[Sigia-l] Intranet as desktop?

[Karl Fast]

> do users make the shift to using the Intranet as a launching point
> for all things work related?

In my experience, the answer is yes and no. 

For people who use standard desktop apps like Word, Excel, and so
on, my experience is this:

  - they would rather launch apps them from their local desktop
  - moving to the intranet is an unecessary shifting in thinking and
    work habits; they resist.

The exceptions tend to be custom internal applications that have
interaction requirements well suited to the limitations of the web.

An example from personal experience:

  I was involved in a call center project. The job was answering
  phones and getting answers from several databases and legacy
  mainframe apps. The intranet brought it all together into a single
  web interface that abstracted away the differences between the
  various systems. Win-win all around.

  About 85% of the work was done in the browser using this custom
  "application," which was really hundreds of perl scripts and
  little databases that connected to big databases and mainframes.
  The other 15% of their work was email. They didn't even have tools
  like Word and Excel installed on their machines.


This call center app was one piece of the intranet. At least, that's
how the intranet team thought of it. 

I asked the people who used the call center app "How often do you
use the intranet?" They looked at me like I was capital S Stupid.
"Waddya mean? I jus been showin ya dis intranet thing for da last
twenty minutes. All I do is use the intranet!"

The call center people defined "intranet" as the little piece that
they used. The intranet team defined it as The Whole Thing. This
simple confusion had caused lots of communication confusions.


--karl