These days, savvy CEOs are tapping the power of intranets and extranets to give small companies the muscle and flexibility of their big-company counterparts. Shouldn't you?
Special Technology Report
The Internet promised to drastically change your business. Now state-of-the-art small-company intranets are actually delivering on that promise.
Instant word-association test: What comes to mind when you hear the terms intranet and extranet? Chances are, it's something like this:
Big-company stuff. Internal Web sites with multimillion-dollar price tags at places like Hewlett-Packard and GE and Charles Schwab. Hotshot technology that my small business wouldn't use and doesn't need. And even if we did need it, we couldn't afford it. Right?
Guess again.
True, intranets come to the party with a big-company, big-bucks reputation -- and deservedly so. The earliest private Web-based networks began at Fortune 500 giants like Ford Motor Co. and Sun Microsystems. The best, in some cases, save more money than many small businesses make in a year. And true, they've typically involved large-scale initiatives, such as linking thousands of workers worldwide or putting millions of documents online.
But here's some news that is just as true: private Web sites are changing small business, big time. Small and midsize companies are turning to intranets (and their external cousins, extranets) in much the same way they turned to the public Web a few years ago. And in some cases, they're getting far more favorable results with the private sites. Many are using them to fundamentally change some aspect of their business. A pioneering few are using the sites to drive their company's entire strategy. And they're doing it using technology once viewed as strictly a big-company tool.
We're not talking about companies' using internal networks as electronic filing cabinets for human-resources forms or bulletin boards where Joe in accounting can advertise a used Jeep for sale. We're talking about entrepreneurs' strategically using a broad range of intranet-extranet efforts to gain a competitive foothold in a tight economy, typically by nurturing existing relationships or creating conduits for new ones.
On one end of that spectrum are the rare companies run primarily, or entirely, on private Web sites that let them easily connect with employees, partners, or customers. One of those companies is 1-800-GOT-JUNK, a Vancouver, B.C., trash-removal business whose intranet for its franchisees, called JunkNet, helped to fuel the company's growth from $2 million in revenues in 1999 to $10 million last year. Another is Boston-based SeniorLink, a fledgling company that will launch an extranet later this year to help baby-boomer customers nationwide find care-management services for their aging parents.
On the opposite end are traditional companies that are using intranets to transform one practice, with effects that ripple through the rest of their culture. A sterling example: Extreme Logic Inc., an Atlanta-based technology consulting firm. Like many growing companies, Extreme Logic handles job-performance reviews online. What's unusual is that the company encourages its corporate clients to log on and evaluate the employees who serve them. As a result, company officials say, Extreme Logic has deepened relationships with customers by letting them know they're trusted partners whose opinions count.
In the middle of the spectrum are companies with the most intriguing stories: those whose private sites create unprecedented opportunities. At TemPositions Group, a New York City-based staffing company, an intranet instantly matches customers' requests for temporary employees with contractors who best fit the bill, allowing the 125-employee business to successfully bid against giant national staffing companies for major contracts. Eckert Seamans Cherin & Mellott, a Pittsburgh-based law firm, now coordinates hundreds of product-liability claims filed nationwide against one of its major clients, thanks to sophisticated technology that makes it possible for the firm's lawyers to share court documents with other lawyers in 50 states, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. And Eminent Research Systems, in Minneapolis, uses an intranet to dramatically speed up its ability to coordinate protocol documents for medical-device tests, thereby helping the company to increase its business capacity tenfold.
It's impossible to find hard numbers on how many companies are jumping onto the private Web. The few studies done to date confirm only that a growing number of small companies have either launched a private network or expect to do so soon. Most, it appears, still use the technology for pedestrian purposes: storing documents, sharing files, ordering supplies. But we've found a handful of cutting-edge entrepreneurs who are using intranets and extranets to transform their business strategies, in most cases by helping their companies forge new relationships.
OPEN BOOK: Dennis L. Veraldi says that his law firm's extranet improves services for clients.
What's propelling this small-business intranet revolution? Experts tick off a number of drivers: the migration of big-business practices to small-business scale, recession-driven pressure to find new ways to get new customers or better serve existing ones, and increased comfort with doing business online. "All the things that the major corporations were doing two or three years ago are trickling down to the small-business realm," says Ryan Bernard, president of Wordmark Associates Inc., a Houston consulting firm, and author of The Corporate Intranet. "The larger corporations were the proving ground."
