The most visible form of ROI is from substantial savings in paper and production-related expenses. Beyond the need to distribute news to all employees, most companies also have a need to inform their workforce about company policies and practices. HR documents like the Employee Handbook and an extensive library of technical literature may be put on an internal web thereby enabling employees to access this information when they need it. Undoubtedly there are productivity gains from having a well-informed workforce, although the ROI may be less visible. Powerful synergism can emerge between unrelated projects when everyone knows what s going on in other groups.
Employees feel proud when they learn about corporate achievements and success stories.
All of the major database manufacturers like Oracle, Informix and Sybase offer customized extensions to Perl and other common programming languages which let in-house programmers build bridges between legacy databases and web servers. Once this middleware is in place, the consistent user interface of web browsers like Netscape make existing databases much easier to use which makes that data more valuable. They like the web because their data is now more visible and used more heavily. The third win is for the support organizations that, in the past, had to support the endusers who needed client software installed on their systems and training on how to use that software. Most large organizations have traditionally run their business on several large databases from multiple vendors.