A Web-based business intelligence service is a great match for First Chicage NBD's intranet.

By Beth Schultz
IntraNet, 10/20/97

Sometimes all it takes is a single application to make employees swarm to the intranet. At First Chicago NBD Corp., the application that's setting commercial bankers a-buzz is a Web-based business intelligence service.

The employees of First Chicago NBD's Corporate & Institutional Banking (FCNBD C&IB) division are so enamored with the Web tool they've actually given up their once-prized possessions - Bloomberg terminals, those coveted devices that deliver up-to-the minute business and financial news. The attraction is the ease and flexibility of getting information through a Web browser, says Richard Hebda, vice president, C&IB Marketing, Customer Workstation, which is a portfolio of Oracle Corp.-based sales and marketing tools.

On a single intranet page, for example, C&IB can deliver demographics, market information and current financials of existing or potential clients. Each type of information falls into its own frame, so it's easy for users to digest. And because everything is hyperlinked, it's also easy to navigate the site.

The desire, Hebda says, is to improve productivity of the bank's sales and marketing staff. If a banker is going on a cold call at 3 p.m., for example, he can fire up his Web browser in the morning and quickly pull together the information needed for the visit.

"When he walks in to see the prospect's CFO or treasurer, it'll seem like he's known him for five years," says Hebda, adding that without the Web-based application, it would have taken two days worth of research to gain that same familiarity.

When it comes to business intelligence these days, the delivery mechanism is what really matters, not the content, Hebda says. That's why C&IB ditched its old client/server system, which Hebda says was difficult to maintain, for a service employees could get to via the intranet. That service is Newscast Today from WavePhore Newscast of Dallas.

C&IB didn't decide on the Web application without serious consideration of other options. The group first evaluated a dozen or so products, only a few of which were Web-based.

"Our interests, in terms of mobility and low maintenance, led us to the browser products," Hebda says. With the old client/server-based news system, C&IB had to maintain a host of servers and keep server and client software up to date. [Because] that was getting rather tedious, the bank wanted to avoid a similar situation with any new application. It did not want to contend with managing servers or updating software any longer.

"There's no point in having a great source of information if your employees can't access it," Hebda says.

So C&IB opted for WavePhore Newscast's Web-hosting service. WavePhore Newcast culls data from 3,000 news sources and delivers customized business intelligence packages to its customers.

FCNBD, an international banking concern headquartered in Chicago, subscribes to WavePhore Newscast's basic service, and also adds some premium "channels." For example, it gets DowVision, which includes the Wall Street Journal, and a few feeds meant for specific groups of bankers.

C&IB employees can access the information in a number of ways. One is through an intranet page called Front Page. Hebda's group essentially has broken the page into three horizontal frames - the farthest left provides a place for hot buttons customized by the individual user, the right frame presents a customizable stock quote table and two search options and the middle section provides links to information sources the general employee population would find useful. From Front Page, bankers can directly access sources such as American Banker, various sections of the Wall Street Journal and news clippings about FCNBD.

Through one of the search options, bankers can get a dossier on a company. Keying in the stock ticker symbol MSFT, for example, would bring up a portfolio on Microsoft Corp., including links to current market outlook, demographics, Securities Exchange Commission filings, earnings summaries, Usenet feeds, press releases and news reports.

Another way to get to client information is via a scrolling stock ticker that is updated at user-determined intervals. Clicking on an item on the ticker, which can be set to run across the bottom of the screen when any application is up, would trigger the browser to deliver more information.

This, in a sense, is the equivalent of a Pointcast, Inc.-like "push" service. For example, if a banker is working on a merger deal, he can direct the application to alert him, via the scrolling ticker or alert window, whenever any news or stock updates on the two parties come through the service.

While working within the Newscast Today application, employees' Web browsers are communicating with a host Web server at WavePhore Newscast's Dallas data center. WavePhore Newscast uses Sun Microsystems, Inc. hardware, the Solaris 2.5 Unix operating system and Apache Web server software. It exposes its Web services to customer browsers through a Common Gateway Interface layer, says Peter White, president of WavePhore Newscast.

For transaction management, the company uses Sybase, Inc. technology and internally developed software.

Users can get to the Newscast Today information with any type of browser. In C&IB's case, that means both Netscape Communi-cations Corp.'s Navigator and Microsoft's Internet Explorer, at least for the time being. The firm is migrating desktops from Windows 3.0 running Navigator to Windows 95 with Internet Explorer, on which it will standardize.

For now, the Newscast Today application is targeted at the 2,500 C&IB bankers, about one-quarter of whom are using it. When the application came online in late summer, C&IB brought up users in the formerly disparate First Chicago and NBD firms who had news service accounts. Then it opened the application to the commercial bankers at NBD-related branches and, lastly, offered it to those at First Chicago.

Hebda says he would eventually like to make the application available to bankers in the retail and middle-market divisions since FCNBD has an enterprise license for Newscast Today. The potential population is more than 25,000 users, he says.

Given FCNBD's commitment to Windows 95, Hebda says he hopes Newscast Today will become part of Microsoft's Active Desktop, which he calls "a great metaphor" for what the bank is trying to accomplish with Customer Workstation. Through Active Desktop, Microsoft provides a way to place both Windows icons and HTML elements on a computer desktop for easier navigation. Through Customer Workstation, C&IB plans to bring all sales and marketing tools onto the intranet.

Bringing Newscast Today onto the intranet is giving FCNBD bankers a taste of that, and it's something they definitely don't want to go without. The phone calls came in fast and furious one day not too long ago when C&IB's Newscast To-day link went down for 15 minutes. "I've never gotten that kind of reaction from any problem we've had," Hebda says.

What's more, Hebda adds, this application has increased the visibility of the intranet among the bankers in general and senior managers in particular. "Everyone sees the value, and they love it."