Banks Begin to Tap the Web's Potential for Internal Change

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Some call it "webizing." The results can be far more dramatic than online banking has been so far

"The Internet will change everything!" web evangelists have been telling us for the past five years. Bankers have mostly been looking at the marketing side for signs of transforming changes in the delivery of financial services. True, we have internet banking and bill paying, but 80% of banks don't offer it yet and 90% of consumers don't use it yet. However, the internet revolution is happening in business-to-business (B2B) interchanges.

And there's another frontier: "webizing" internal operations. Today, only the biggest enterprises are exploring new ways to handle their internal processes. Few bankers are even aware of the potential benefits.

But using the web to integrate the flow of external and internal operations is surely the way the business world is going.

Evangelists call it creating an information ecology -- the natural habitat of shifting alliances of added-value providers.

A company-wide, information web-based network integrates internal technical resources and business logic with information from customers, vendors, and trading partners. When integration stops at the edge of the enterprise, it's called an intranet.

It becomes an extranet when it also …