IntraNet: The Xerox intranet<title><META NAME="publicationDate" CONTENT="1996-07-01"><META NAME="icx_url" CONTENT="http://www.networkworld.com/intranet/796xerox.html"> <script language="JavaScript">  </script> <base target = "_top"> <SCRIPT LANGUAGE="JAVASCRIPT">  </SCRIPT> </head>   <META NAME="publicationDate" CONTENT="1996-07-15"> <body bgcolor="ffffff" background="back2.gif"> <table cellpadding=20 border=0 width=600><tr><td colspan=2> <A HREF="http://ad.doubleclick.net/jump/idg.us.nwfusion.general/;top=;pos=top;sz=468x60;tile=1;ord=045401?"> <IMG SRC="http://ad.doubleclick.net/ad/idg.us.nwfusion.general/;top=;pos=top;sz=468x60;tile=1;ord=045401?" border=0 height="60" width="468"></A> <br><hr size=1> <h1>Documenting the Xerox-Wide Web</h1> <FONT SIZE=+1><STRONG>As Xerox Corp. undergoes its external transformation as The Document Company, internally its employees are using a corporatewide intranet to search through knowledge bases and share information on products, services and general business practices.</STRONG><hr size=1></FONT> </tr><TR><TD COLSPAN=1 valign=top width=210> <h3><IMG SRC="/gif/fyi.gif" ALT="FYI:" WIDTH=30 HEIGHT=19 ALIGN=middle></h3> <P> <A HREF="796rolm.html">Creating an intranet at Siemens Rolm</A><p> <a href="796xside.html">Print away on that intranet</a> - Xerox developing Web interface to network printers, copiers.<p> </td><td colspan=1 valign=top width=380> <FONT SIZE=+2><STRONG>By Beth Schultz</STRONG></FONT><BR> <strong>IntraNet Magazine, 7/96</strong><p>A Xerox Corp. sales rep at a customer site is stumped when asked if it is possible to hook one of Xerox's TCP/IP-based printers to a Novell, Inc. NetWare LAN. Not wanting to lose the sale, he fires up his laptop and dials in to the company's corporate intranet, Xerox-Wide Web (XWW).<IMG SRC="796xerox.gif" WIDTH=67 HEIGHT=60 alt="" ALIGN=right> <P> Once connected, he zooms over to the Field Information Research Systems Team (FIRST) Center, a resource facility established by the company's U.S. Customer Operations unit to support presale activities. From there, he accesses the FIRST Knowledge Base and peruses it for information on TCP/IP and NetWare. He quickly learns a few default settings have to be changed and a few other system files tweaked, but connectivity is possible. <P> Within minutes, the rep is diagramming the configuration for the customer. He has shaved a couple of days off the time it would have taken him to figure out the answer on his own and has left the customer with the impression that Xerox is a company that can get the job done. <P> ''What we're doing is returning time to the field,'' says Jim Roth, a systems consultant at the FIRST Center in Dallas. ''And if you use the formula time equals money, then we're doing our job in a very large way - we're returning person years to the field on a monthly basis.'' <P> Roth has devised a return on investment formula for FIRST Center backers, the Xerox business units that fund the research center. ''If each inquiry saves you two days and we extrapolate this over the 1,400 inquiries we get each month, we're saving on the order of decades of time,'' Roth says. <P> ''You can count that as funny money if you want, but I tell you what: You can't believe how excited people get about the time-savings,'' Roth says. <H3>Knowledge gained</H3> FIRST Center has built a giant knowledge base that houses answers to questions on Xerox printing and production systems. The World-Wide Web provides the perfect interface to that knowledge base, Roth says. <P> The ubiquity of browsers, coupled with the knowledge base and some sort of search and retrieval engine, adds up to a pretty powerful tool, Roth says. <P> FIRST Center, which runs one of the more advanced, mature sites on the XWW, relies on Verity, Inc.'s Topic search engine to handle queries. The engine pulls information from the FIRST Knowledge Base, which extracts information from a relational database as well as other sites. <P> ''When you go to FIRST Center's home page and launch a search, you're actually searching over 20 to 25 different data collections,'' Roth explains. ''They're all similarly formatted so that when you get the results back, it's just a click away to follow a URL.'' <P> Activity at FIRST Center, which predates the Web interface, has skyrocketed since the Web searcher was implemented. About 1,000 of the 5,000 to 7,000 mobile U.S. salespeople have registered to use the FIRST Knowledge Base. That number grows monthly by about 100, Roth says. <P> ''When the Xerox sales force went to the virtual office, we had to radically alter the way we communicated with them,'' Roth says. He maintains that intranet access has become more important to business than the telephone. The words of a true intranet evangelist, as Roth merrily classifies himself. <P> But he isn't out there alone trying to spread the word. Like any research-intensive, network-savvy company, Xerox has had its share of Web pioneers and proselytizers. The Xerox information technology department has been running an enterprisewide Internet-style network for more than a decade, and supporting pockets of people using Web browsers and servers for several years. <P> Cynthia Casselman, however, gets much of the credit for triggering the events that turned those ad hoc activities into a sanctioned, strategic effort. <P> As manager of strategic communications, Casselman set out to figure out how Xerox could become a better communicator. Ironically, Xerox, which was busily building its image as The Document Company, was struggling to deliver information about its own goings on to employees before they heard it elsewhere. <P> After conducting a survey, Casselman