Introduction 1. Metlife 2. Smith Barney 3. BellCore 4. General Services Administration 5. Oklahoma State University 6. Lucent Technologies 7. Thomson Consumer Electronics 8. Washington State Department of Personnel 9. Delta Air Lines 10. Bell South Briefs 11-40 Briefs 41-70 Briefs 71-100 Methodology Sponsors
	Corporate split couldn't keep Lucent's IS team from pulling together employees By Ilan Greenberg Huge corporate transitions are inevitably supposed to be disasters, like earthquakes with aftershocks that don't go away for years. And if ever there were a transition that would qualify as a corporate earthquake, it would be the recent trisectioning of AT&T. It is all the more remarkable, then, that the corporate department that often feels the seismic tremors most strongly, IS, can boast the successful completion of a numbingly difficult enterprise-scale project accomplished during the thick of the communication company's break-up. The IS department in question belongs to Lucent Technologies, the Morristown, N.J.-based company broken off from AT&T that is responsible for the manufacture of telecommunication equipment and is the beneficiary of AT&T's famous Bell Labs. Struggling with a massive technology deployment while reconciling new standards, platforms, and mandates, Lucent turned the prediction of disaster on its head. DELVING DEEP. The team's challenge was to create an intranet for Lucent's approximately 100,000 domestic employees. Designing an intranet of that size is difficult; back in 1994 when the project began, the goal bordered on heroic. Originally, the strategy was to examine how human resources could save costs and increase employee satisfaction through electronic communication, according to Kathy Gill, project manager at Lucent. "But after we delved deeper and deeper into the project, we saw that we could also link the transactional piece as well," Gill says. The communication component was clear enough: Give employees access to all the information about company benefits that, at the time, was distributed by hard copy and information hotlines. "We had a strategy as a company to design the site and position the content so that employees could pull together their plan's core components and integrate all the common information available to them," Gill says. From there, Gill and her other team members, Donna Farino and Sal Borruso, saw that it was "common sense" to build into the architecture extranets to accommodate transactions, such as links to participating doctors. OPEN ENROLLMENT. To get the job done, Lucent turned to a local system integrator, Morristown-based Logical Design Solutions (LDS), which even then considered the building of intranets a core competency. LDS went to work building an intranet that, as much as possible, adhered to industry standards. The religious observance of standards, according to Bob MacAvoy, project manager at LDS, was key to the project's success. MacAvoy used only standard Internet protocols, such as Secure Sockets Layer as a security mechanism; Oracle as a back-end database; and Software Process Improvement script using Perl to develop the system. He also kept existing interfaces for legacy systems, such as DB2. The use of standards was important because the system was to be personalized for each user, meaning that each time an employee logged on to the system, a customized inbox would pop up, reflecting individual benefit choices. "It's a high-volume application during the open enrollment periods, so whatever we needed to do had to be able to support a really high volume," McAvoy says. "And we did not want any confusion; it was important that everything be made clear and standard." Interestingly, Java is a complete development no-show. It might be part of future development plans, according to MacAvoy, but the decision was made during the intranet's development that Java was too likely to be a security problem. On the desktop, users have Unix- and Windows-based machines. Unix was chosen as the server OS because "Unix was a much more scalable, proven platform for enterprise applications," MacAvoy says. Lucent uses Microsoft's Internet Explorer, but the intranet is designed to support Netscape Navigator as well. "We worked closely with our CIO organization to be really aware of what software and hardware employees already had on their desktops," Gill says. POSITIVE ACCEPTANCE. The intranet went live in January 1996 as a pilot. "We're really pleased with the response. It was much, much more than we expected," Gill says. She declined to disclose the actual cost of the project. When Lucent's human resources intranet is rolled out to everyone, Gill and her team will gradually take over the maintenance of the site. Eventually, kiosks will be available for those employees who do not have access to desktop PCs. And more information and services will be added to the platform as Gill considers employee suggestions. Perhaps a more telling sign of the intranet's success is the job satisfaction of the development team. "This is a tribute to everyone on the development team," Gill says. "Would I do it again? Absolutely." Ilan Greenberg is a free-lance writer based in San Francisco.		Access for 100,000 Challenge Create an intranet to give 100,000 employees access to information from the human resources department. Solution Hire Logical Design Solutions to build an intranet using standard Internet protocols. Benefits Employees able to customize their benefit plans online. Surprise Positive response to the pilot version, which led to the addition of extranets to accommodate external transactions. Key to success Incorporating feedback from both upper management and employees to establish cost-effective strategies. Advice Teamwork is essential not only to the creation of an intranet that serves a large user population but also to the intranet's ongoing maintenance and improvement. Web site http://www.lucent.com Score 694