Intergraph's Intranet --

The mission-critical communications link

While Intergraph has been providing quality technical software applications and high-performance graphics hardware for more than 25 years, we've also been supplying network and systems services for our own large and far-flung organization. With 8,300 employees in the United States and 60 other countries, product development efforts in several locations, and sales offices and service centers worldwide, we conduct much of our vital communication across the Internet and our private intranet.

Intergraph's intranet is managed from our headquarters in Huntsville, Ala., where the Intergraph Network Operations Center (NOC) monitors and oversees the worldwide network. Don Jarmon, a 13-year Intergraph veteran, manages the NOC and knows the system inside and out. "The Intergraph network connects 80 offices in the United States and 125 other offices around the world," says Jarmon. "And it runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week." Intergraph systems personnel are stationed in offices around the world and throughout the 35-building Huntsville complex. In addition to our wide area networks, all buildings and offices are linked into local area networks."

So what should this mean to our customers? "We want our customers to know that we have the expertise to provide them with quality network and systems services," says Steve Powers, executive manager of Network Services at Intergraph. "When you call on Intergraph to connect your company to the Internet or to analyze your current system, you're calling on an experienced corps of professionals. Not only are our field personnel extensively trained in networking, they are also backed up by experts in the Network Operations Center and in other offices. We use all our experience to provide the best possible service to our customers."

"Since we understand our customers' application requirements – and not just their networking requirements – we provide much better solutions than a typical network services company," says Russ Holder, Consulting Services manager. "We offer a total project approach for network services, from requirements, design, and installation, to maintenance and support."

In early 1994, a team from throughout Intergraph began meeting to discover ways to improve intracompany communication. All attendees of the first meetings were in various ways involved in providing information to other employees, often in remote offices. Some represented divisions that were already sending e-mail newsletters to sales and technical staffs across the worldwide Intergraph network; others were from departments that still relied more on paper documentation. Some came from organizations that were developing repositories of documents to be retrieved via FTP (file transfer protocol). With this experience and insight behind them, everyone on the team had concerns about the growing amount of information they were being called on to convey, organize, manage, and store.

Many Intergraph offices used UNIX-based computers for their communications, while others handled their office tasks with Intel processor-based machines; field personnel had laptop computers with limited storage space. The team had to take these factors into account, along with the fact that Intergraph, like many other large corporations, was looking for ways to increase efficiency and thus its competitive edge.

Team members familiar with computer bulletin boards, Gopher servers, and the fledgling World Wide Web compared notes and discussed the capabilities of each and how each might help improve communication. Alternatives, such as custom client/server applications and "groupware" solutions were explored and dismissed as too costly and time-consuming to implement. The team was quickly convinced that the best solution to Intergraph's communication problem lay in using the Web and the new graphical browsers that provided easy access to information and ran on almost any platform. Even though Web technology was in its infancy, the team recognized the great potential of this information exchange medium.

Finding the missing link

The team also developed a FAQ (frequently asked questions) document and a "cookbook" for setting up a server, then went door-to-door showing the technology and its potential. Demos were staged at various departmental and management-level meetings, and a half-day seminar filled the auditorium at Intergraph's headquarters complex. Memos and papers went to anyone and everyone in the company who might be interested.

As a part of spreading the concepts, the team identified areas of the company where Web technology could make a big difference. "While we were trying to fill major communication gaps and prioritize projects, it became clear that we were deploying a very powerful tool that everything we used to do business could be put on the Web," says Brady Merkel, one of the team's original members and still a driving force in Web technology at Intergraph.

Now, less than three years later, it's hard to imagine working at Intergraph without our intranet. Today, there are more than 80 Web servers on the company's internal network, with additional isolated servers for specific projects. Almost every international office has a server, as do all U.S. regional offices, and even many smaller branch offices.

Intergraph personnel use the intranet's central home page as a starting point for accessing links to other servers. Each server is operated independently by the organization responsible for the information it contains. The unstructured and decentralized operation of Intergraph's intranet encourages creativity and responsibility throughout the company, and fosters the deployment of new Web technologies.

Allan Wilson, executive vice president for Intergraph's Asia-Pacific operations, was involved in intranet development before moving to Hong Kong from Huntsville. He recalls, "We were fortunate to have had a good head start on the underlying technology: We already had a solid worldwide network and employees who relied on e-mail and early communications software to access information via the network. The one thing we were missing was a single tool that would provide an easy-to-use, graphical interface to information – a Web browser. Once Intergraph's early intranet pioneers saw Mosaic and other first-generation browsers, we knew we had the missing piece."

The distributed nature of information on the Web and the underlying distributed responsibility for creating the information and keeping it up-to-date meant the workload was spread. There was no central bottleneck. Each group was responsible for the quality and timeliness of its information. However, from the beginning, the core Web team established broad standards for consistency and efficiency. Wilson explains: "Intergraph's intranet came together naturally as a result of the right combination of need, technology, and enthusiasm. You can't beat a solution that does the job while also being fun to use."

So how do we use our Web-based intranet?

The Intergraph intranet is used to disseminate information from various product groups about products and points of contact. Product information can consist of almost anything, including descriptions and specifications, pricing structure, competitive analyses, and technical papers provided in formats such as Microsoft Word, as well as HTML.

