PA Consulting Group today launched the results of their new survey, which examines business to business use of the Internet and the growing use of corporate Intranets in UK enterprises.
Surveying over 400 IT and business directors through postal questionnaires and including some 20 in-depth, face-to-face interviews, the PA survey concludes that:
- 1997 is the year of the Intranet – get one now or get trampled in the rush in 1998
- Intranets give quick paybacks and good ROI – even when being used for relatively simple applications
- Internet opportunities are there for the taking – security worries are more about perception than reality.
Whilst there has been an explosion of interest in and hype about the Internet and corporate Intranets, business people are still in need of a clear understanding of exactly what UK businesses are doing - and planning to do - with these technologies.
Use of the Internet is already surprisingly widespread amongst the senior management respondents to the PA survey:
- 64% of respondents already use the Internet in their business lives: this figure is expected to rise to 91% within 1 year, and 96% within 3 years
- 36% of respondents already use the Internet at home: this figure is expected to increase to 63% within 1 year, and 75% within 3 years.
As anticipated, the current top five Internet applications revealed in the survey are external email, information access/research, advertising to business markets, information provision to customers, advertising to consumer markets. However:
- 20% of organisations responding are already using the Internet as a sales channel, for recruitment, and for information provision
- 10% are using the Internet for customer support and product innovation
- A few respondents (1-3%) are already using the Internet for invoicing and payments.
Use of corporate Intranets is maturing rapidly, the survey also reveals. Around 90% of our respondents saw at least some potential for application of an Intranet in their organisation, and over 60% of organisations surveyed are already developing or planning to develop a corporate Intranet. The first Intranet applications are typically to:
- Provide a more effective, easily updated medium for issuing codified information to employees
- Provide access to – and therefore gain leverage from – the corporate ‘knowledge base’.
In both cases, around 40% of respondents saw immediate potential benefits.
Respondents who had undertaken large-scale Intranet implementations were clear that the benefit obtained from creating a flexible, agile, ‘learning’ organisation far outweighed simple cost savings – substantial as these may be.
The survey also revealed that, whilst the majority of organisations are extremely positive about the benefits that Intranets can bring (even though only 30% of respondents were taking a proactive stance with this technology), well under 10% of our IT respondents were willing to consider providing third party access to their Intranet systems to create an Extranet - security still being the predominant concern.
We conclude that there still may be opportunities for late entrants to catch up with more advanced users of the Internet and corporate Intranets (not surprisingly mostly from the IT/Telecoms industry). Businesses may be able to gain immediate advantage from Internet and/or Intranet opportunities by, for example:
- Launching straightforward Intranet applications (eg to replace the paper-based corporate internal phone book) as the first step in a process of managed change.
- Experimenting bottom-up with Intranet applications, and the related culture change implications, perhaps for employee communication at a departmental level within the context of broader workgroup computing developments
- Beginning to use email for communication with trading partners (subject to appropriate ‘firewall’ security)
- Launching a relatively modest (but attractive and well-maintained) Web site as a new vehicle for advertising and/or as a new communications channel with customers and/or suppliers
- Putting recruitment opportunities onto the Web, either directly via the corporate Web site or perhaps indirectly via an agency.
Based on this research, PA concludes that 1997 will be a critical year. Taking action at the right time will be essential. Soon, it may be that any substantial business not using email, promoting itself on the Web or doing business electronically with its customers and suppliers will find itself in the same category as those writing letters on manual typewriters and filing the carbons!
