Boeing Intranet Takes Off

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By JOHN EVAN FROOK

Seattle -- Known worldwide for its jumbo jets, The Boeing Co. is building a jumbo net--an enterprise intranet that is becoming the standard communication tool throughout the entire company.

Several observers of Boeing's budding intranet are calling it the standard by which large corporate nets will be measured. The Boeing Internal Web has already facilitated two of last year's biggest deals for the commercial airline, defense and space contractor.

Boeing is building its intranet for 10 years out when much of its business will be conducted over the Web. It has developed a plan that calls for decentralized content creation and delegated authority for many policy and technical issues.

While other large corporations have extensive Web installations, none have moved as quickly as Boeing--a $48 billion behemoth if you include its pending merger with McDonnell Douglas--in making the Web and applications instantly available, according to vendors and integrators familiar with Boeing's installation.

"Boeing is the biggest [corporate intranet]," said Srivats Sampath, Netscape Communications' vice president of product marketing for servers. "Boeing is one of the leading companies to see the benefits of standards-based computing and is ahead of the pack in truly leveraging that benefit."

In fact, Boeing's internal site helped to bridge communications with 21,000 new employees acquired as part of its $3 billion stock-swap purchase of Seal Beach, Calif.-based Rockwell International Corp.'s aerospace and defense unit. Also, Boeing had information about its proposed $13.3 billion acquisition of McDonnell Douglas Corp. available on its public Web site minutes after the announcement.

The user numbers are staggering already. Boei ng has wired more than 50,000 employee workstations to the Web. The company offers users a choice between Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer clients, and provides full Web access to a growing legion of information workers, all with no restriction on use.

New users board the Boeing Internal Web at a rate of 500 per week. A corporate policy adopted in September 1995 makes the Boeing Internal Web the primary means for information within the enterprise. The goal is to provide unrestricted access for up to 200,000 employees.

Boeing's intranet already boasts a total of 412 separate Web sites, some as large as 17,000 pages. The number is growing at a clip of four new sites per week. Last month alone, employees called up Boeing's intranet home page 217,000 times.

And Boeing eschews attempts to control this information explosion. Oversight of Web technologies and policy runs on an estimated $1 million budget. Yet it wasn't dollars and cents that encouraged Boeing to take a hands-off approac h.

"The Web is not very structured, and we don't want to overstructure," said M. Graeber Jordan, senior manager of electronic commerce deployment for Boeing's Information & Support Services. "We don't want to stifle it by managing it to death. We're trying to find the balance between putting the tool in the hands of a process business unit and providing the right sort of guidance."

Here's the blockbuster: Boeing is using its intranet as the primary communications tool for its Wing Responsibility Center--an organization created roughly a year ago to build wings, tails and rudders for the company's commercial airline and defense units. Where it once would have spent millions relocating workers from all over Washington state, WRC management now brings those people together via its intranet.

The WRC site, built on Microsoft Internet Information Servers, features a customized search engine and specifications for all of its parts. Any WRC employee can reach even the most senior manager via the Boeing Internal Web. Chuck Kahler, the executive in charge, sees the Web as glue for an organization that's expected to net the company billions of dollars over the next 10 years.

Dozens of sites already make content available to employees, including the Web version of its Spares ordering and inventory system, employee news services, a library and human-resources information. Via a customized Verity search engine, defense and space marketing teams access government requests for proposals overnight, instead of waiting 10 days for a clipping service.

"We have not found a business process or business unit that has done just a cosmetic veneer for the Web," Jordan said. "When they start thinking about the Web, putting up a page and thinking about who is going to click on a page, they start getting customer-focused. Inside the company, that's a powerful force for improvement."

Outsiders, too, are impressed by Boeing's embrace of its Web.

"Boeing is using the Web technology to make massive organization changes in culture and communication," said Dr. Eric Schaeffer, president of Human Factors International Inc., Fairfield, Iowa--a firm that helped develop the WRC interface. "In the past, IS systems were used to provide information or complete functions. On a visionary level, Boeing is using the Web as a way to support organizational change."

Experts say Boeing's approach to intranet management could become the norm for IT departments at the world's largest corporations.

"They use a distributed management approach, and frankly, that's the only way to do it," said Paul Kraabel, president of the IT management consultancy Kraabel & Co. Inc., Mercer Island, Wash. "The issue is content. If you have IT people managing content, they would do nothing else but manage phone lists, product descriptions and human-resources information. The content has got to be delegated to the divisions because that's where the accountability is."

Jordan a ttributes the company's strength to the development of building blocks, or critical success factors. Unconnected by hierarchy, each success factor identifies a Web policy or technical issue. Boeing has identified more than 54 building blocks, including groupware applications, URL filtering, content authentication and searching and indexing. Each building block is assigned an owner, who is responsible for a description of the issue, future plans and a time line of progress made toward resolution. For example, a building block for proxy servers calls for cost management (at a level of $1.30 per month per user, including access fees).

"Other corporations probably have the same list of critical success factors with 5 to 10 percent variation," said Jordan. "But each company would have its own order [of priorities]. We've taken the view that all of these things are core bricks. We're saying that if you do all these things well and put them in a foundation, you'll be OK. It is a way to solve all the problems wit hout trying to manage this crazy thing. Because, to some extent, it is fundamentally unmanageable."