CUED Talk: The WWW and Money

In 6 years, the WWW has changed from being a research topic to something which anyone can use. Global usage is doubling every 6 months. At CUED there are

Up to 30,000 e-mail message send out a day
Up to 20,000 WWW files requested a day
20 local newsgroups to facilitate discussion

This use of the internet is becoming typical in business too. According to Radio 4's "In Business" program over In 1998 40% of US business mail is e-mail, and for many companies it's mission-critical. A third of US High Street outlets have pages on the WWW. A National Computer Centre survey in June 1999 showed that 66% of companies either have an Intranet or are developing one - a 50% increase on 1998. Using an "intranet" in this fashion is viewed as very cost-effective. The Black Box survey at about the same time showed that 95% of UK companies are online.

The CUED computer staff changed to using the WWW rather than paper because we wanted to provide a better service and do less work! We think we've succeeded in providing a much better service (much more information is available now, and at all times). However we do just as much work as before (though of a different type). Other larger organisations have reported similar experiences, with job descriptions being revised whenever there's any staff turnover.

Internally - e-mail has been used for years. We now use the WWW to deliver documentation and information because it's cheaper, the information is more up-to-date, and people working from colleges or home can still access the material.
Externally - It's a cheap way of attracting students, staff, sponsors, and alumni money.

In companies resistance takes various forms

Objections to the cost of hardware, expertise and a help-desk - at CUED we are lucky in that these facilities are available already within the university.
Objections that benefits hard to quantify - at CUED our information-providing function is easy to quantify. Logs of WWW traffic show that we are helping many more people than we could in the days when information was provided by phone or on paper.
Fear of staff wasting their time "cyberskiving". According to a 1999 survey by Black Box IT directors at 20% of companies questioned said that their operation was hampered by staff wasting time on 'fruitless web browsing'.

The change to greater WWW use can bring other organisational changes

A change in power balance, a marginalisation of technophobes
A need to revise information flow and control
A change from static to dynamic data. Exploiting the WWW is not merely a matter of putting paper documents online - there shouldn't be any more lists/directories revised only once a year!

In succesful companies

Information is treated as a shared resource
Users are aware of the information available
There are audits of information resources
Innovation in using/enriching information is encouraged and rewarded.
Senior executives are comfortable with technology.

See Business Use of the World Wide Web: a report on further investigations by Hooi-Im Ng, Ying Jie Pan, and T.D. Wilson.

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Updated July, 1999

tpl@eng.cam.ac.uk