found employees wanted information that was timely, relevant, accessible and honest. They were, it appears, tired of finding out about Xerox business activities on the radio. She identified the Web, which was just gaining attention at the time, as a medium with real possibility for answering some of those needs. <P> In what she calls kismet, Casselman met Malcolm Kirby, a manager in the company's IT group, and Richard Beach, a scientist at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Kirby was looking for ways to shift the information infrastructure from a push to a pull model, and Beach, who in working on supplying document services to customers via the Internet, had begun promoting the idea of an internal Web. <P> <P> ''We had defined a workgroup-based approach to Web-based, pull-oriented information-sharing,'' says Kirby, manager of applied collaborative technologies in the Xerox Global Strategy and Advanced Technology group. ''Cindy wanted to extend this is an enterprise environment.'' <P> The three began exploring the concept of an intranet from a corporate perspective. ''We started to try to figure this out, and what it would be, and what it would look like and what it could mean to employees,'' says Casselman, who is now intranet development partner at Xerox headquarters in Stamford, Conn. <P> ''We really feel that the intranet development takes a new relationship like ours. It takes the technology and the content and the strategy to make this powerful,'' Casselman says. <P> Kirby agrees. ''There has always been strong end-user pull for extending collaborative services. In my mind, however, it was important that this not be exclusively an IT initiative,'' he says. ''Particularly in the case of the Web, the traditional paradigm of information systems doesn't map well to the model of information empowerment and personal responsibility inherent in the Web.'' <P> The trio ultimately cooked up the idea of the XWW. To make sure the XWW matched employee wants and needs, it solicited input from people across the organization. The group then identified 20 or so people who it felt had expertise and insight to lend and asked them to participate in a steering committee. <P> The task force decided that knowledge bases and communities of practice should be the hallmarks of the XWW. ''Our initial objective was to create a knowledge base for Xerox people to get the information they needed to do their work, and to create a virtual online community so that people - especially those people who don't even have offices - would have a place to go that represented Xerox to them,'' Casselman says. <P> The group also decided it would use the intranet for information dissemination and to get out corporate news. ''We wanted Xerox employees to have a place to get the highlights of what is going on in the world of Xerox,'' Casselman says. <H3>A familiar sight</H3> Each of these objectives lead to a common starting point: a unified home page. The team created the WebBoard, from which Xerox invites employees to participate in the Web: ''Pull up a chair, take a look around and make yourself at home. This is our meeting place, a friendly home in cyberspace, where Xerox employees can work and learn, grow and share, talk and laugh together - regardless of where we're located - around the corner or around the globe.'' <P> From the WebBoard, a word play on the familiar whiteboards found throughout the company, employees can access hundreds and hundreds of sites on the XWW. One popular starting point is Webline, which provides daily headlines about Xerox itself, its competition, the document processing industry in general and even the XWW. It is linked to pertinent information on the internal and external Web. ''We look to find things that will lure people into the Web,'' says Jerry Mikorenda, manager of employee communications programs at Xerox. <P> ''The idea is to make checking XWW a habit. Just like when you come in and check your E-mail in the morning, we want people to check the Web,'' Mikorenda says. ''The idea is to sit there and have a cup of coffee, and click on the Webline icon.'' <P> The corporate communications department, which compiles Webline, is taking an objective stance with the information it posts on the Web. ''We don't try to process the information like we did in the old days. We don't put the Xerox spin on it,'' Mikorenda says. <P> If Xerox introduces a new color copier, for instance, Webline will supplement the press announcement with analyst commentary - positive or negative. ''This goes toward credibility and honesty,'' Casselman says. <P> From WebBoard, employees also can get a list of all XWW sites by category. They can contribute their own sites or recommend links to internal and external resources, Casselman says. The suggestions are checked and, if appropriate (all but one has been), are added to the XWW. <P> Xerox has not established any formal guidelines for the intranet yet, but to cover itself, it says that rules that apply in the real world of Xerox are ditto in the virtual world, as well. <P> Employees can find that policy on the Web, of course. It reads: ''The WebBoard should be viewed as an extension of our office environment. The same basic rules of courtesy and etiquette apply here. All our best interests are served by interacting in a friendly, supportive, nonaggressive and noncommercial manner....We suggest you use discretion in posting confidential business information.'' <H3>Tracking the hits</H3> The amount of interest in the XWW has grown considerably since its launch last fall. At that time, there were about 100 sites, and today, there are about 1,000, Casselman