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  RFP: Corporate Intr anets By Brian Walsh Put yourself in my shoes. I'm the chief technology officer at Network Computing's mythical AppLogistics Inc., and I represent an international group of people with different companies and different names, selling different products to different customers with different systems, in different states, regions and countries. Our corporate imperative is to ensure that these disparate entities present a single, unified image to the market. I'm the guy who has to sell this to them or else jam it down their throats. I'm the one telling them they have to become a new sales and marketing organization. What's the quickest way to get them up and running? What's the best way to support them? An intranet, that's the ticket! With an intranet, you point your browser at your new server and away you go. We decided we'd issue an RFP for a packaged application and Web infrastructure. Then we'd issue a second one with AT&T, MCI or some large Internet service provider (ISP) for the virtual private network (VPN). They'll mail our users the browser disks, they'll handle the setup and user support. Bang! we're up. No problem, right? Well, let me tell you what really happened.
first 10 years, we enjoyed slow, steady growth. Recently, the company has grown by acquisition. In the past 10 years, we have purchased or merged with seven other companies to form a significant presence in Western Europe and Asia. As a result, we now have 11,000 employees in the United States, Europe and Japan, including a sales force of 1,000. The company operates in North America, Europe, Asia, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. Until recently, manage ment co ntrolled the organization as a holding company. Each individual operating company maintains its own way of doing business, including handling its inventory, sales systems and supplier management systems. Now, management has changed strategy and will take an active role in the day-to-day operations of each firm. Therefore, the goal of our RFP was to create the infrastructure necessary to integrate these separate units into one unified company. Strategic Decisions Strategically, we made two decisions. Sales and marketing are our target application domains. An intranet is our chosen infrastructure. To create a unified brand, AppLogistics management is concentrating on creating a uniform sales organization out of the discrete sales teams in the operating companies. We want the new intranet to reinforce our unified approach to the market with common literature, lead management, customer databases and order entry. We want our new intranet to connect the members of the sales force to each other and t o other AppLogistics groups for sales and service. The individual companies will maintain their existing systems for all other business functions, such as inventory, supplier management and human resources. Our eye is on the business problem, not the technology. The trick is to dovetail the technology with the business imperative of a single, unified corporation, operationally creating an ideal centralized environment that appears, for all intents and purposes, as a local operation in each of our markets.
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AppLogistics, a multinational company specializing in the distribution and supply of electronic components and connectors, was founded in 1976 in Milwaukee. For the
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