Using the remote dial-in capability, Intergraph personnel on the road can download proposal templates, customer presentations, or other information to their laptop computers. On a daily basis, Intergraph personnel learn about training opportunities, check schedules, and register for classes. And, of course, the cafeteria menu is one of the pages most frequently accessed by employees in Huntsville.

Since Intergraph's public Web site www.intergraph.com is equally accessible, many employees use it to obtain current addresses for worldwide offices, information on training and documentation, and trade show schedules. Much of this information is automatically generated daily or weekly from various databases.

Our software and hardware development efforts are aided by having ISO 9000 documentation available through the intranet. Policies, schedules, and a myriad of documents are accessible and current – and there are no paper documents to be disseminated and tracked.

The Intergraph Customer Service division maintains an intranet server for quickly finding information in response to customer needs. The server acts as a "quick look" tool to provide information such as new product updates, maintenance documents, and technical support bulletins.

Trainers, sales representatives, field engineers, marketing personnel – all these people keep the Intergraph Travel Services department extremely busy, so the travel staff created a way to make things easier. Their Web site allows an Intergraph employee to initiate travel requests through the intranet. Personal data, such as preferred seating on airlines and frequent flyer membership, is entered only once when the employee first accesses the system. With a few mouse-clicks, he or she can quickly and easily schedule a business trip and request management approval, eliminating the need to fill out paper forms, track down supervisors to obtain signatures, and fax requests to the travel department.

"Increasing productivity was the big issue that faced us," notes Pam Kilby, manager of Intergraph's Travel Services. Previously the department received faxed travel forms from employees. "The faxes were blurry and difficult to read, and mandatory fields were not always filled in." With the new intranet system, when an employee creates a travel request, personal data from the travel database is automatically entered into the form. As the request is processed, its status is updated in the database. Kilby says, "The intranet travel system gives us better control and eliminates a lot of phone calls to the department. The traveler has a quicker way to submit information and an easier way to track requests."

Intergraph's Marketing Communications department uses the intranet to give employees around the world instant access to company press releases and ads. International offices can quickly view new ads, decide if they want to translate or localize them, and request electronic copies. In the past, color hardcopies of ads were circulated after they appeared in U.S. publications. The intranet eliminates that necessity and speeds up the localization process considerably. "Instantaneous ... Real-time ... We like to hear words like that from the offices that use the information we post every day," says Sharon Cling, international marketing communications coordinator. "We want to give our sales force a decided edge – and that means accurate, up-to-the-minute information."

After considering a range of options, Intergraph chose the Web as the most efficient, cost-effective means of exchanging intracompany information.

Departments throughout Intergraph – for example, travel, network support, and marketing communications – as well as the company's remote offices depend on the Intergraph intranet.

Intergraph's regional offices have their own intranet servers, providing valuable data pertinent to individual regions as well as local branch offices. Many international offices also have their own intranet servers, providing information about operations for a particular country or geographic area, often in the country's local language.

Putting knowledge to work

Written by Katharine Garstka, Intergraph general webmaster, and Pat Duggan, senior system consultant, Intergraph Network Services.

Customer Support Services–taking the intranet a step further

Intergraph continually seeks ways to provide better, faster, more efficient service to our customers. While staying focused on improving our current services, customer support has launched a new project: development of a knowledge-based problem solution system. In such a system, users key in a plain-text description of the problem; the system then asks questions and uses the answers to lead the user to the solution. The system can automatically solve many of the problems currently dealt with by support analysts over the telephone. "We can put lots of experienced people on the phone lines, which is very expensive, or we can put what we know in a knowledge-based tool," explains Paul Brownell, director of Customer Services.

"We needed a method to capture perishable knowledge in a single problem/solution repository," notes Ken Adams, senior program manager of the project. Adams and a team of experts from various organizations laid the groundwork for developing the system. The first and most important problem the team encountered was how to capture knowledge from existing sources. To solve the problem, the team created CATalyst, a real-time tool that automatically combines problem/solution sets into Cases and CaseBases. A Case is a problem, its solution, and any associated questions or information. A CaseBase is a collection of related Cases, organized for logical retrieval.

With the aid of CATalyst, production CaseBases were quickly created from selected worksheets. CATalyst automatically retrieves the worksheet from an existing database, builds the CaseBase, and mails it to the designated author for refinement or approval. Many CaseBases, based on information from Intergraph product groups, are in production today.

To deliver the CaseBase information to the support analysts, we created a Web interface, so that the system became another component of Intergraph's intranet. The decision to deliver the information via a Web server rather than by CD-ROM was an easy one. "Putting the information on the Web costs very little, and since the information is dynamic, we're putting knowledge into the database every day. You don't run into the problem of people having out-of-date information," explains Adams.

The first implementation of the system is internal to Intergraph, allowing us to share information, develop Cases and CaseBases, and thoroughly test all aspects of the system. When everything is working well, and when the CaseBase information is more populated, this system will become the basis of our Customer Support efforts.

Projects such as this will help improve the quality of service by providing access to a computerized "expert" 24 hours a day. Notes Adams, "We are empowering our customer support analysts, our sales force, and eventually our customers, by providing direct access to critical expert knowledge.