Fear. Fear of failure, fear of competition and most importantly, fear of the unknown. For the technophobe, the internet can be a frightening place, made worse by an avalanche of statistics that creates panic amongst those companies still to take their first tentative steps into the world of virtual business.
First, let us distinguish between the internet and the world wide web (WWW). The internet is physical in nature, made up of computers, routers and cables, which combine to form the infrastructure that holds and carries the WWW.
The web is effectively the content of the internet – the sum of inter-linked pages that make up the websites and the home pages of those organisations that have an internet presence. But for the purpose of this article, let us assume the internet and the web make up a single entity. For the sake of simplicity we will call this the internet.
The internet actually began, in its physical incarnation, as early as 1969, when the US Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) connected the computer systems of four universities, establishing a communications network that could withstand a nuclear attack.
The idea was, that if a nuclear strike destroyed any part of the series of interconnected networks, information and communications could still be re-routed around the surviving elements of the network.
The internet has since been developed to encompass a host of technologies that includes intranets, secure internal networks that facilitate communications within the organisation, and extranets, which extend the network and communications to a broader audience, including customers and suppliers.
These have major benefits for organisations, such as rationalising supply and demand chains as well as faster and more accurate response to customers. Intranets and extranets are broad topics in their own right but here we focus on what benefits the internet itself can bring.