says. Kirby notes that those XWW sites are supported by some 400 Web servers. <P> <P> Many of the Web sites track hits. Casselman takes daily and hourly measurements to see what parts of the Web are being used by whom. She acknowledges, however, that much of that tracking activity is primitive. She'd like to elevate tracking procedures to the level that FIRST Center uses. <P> When salespeople interact with FIRST Center, their activities are thoroughly tracked, Roth says. ''We're not just tracking hit counts, but the actual activity we consider core to our business.'' <P> For example, if a salesperson uses FIRST Center to submit a query about Microsoft Corp.'s Windows NT operating system, he many only look at four of the 300 documents returned. FIRST Center is interested in exactly what documents he has looked at so it can run trend analysis and figure out where it needs to devote more of its research resources, Roth explains. <P> What's more, FIRST Center validates its work. When the salespeople pull down the documents FIRST Center has found for them, they find a question on the top and bottom that asks whether the documents answer their questions. They can click on a button for ''yes'' or one for ''no.'' <P> Once a month, FIRST Center sends via electronic mail a survey to employees who retrieved documents, asking them to rank their satisfaction level and indicate the amount of time the search had saved, Roth says. <P> The center uses a Visual Basic program to aggregate the information. ''Right now, we're averaging a two-day savings per inquiry with 100% satisfaction,'' Roth says. The FIRST Center's tracking and user feedback mechanisms are impressive, says David Leveen, a partner with Cognitive Communications, Inc., the Stamford-based management consulting firm that helped Xerox design its internal Web. <P> "People often don't think about how the end user is going to use the information on an intranet," Leveen says. "We find thinking like Jim's to be rare." Other Xerox sites do not use such sophisticated tracking techniques. ''We at least know that use is definitely increasing every week, by thousands of hits. And we know that when we put something out there that's really relative or timely, we get a huge increase in hits, and that we're deriving business benefits from that,'' Casselman says. ''But the present measurements aren't effective in proving the value. <P> ''We're trying to promote this to people for work practices,'' she says. ''This is where a lot of the real business value comes from, from people [on different teams] who couldn't get in touch with each other otherwise, talking about the work they do.'' <P> Casselman says she is aware of about 15 groups and is sure that there are scores of others that have forged communities of practice on the intranet. She cites as an example the Xerox Color Services group, which places success stories, marketing discussions, best practices guidelines and other files at users' fingertips. Anyone involved in color products, from the product engineers to the graphic designers working on collateral material to the salespeople pitching the goods, come to the site to get and share information. <P> ''This is what I think most of the work on the intranet will come to: making it as easy as possible to find things,'' Casselman says. <P> Beach, who is general manager of Advanced Technology Business Services at Xerox Business Services, sums it up this way: ''We can reach more Xerox people around the world. We can do a better job of delivering information upon demand through Web services. We can distribute information faster, helping Xerox people get the information from Xerox before they read it in the newspaper.'' <P> He notes, however, that considerable work remains. For example, the global Xerox population has only sporadic access to the XWW. The IT department's Kirby estimates that about 20,000 of the 70,000 Xerox users worldwide have intranet access. He says that number will more than double, to about 50,000, by year-end as Web access is added to the basic functionality of each desktop. <P> Xerox has standardized on Netscape Communications Corp.'s Navigator and NetManage, Inc.'s WebSurfer browsers for Windows PCs, and on Spyglass, Inc.'s Mosaic for Unix machines, Kirby says. It has primarily used Web server software from the Center for High Energy Physics, or CERN, but is now evaluating next-generation packages. <P> ''Our primary focus with browsers and servers is on open standards,'' Kirby says. ''We are concerned that adopting proprietary extensions to the HTML standards will cut off part of the population from some information. So we put a lot of focus on standards-based implementation and development.'' <P> Casselman and others at Xerox, including Chief Executive Officer Paul Allaire, have big plans for the intranet. Casselman, for instance, wants to add chat lines and electronic auditoriums to the XWW. Allaire, who already appears in video clips and snippets on the intranet, has agreed to participate in a regular chat line beginning this fall. <P> ''In my mind, this is going to be the place people go to get their mail, find out what's going on, communicate with others, do their work,'' Casselman says. <P> <hr size=1><P> <a href="/index.html"><img border=0 align=bottom src="/gif/button1.gif" alt="NW Fusion home "></a><a href="/feedback.html"><img border=0 align=bottom src="/gif/button2.gif" alt=" Feedback "></a><a href="/search.html"><img border=0 align=bottom src="/gif/button3.gif" alt=" Search "></a><br> <h6>Network World Fusion - <a href="/copyright.html">Copyright 1996, Network World, Inc</a>.</h6></BLOCKQUOTE> </td></tr></table> </body> </html>