Is the Internet Second Nature?

Do you excel at serving your employees?

At a second-nature Net company, people can go online to file expenses, to select benefit options, to order supplies, and to perform lots of other mundane functions. That commitment to internal customer service translates into better external customer service, because it fundamentally adjusts employees' perspective on how easy it should be to interact with a company. But there are other, more tangible benefits as well.

Cisco employs just two people to handle expense reports for the entire company -- thanks to an online system that automatically approves expenses that fall within certain parameters. Thus, a meal in Tokyo that cost $100 will probably be approved without a hitch, while a meal in Topeka that cost $100 might be flagged for a human audit. The system is so sophisticated that employees usually get reimbursed via electronic deposit within 48 hours of filing a report.

That approach saves money by cutting down processing costs; it increases productivity by liberating employees to get on with their real jobs -- and it makes retaining those employees much easier. "Once you've experienced how easy these things can be, it's hard to go back," says Bob Lavin, 44, senior director of technology and operations for Cisco's HR department. "I frankly don't think I could work for a company where it took me six weeks to get reimbursed for expenses."

Do you aggressively cultivate new ideas?

The best ideas win -- but only if they find their way into the arena. Net-centric companies know how to get ideas aired, vetted, and implemented with breakneck speed.

"Microsoft has always been a company that thrives on championing ideas," says Alex Simons, 30, a nine-year Microsoft veteran who is now a product-unit manager for bCentral. Not every idea finds a home at Microsoft. But there are no rules about whom an employee can pitch to, no penalties for wasting a VP's time, no stigma attached to backing a rejected idea.

Simons, who has gone three for seven in pitching ideas to Microsoft executives, recalls one pitch to CEO Steve Ballmer that failed: "I got three-quarters of the way through, and it was clear that Steve thought it was just a stupid idea. But there was no 'Hey, you're stupid.' He said, 'Hey, Alex, I don't think that this fits into Microsoft's strategy. But I'm willing to discuss it again. Why don't you come back in six weeks if you think that you have a story that addresses the issues I've raised?' I never went back to him. But it wasn't like there was any failure involved. It was just 'Well, on to the next idea.' "

In its approach to idea generation, Microsoft is "like a startup community with one venture capitalist," says Simons. "There's always a moment of truth when you have to go to Steve or Bill [Gates] and ask for money. But there is an awful lot of collaborative work that goes on inside the company before you get to that point."

Intel takes ideas seriously too -- so much so that it subjects them to a trial by fire. The company even includes a segment on "constructive confrontation" in the training that it offers all new hires. The class teaches employees how to rip into one another's ideas without actually ripping into one another. "We have this common way to disagree, and that gives us speed," says Michael Fors, 37, a comanager of Intel University and an instructor for the course. "We don't spend time being defensive or taking things personally. We cut through all of that and get to the issues."

Do your customers work for you?

For a Net-centric company, the flip side of "customer service" is "customers serve us." Any company can use the Internet to help its customers. But the Net enables companies to turn part of their customer base into an effective ad hoc R&D team.

At Microsoft, the Office team has reinvented its product-development cycle. Previously, the process of testing a new version of Office was an exercise in frustration: To inform the team about glitches in the software, volunteer testers had to pick up a phone or compose an email. The information submitted by testers was subjective and often incomplete. And by the time the team received that information, it was usually too late to change anything. Not anymore. Today, beta versions of Office are written so that if a tester's computer crashes while using the software, the tester can instantly send a report via the Internet that outlines exactly what he was doing at the time, what kind of system he was operating, and which programs he was running in the background.

By analyzing such data in preparation for its 2001 release, the Office team has been able to spot and fix bugs that it would otherwise detect only after the software was on the market. "The development curve is just incredible," declares Michael Angiulo, 28, group product planner for the Office group. "If we can fix 10 key bugs, we can make the product as much as 50% more stable."