• Scenario A: Your company goes in for Internet connection to help employees find market and technical information from the Net. Two months later, you realize half the workforce stays back to log on to their favourite Yahoo and ICQ chat rooms.

• Scenario B: An important e-mail gets delayed as it is stuck up in a download queue of 50 other e-mails. The culprit is a colleague’s 10-MB multimedia attachment.

• Scenario C: Conceding to employees pleas for faster Internet connections, you subscribe to an ISDN connection. But hardly a month later, they are clamouring for more. What do you choose next: a 128-Kbps or a
  2-Mbps leased-line?

Have you been through similar situations? If you have,congratulations! It is time to bring in some structure, some planning to yourcompany’s Internet usage.

Internet and Your Company

Before developing an Internet strategy, one needs to know thereal value that the Internet brings to a company. And only a few companies canactually claim to have a full-fledged Internet strategy, in spite of thefashionable prefixes of "e" and "i" to their names.

Notwithstanding the different business models, the Internetoffers some common benefits to companies. It offers a readily available andcost-effective way in which both large and small businesses can make the most oftoday's IT infrastructure. It also enables one to access and use informationitself, either as a product, or in the form of a reusable building block forsubsequent growth. The Internet, with its open and extendible network structure,is a great leveler providing many small and medium sized businesses anopportunity to compete with larger and more sophisticated competitors. It isalso shaping up to be one of the best communication media for networking withbusiness partners and prospective customers. In the box are given someactivities that can be conducted through a simple Internet connection.

Two developments in the IT industry have raised the usabilityof Internet from the corporate perspective. One, security measures likefirewalls and encryption of data have made Internet a secured communicationmedium. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) is a cost-effective application of this.It uses Internet as the communication link for sending crucial private data overthe public network. By using this technology along with web hostingapplications, one can deploy an intranet that is accessible to authorized usersfrom any part of the world.

The second development is the convergence of voice, data, andvideo, which is making Internet a versatile communication medium. Internet,though primarily a data-centric medium, has the ability to transport voice aswell as video. Videoconferencing is another application that Internet promisesas it matures. It will be far more cost-effective than the dedicated privatelink across cities corporates use today. Internet telephony is yet anothercost-effective application for routing long distance calls.

Internet has a tremendous potential to empower youremployees. It helps in cutting down the response time and spreading the reach ofa company. Many companies have successfully employed the Internet to providecustomer support on a global basis. Internet connections are cheaper than a longdistance call and the language pronunciation barrier does not exist on the Net.It can transform a company’s market space from a local community to the entireworld. Another important thing that the Internet inadvertently brings intopractice is a new business/operational process within the organization. Theresult: transparency and accessibility within the organization.