The next time your CEO gives an analyst presentation, consider the audience. Yes, those sitting in the room where the talk actually takes place represent one definition of your audience. And so do those that the analysts influence through their writings and recommendations.
But how about executives and managers up and down the ranks at your competitors, and those scattered across any number of your company’s offices around the world? They too could be tuned in, live, through the internet from their office desktops and traveling laptops. As your CEO speaks on Wall Street, a competitor’s strategic planner may be taking notes three time zones away. And her CEO may be reviewing his private dossier on your company while simultaneously watching as well.
Relaying a CEO’s presentation to analysts and investors, even over the internet, is nothing new. What is new is that intranets are becoming the medium through which that event – and indeed, a constant, non-stop flow of breaking news and background information – is being piped through corporate offices, and integrated with a company’s internal information.
Many communications professionals no doubt recognize the importance of intranets – private corners of the internet used for internal communications – as a platform for information sharing and fostering collaborative work efforts. Because intranets are fairly easy to build, using the same underlying technology and software as the world wide web as a whole, they are fast becoming the preferred means to link workers in any number of locations.
Switched on groupware
Certainly the numbers tell the story. Information industry tracker International Data Corporation (IDC) predicts that, by 2001, some 133 mn corporate workers will be tied into an intranet. By the end of this year, about 77 percent of US and 75 percent of European large organizations polled will have their intranets up and running.
These days, though, the hot topic is the growth of intranets as the means to host enterprise-wide information services to retrieve and distribute external news culled from newspapers, magazines, newswires – and yes, even your IR presentation – provided by publishers and broadcasters. Some of those enterprise-wide information services have added real-time and archived multimedia – such as the CEO on video – to the mix of sources on offer.
Often, the incoming information is sifted through one of the new breed of powerful profile filtering technologies, with relevant articles and reports automatically selected for each user or group of users. In the office, at least, the personalized newspaper – The Daily Me – is fast becoming a reality.
Today, information providers offer their own interfaces for personalized news delivery. The next truly big thing down the road is integrating information provided by an enterprise-wide information distributor directly into a company’s own intranet interface, and then creating links between new incoming news and related, internally created information (such as market studies or competitor profiles). In some cases, too, there will be a one-click link to online searching of archived news and outside analysis.
So when you turn on your office desktop in the morning, included on the first screen you see, mixed with your company’s internal communications, might be scrolling headlines from your industry, or that morning’s financial report on a competitor – or even your CEO’s presentation to London analysts. With a few clicks, you might be able to call up your internal research on the same subject.
What’s behind the move to integrate external news and internal information onto a company’s unique intranet front door? ‘People just don’t want to hassle with multiple interfaces,’ says Steve Arnold, information industry consultant.
Adds Maureen Fleming, a senior research analyst at the Gartner Group, ‘It’s no longer a question of just getting the information you want. Now it’s getting what you want where you want it.’
Fleming says that the recognition of the imperative to leverage a company’s knowledge assets is driving much of the move to integrating external news and internal information. ‘Enriching news clearly will be a competitive advantage for companies. The market is moving fairly aggressively toward it.’
Collecting kingpins
WavePhore Newscast, based in Dallas, is an example of an enterprise-wide information provider. It collects articles, newswire reports, and financial reports from some 4,700 sources worldwide, including information kingpins like Reuters, Dow Jones and the BBC. All told, some 80,000 articles and reports arrive on the system every 24 hours, and all are run through the personal profiles set up by customers at some 200,000 desktops in 170 companies. The filtering technology – ‘Fast Data Finder’ – was first developed for use in military and intelligence circles by an offshoot of TRW. Think of it as a real-time, automated indexing technique.
The end result is that not only would a pharmaceutical company receive a different stream of news than, say, a bank, but individual managers and executives within that pharmaceutical company would be connected to different subsets of information. The marketing executive gets marketing news, the CFO gets financial news, and so on.
Recently WavePhore added feeds from MSNBC, the Microsoft-NBC joint venture, so it can broadcast financial and business oriented programming over the internet. Among the events it broadcasts are CEO analyst presentations.
News nuggets
Now WavePhore is planning a service through which companies can select information topics for seamless integration into their own intranets – WavePhore president Peter White calls them ‘discrete pieces of information.’ He says that the merger of external and internal information, all distributed across an intranet, will go a long way toward making a ‘tighter connection between someone showing up for work and what is happening in the larger marketplace. It’ll help people make better decisions.’
By housing that filtering and processing function, delivering internal and external news to a company’s intranet, WavePhore saves clients both bandwidth and infrastructure costs. IDC predicts that by 2000, such ‘web outsourcing’ will be a $13.8 bn worldwide business. Another study, by Cowles/Simba, suggests that by 2000, worldwide sales of just external news for intranet deployment will be $5 bn a year.
Bigger company
WavePhore is not alone. Its bigger and better known competitor is NewsEdge (the new name for the entity created by the merger of Desktop Data and Individual Inc), which last year launched its ‘News Objects’ to embed tailored incoming news in a company’s intranet.
The Dialog Corporation, recently acquired by Britain’s Maid (which also offers a series of information services built around its ‘Profound’ brand, some already available for intranet integration), says it will soon be meshing information drawn from its information repository with clients’ intranets. An information industry pioneer, Dialog, stores and manages an information content pool estimated to be 50 times the size of the entire content of the web. Its proprietary indexing technology, called InfoSort, will be available for both external news and in-house information. When that is available, users will be able to search a pre-determined segment of the Dialog databases directly from the subscribing company’s intranet, and then move on to, say, an internal research report on that same subject.
Says Dialog’s London-based CEO, Dan Wagner, ‘We’re being proactive in our vision of how people will want to use information.’
Another information service, Retrieval Technologies (RTI), now offers web-based ‘1st Page’, a service that integrates information feeds into a single interface for enterprise-wide use. RTI is also planning to offer a built-in link between categories of incoming news and related, internally-created information stored on intranets. RTI’s system is known for its ability to help users share news among work teams.
But does your company really need to be so on top of the news, so constantly? Who really, after all, cares? Gartner’s Fleming offers a true-life anecdote sure to send a shudder through any IRO. It seems that the CEO of a Fortune 50 company received a call one day from a journalist asking about reports that a state attorney was investigating the company. Not having seen the report, the CEO denied any investigation was underway. The reporter’s story, in turn, spoke darkly of a ‘cover-up.’
When the story hit the wires, the stock sank. A crisis was created simply because the journalist had access to a better, and more up-to-the-minute, news distribution system than the CEO.
So perhaps IROs should be asking not how much does all this cost to install, but what is the price of not doing so?
