mits.
Jon Udell, our Web Project editor, will be focusing on the intranet in his column for the coming year. He offers a lot of useful advice.
While you're absorbing all Jon's intranet goodies, consider this: Conventional wisdom has it that technologists have lost the momentum in steering corporate technology policy. Business managers are tired of that inward focus, according to this line of thought. Reengineering has put the technologists back where they "belong"--implementing other people's visions. Really? It sounds like somebody forgot to check who's driving the intranet, and where it's headed.
The intranet marks the resurgence of forward-looking technologists who have struggled mightily over the last decade to establish open distributed computing in the enterprise. Why? Not only, or even mainly, because they have a religious belief in standards. This movement has been about control: Computer users should control their resources. And they can do this only when they are able to ex
ercise the ultimate sanction against vendors who produce products that don't meet their needs: Replace them. It's only the technologists in the corporate world who've had the vision to sort through claims like "Internet Ready" and establish long-lasting architectures that will survive both vendor and management attachment to various visions du jour.
The intranet is nothing less than an attempt to escape from the most onerous aspects of client/server computing as it has evolved to this point: dependence on expensive relational database management systems, lock-ins to proprietary 4GL environments, and the inability to write one application, one time, and have clients access it from any desktop anywhere.
That last point marks a big difference between the new, savvy Internet technologists and the gnu-savvy Unix diehards of only a few years ago: The former's vision is far more focused on giving the corporate end-user community what it wants, needs, and can afford, even when those same users don't qui
te know what those things are. Where did this new breed of technologist come from? Many are the old breed, grown wiser; some are Young Turks with no legacy to defend as yet.
Will the intranet concept succeed totally? Not a chance. Is it always the right approach? As this month's cover story shows, not always, and not everywhere. But one thing's for sure--next time you hear somebody dissing the IT community for having no business sense, ask them which high-priced management consultant or smart CEO invented the intranet, thereby cutting application development times and slashing software license fees.
The products at this year's Networld + Interop certainly proved that today's technologist has learned his or her lesson. Keep the end users happy, align IT plans with business goals, and--oh yes, one more thing I learned in Las Vegas--never put all your money on one horse.
Mark Schlack, Editor in Chief,
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mschlack@bix.com
Triumphant Technologists
