Inc.'s Notrix and Sybase, Inc.'s OpenConnect as database management system gateways so users could access information in Notes servers; IBM's CICS and DB2; Geac Computer Corp.'s financial applications running on mainframes; and Unix servers running DBMS from Tesseract, Inc. and Sybase.

Because information is spread across the data centers, ensuring adequate response time was another issue. To deal with it, Prudential built a response-time monitor, says Gerard Bu, vice president of IS at Prudential.

Network and systems management tools poll network devices and applications continuously. They funnel the data into an application that has preset response-time numbers. If the number isn't what the company desires, the response-time monitor will set off a page and notify one of the technicians that there is a problem.

USER HAND-OFF
In addition to technical considerations, the company had to tackle implementation issues. The steering committee established a set page design, so the home page for Prudential HealthCare resembles the home page for Prudential Real Estate. Prudential designed its pages with Microsoft's Paint.

"The company wanted to push publication out to the business units," says Eileen Kahn, a systems manager at Prudential HealthCare. "The design made it possible for users to create content without IT, because users worked with a Notes client or Web browser, not HTML or Java."

Most of Prudential's 75,000 employees use the modified Notes client, but some have Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator or Communicator software.

Another benefit is that page developers can copy or cut and paste existing designs and speed development. Departments have latitude to determine which employees can create pages and which can add content to pages. The intranet has one to five levels of approval, which each business unit selects. Because Notes includes workflow capabilities, departments can automate the approval process.

The company developed a training course for employees responsible for building pages. Departmental and corporate content developers attended the classes last summer and fall, and, in December, Prudential rolled out the first of the 24 applications it now has on the intranet.

The main intranet site includes corporate data, such as messages from the chairman, press releases with broad interest and news clips about the company. Previously, the dissemination of this information was limited to e-mail or fax, so press releases only went to about 100 employees and news clips to 1,000. Prudential also has populated its Web with plenty of self-help applications. Via the intranet, employees can register for training courses, route travel vouchers, check co-workers' schedules and locations to determine if they can commute together and purchase office equipment (532 supplies, including computer equipment).

Prudential even gave its intranet a democratic flair. As it came online early this year, the IT department asked users if they thought the intranet needed a name. After the users voted yes, IT asked them to submit possibilities and then selected a name from the best entries. The winner: Inside the Rock.

The six lines of business are at different stages of developing intranet content. Prudential HealthCare, which has 17,000 employees in 50 locations serving five million members, has moved quickest. It now has more than 1,000 pages online. Because content development was so easy, one HealthCare group even delivered 125 pages in two weeks, Kahn says.

The HealthCare pages feature a wide range of information. There are sales and marketing materials, including potential proposals, brochures and posters; a Lotus Notes Tip of the Week section to increase users' computer literacy; and business unit data, such as office functions and organizational charts. The intranet has helped the business unit become more efficient. An employee newsletter goes online rather than being mailed. That resulted in a $100,000 savings per year. A compliance manual, which cost $70,000 to produce, also is on the intranet.

Prudential HealthCare, whose pages generate about 10,000 hits per week, in April conducted an online survey to determine users' thoughts about the intranet (see graphic, left). Many found the organizational charts and contact information helpful. In fact, one person was able to provide a customer who needed information about the organization's Safety Helmet program with the Prudential HealthCare contact's name and telephone number.

The intranet steering committee has been content with its equipment and software selections. The only weakness stems from limitations with how Notes tracks hits. For now, the software tracks only connections to main pages. Prudential would like to add a counter to see how often each page is read, a feature that is expected in the next release of Domino.

With the intranet infrastructure in place, Prudential is concentrating on building up the content and promoting use of the new communications infrastructure. Employees had better study how to use it: Although PROFS is still running, the company expects to phase it out this summer. Its Notes-taking will be complete.

Korzeniowski is a freelance writer in Sudbury, Mass.