Web-Enabled To The Core

The IT department has to learn to let go. That's part of the message from Terence Milholland, CIO and vice president of information services for The Boeing Co., who is spearheading the aerospace giant's creation of virtual factory applications to help tune production and reduce costs. Milholland spoke with InternetWeek editor-at-large John Evan Frook.

InternetWeek: In 1995, Boeing's senior management set a hands-off approach to intranet management policies. Employees were given access with few restric-tions. How has that approach panned out?

Milholland: Part of our philosophy has been governance with a small 'g.' It was a very deliberate policy debated at the very senior levels about the risks we were running in a large corporation and when we can legally trust people. We got what we expected-a couple of neat applications that grew, and a whole bunch of people who began to play. But the playing was OK because they were learning. Now, we're trying to professionalize the internal stuff.

InternetWeek: Why does a user base of more than 190,000 give Boeing a competitive advantage?

Milholland: What we've done is create a critical mass of people inside of Boeing focused on the technology and its value. They begin to use this in ways we couldn't dream.

InternetWeek: Boeing has made moves toward Internet commerce-a site that sells spare parts on an intranet and automation of production in your airplane-wing assembly plants, among others. How do these impact the corporate IT budget?

Milholland: Our e-commerce activity was a trivial thing to build, relatively speaking. We basically provide user-friendly interfaces off the Web into legacy applications that make money for us and make money for the customer, because it makes it easier to get the job done.

InternetWeek: What are the key challenges for IT in supporting the network infrastructure behind a massive intranet?

Milholland: The first one that comes to mind is protecting yourselves and the users from the bad guys. When you scale at the enterprise level, the question is whether there are holes for people to come in and disrupt the enterprise. As we scale, we've been trying not to overwhelm the firewalls and security perimeters, and the other checks we have in place.

InternetWeek: So what's the No. 2 issue at Boeing?

Milholland: The second piece has been following standards-reducing variations is probably a better way to say it. There's a tendency by people to build pages and applications in their own way. Part of our Web plan was to have a set of guidelines and specifications that say, "here's how you ought to do it." When we acquired Rockwell and merged with McDonnell Douglas, we had to settle the differences of opinions and underlying technologies, and establish one way to go forward-which we've now done.

InternetWeek: What are your other big challenges?

Milholland: The third would be sizing the pipes we have and the servers themselves. There's a tendency to underestimate what you need in this space. We've been able to stay ahead of demand, but barely.

InternetWeek: How have you found the tools that troubleshoot intranet performance problems?

Milholland: The tools for doing problem management at the individual level-with the size of the environment we have-are coming along, but they are not very robust. And that's among the issues that need to be thought about-the ability to maintain configuration controls, problem management and rolling technology.

InternetWeek: Boeing is ramping up its Boeing Partners Network, starting to bring in business partners. Is that a serious step?

Milholland: Very serious. I do not connect someone else's network to mine. I am not ready to take that step, because we don't know who is on the other end. We're a defense contractor. There are issues of information that only a U.S. citizen or foreign national with a work visa is allowed to see. If you connect with a partner company, you have to know if foreign nationals work there.

InternetWeek: Is corporate IT increasing Boeing's bottom line with its intranet?

Milholland: Senior management will agree, and certainly I believe, that these things are productive. But they're not a one-to-one connection [to the bottom line] because of issues of process improvements and human-resource policies that enable collaboration. It is the individual business units that get to claim results. If you just poured billions into a computing infrastructure but didn't change the ability of people to use it effectively inside-and allow them to be creative-you're not going to gain.