A salesman was traveling by car to an appointment in the next town. Since it was a nice day, he decided to take the scenic route through the country rather than taking the freeway. He was driving past a farm when something caught his eye. He pulled to a stop and got out. He was staring in disbelief into a pigpen when the farmer appeared. "Afternoon, young sir,'' said the farmer. "I see you've spotted Herbert.'' "Yes,'' replied the salesman, shaking his head in disbelief, "and I've never seen anything like it - a pig with a wooden leg!''

Electronic commerce, like a pig with a wooden leg, is still a novelty. We find an electronic commerce site such as Godiva Chocolatier's at www.godiva.com, and we're impressed.

But Godiva, like many other companies operating online sales sites, has problems, which you'd quickly encounter if you tried placing an order for chocolates for more than a couple of people. In a process that is far too laborious and time-consuming, you wind up filling out the same form several times with only minor changes.

That said, these kinds of usability problems are fixable. Online vendors will redesign their user interfaces so ordering ungodly quantities of chocolate, for example, gets much easier.

Much more important for any commercial site is what happens behind the Web site.

Whether you outsource your public e-commerce services or run them from your extranet, they generate a stream of data and orders. If that stream is to be of any value, it must be integrated with business processes. Without an effective intranet, you'll be undertaking an impossible mission.

A crucial part of any effective intranet is how it interfaces with its associated extranet. I have recently talked to a number of companies that are planning to place their public Web servers - for example, their extranet content - on their intranets, behind a firebreak to protect it. This is not a good idea.

A firebreak, sometimes called a screened subnet, consists of a network with a firewall that runs proxy services and connects to the Internet. The firebreak network connects to the intranet via another firewall or, at the least, a packet-filtering router. The idea is to control which network addresses talk to each other and which clients talk to which server.

You should place a public Web server inside the firebreak. That way, if the server's integrity is compromised, the intranet is not exposed. The same positioning applies to Simple Mail Transfer Protocol servers and any service that is publicly accessible. This defense not only insulates the intranet from the Internet in the case of attack but also, because of the firewalls, effectively masks the architecture of the firebreak and the intranet from probes.

"So tell me, how did he get the wooden leg?'' asked the salesman. The farmer replied, "Ah, well, Herbert's a remarkable animal, sir. My little girl fell into the pond and Herbert heard her splashing around, jumped out of the pen, jumped into the water and dragged her to safety. Remarkable.''

There's a danger in putting up a commercial Web - it might just overwhelm you. I've heard of organizations that launched Web offerings and found themselves inundated with 5,000 inquiries in the first week! If you haven't planned how to handle such a load, two things could happen: You'll drive yourself to exhaustion trying to respond or you'll fail to respond adequately and possibly lose business.

To prepare for e-commerce, your intranet must embody several key attributes. First, it must extend throughout the organization. This requires that every staff member use the intranet on a daily basis. Unless the intranet is the primary tool for disseminating and gathering information, it will not become the focus of corporate communications.

Second, your intranet must be rich in information that relates to the way the company makes money. If your intranet content is only about products - specifications and prices - rather than selling the products - features and benefits - it will not fully support the organization's goals.

The last attribute is that your intranet must mediate the steps of doing business. Everything to do with creating product information and marketing materials, receiving orders and inquiries, and shipping and billing for products, for example, must be part of intranet content. Any aspect of the process that isn't accessible via the intranet becomes a liability because when that process goes wrong or needs modification, you won't know what needs fixing or changing.

But before you rush off and try to build an e-commerce solution integrated with your intranet, be warned. In my experience, most organizations and IT managers don't know all of their business processes, and those processes they do know about usually can't just be dropped onto an intranet overnight.

So don't attempt to do it all in one go. Work toward e-commerce incrementally.

"Amazing,'' said the salesman. "But how did he come to have a wooden leg?'' "Oh, that's not all sir,'' replied the farmer. "One night the house caught fire and Herbert broke down the front door, ran upstairs and dragged us all, unconscious, to safety. A truly remarkable animal.''

"But what about the wooden leg!'' exclaimed the salesman. "Well sir,'' replied the farmer, "a pig like that, you don't eat it all at once.''