The Business Internet and Intranets:

This combination of tools enables companies to develop applications that previously were either infeasible or too expensive to be practical. Intranets provide a pragmatic if at times inefficient solution to long-standing problems in the information systems field. Even though the Internet evolved completely outside the mainstream of business technology and predates personal computers and even though its developers were little interested in or even opposed to commercial uses of the Net, the Internet has nonetheless rapidly become one of the key new tools for corporate computing. The reasons for this have to do with the intranet's basic toolchest: TCP/IP, hypertext, and browsers. TCP/IP, offering data communications via computer rather than by voice over telephone lines, evolved as an extension of computers, with each major vendor (IBM, Digital Equipment, Apple, and so on) developing its own proprietary protocols. Bandwidth, the main measure of information carrying capacity on a telecommunications link, was limited and expensive, so these various protocols were designed for efficient use of this scarce and slow resource. Security and error-checking added to the systems' complexity and relative slowness. Local area networks, however, were not so constrained; over short distances, bandwidth is basically free. LANs used different protocols than did WANs. International public data networks, provided by national phone service monopolies, had their own protocols. As a result, by the early 1990s, businesses had a plethora of protocols in use. The computer systems that used them required special-purpose devices (called routers, gateways, and smart hubs) to link to networks and computers using other protocols. TCP/IP evolved along a very different path. Its developers made very inefficient use of bandwidth, ignored error-checking and security, and focused on how to link any computer to any computer. Today, bandwidth is plentiful; the low cost of hardware makes it simple to add security; and telecommunications transmission quality has improved so much that error-checking as messages move across the network is not required. In this new context, TCP/IP has become, literally, a liberation. It still has limitations: It is not practical for high-volume online transactions requiring precise synchronization, such as airline reservations, for instance. But TCP/IP makes it simple to define new networks of users and to link them together.

Hypertext linkage among personal computers is a trivial technology in comparison with the major payoff from intranets: faking data integration. Data integration means that information in previously separate databases can be cross-linked and cross-referenced so that it looks to the user as if it's a single database. Integration is a horrendously difficult task, due to many technical, organizational, semantic, and political factors. In the 1980s, several banks each spent $50 to $100 million trying - and failing - to build an integrated customer relationship database. Hypertext doesn't solve the problem of large-scale data integration, but it finesses it. Items of data defined as Web pages can be cross-linked. Human resource departments have rapidly taken advantage of this to pull together information on, say, benefits, job openings, employee records, and training programs. Merck, one of the world's largest pharmaceutical firms, used this simple new trick of the software trade to combine all of its data on clinical trials of new drugs, even though the various databases involved were built on entirely different hardware, software, and telecommunication systems around the world and despite studies that had concluded that such integration was totally impractical; the time needed had been estimated in years and the costs in the range of $100 million. Using hypertext, Merck took only a few months and no capital budget to produce an integrated database. TCP/IP moved the data, and the World Wide Web hypertext created links to access and combine it.