Baylor Healthcare System's Marylynn Henry, project manager, and Michael Miller, senior technical architect, deployed an intranet that simplifies business processes and increases the company's purchasing power. Throwing out the old ways sounds good on paper, but for many corporations, the old ways are hard-coded into legacy systems.
Intranets change everything.
Intranets offer so much flexibility that corporations really can reengineer their basic business processes and increase the value of intellectual capital without sacrificing legacy databases or switching to new platforms. There are two major reasons for this. First, Web browsers run on many platforms, so an intranet doesn't require different versions of client applications for different platforms. The application can be changed quickly and easily to facilitate BPR by altering the Web pages and the database interface on the Web server. Second, intranets permit the implementation of a three-tiered architecture, which makes it unnecessary to upgrade or modify legacy systems in order to support changes in core business processes.