Techspan's Techies: Their virtual profiles are maintained online for project managers to access 24x7

It's three in the afternoon on a recent Monday, and Ruchika Lamba is sweating it out-never mind that the plush workstation where she is seated is in LG Electronics' swank and centrally air-conditioned office in Greater Noida near Delhi. The cause of her palpitation is not the capital's scorching summer, but the question staring at her from the colour monitor in front of her. The 24-year-old Marketing Executive at LG is taking an online one-hour 'Global Test' that LG asks all its employees to take every quarter. And this question is the mother of minutiae; it wants to know ''How many sensors do the Dios (line of) refrigerators have?''

Lamba, of course, hasn't the faintest clue. Ordinarily, she would have scored zero on this question. But-bless the Internet-this is an online test on LG's own intranet (think of it as an internet that's available only to a select few), and clicking on an icon on the intranet toolbar, she opens a presentation that she knows has the answer. Bingo! Lamba ticks the right option. (If you must know, the Dios refrigerator has six sensors). Her final score on the test: 70 per cent. Fine, she didn't win the prize that two of her colleagues who scored 90 per cent did. But she came close to winning one-thanks to the intranet.

Across corporate India, employees like Lamba and human resources (HR) professionals are singing hosannas to the intranet. Just look at the wondrous ways in which this e-tool is helping them: at one click, it offers reach across offices and geographies; lowers transaction costs; demolishes bureaucracy; and even increases organisational transparency. ''The intranet is truly the glue that binds Wipro's 10,000-odd employees together,'' says Prateek Kumar, VP (HR), Wipro Technologies.

Business And Pleasure

Not too long ago, intranets were mere ''brochureware'' for companies; a portal where you could find notices, updates, and general information on the goings-on. Today, they've taken on a life of their own. And for the hr department, that's proving to be a boon. In a well-wired set up, more than three-fourths of all hr transactions can be done through the net by the employees themselves. That includes everything from filling out leave forms, claiming medical and travel expenses, checking leave status, pf balance, and even appraisals.

Intranets also allow companies to make do with a smaller hr team. C. Mahalingam, Vice President (hr), Hewlett-Packard (h-p), India, for example, estimates that a paper-dependent organisation needs one hr executive for every 55 employees. But a wired firm can get away with one hr executive for every 120 employees, without affecting hr quality. Not surprisingly then, more and more companies are realising that exploiting the power of the intranet not only improves efficiency and lowers costs, but also increases employee satisfaction.

At h-p, for instance, the hr portal (called @hp) is the sole gateway for all hr transactions. Wipro even has an 'intranet' scorecard for its functional departments, and if the score of any of these departments falls below a certain level, it is asked to make up. I-flex, a Citigroup software arm, connects its 2,000 or so employees across the globe via its ''I-opener'' intranet. And at Hughes Software Systems, employees can create their own home page on the intranet.

But mere connectivity or access to information isn't what the intranet is about. At Techspan, an e-consulting company promoted by Arjun Malhotra of HCL fame, the intranet is used to run a ''talent management system''. Teams are set up and disbanded 'online', depending on projects and their locations. All kinds of employee data, including resumes, notes on skill levels, project details and status, are available to the managers on the intranet. ''We can source specific skills from anywhere in the organisation real time,'' says Bonnie Singh, Head of hr at Techspan.

Online education is another benefit that companies are trying to reap from their intranets. Hewlett-Packard, for instance, offers more than 400 self-paced e-learning modules on the web through its @hp portal. Employees can register and go through these training programs at hours convenient to them. Wipro's Channel W-it even offers a customised stock ticker for real time changes in an employee's net worth-not just provides online courses, but also participative forums where a lot of brainstorming and troubleshooting takes place.

But getting employees to explore online resources is not the easiest of things to do. Even if they are interested, they may not have the time. What do you do? The Hyderabad-based Dr Reddy's Lab tried teasers. Sure enough, intrigued employees were turning its online e-Campus inside out in their search for answers. The newest addition to DRL's intranet is an e-module on yoga, which employees are encouraged to practice during their breaks.

NIIT, on the other hand, has a separate portal called iniitians.com, which is an online community portal for the employees. So, when NIIT posted dismal results in its third quarter ending September 2001, and the management wanted to check the ''temperature'' of the organisation, it invited employees to post their queries and concerns. More than 100 questions turned up on the intranet. During its annual session with employees in early May, NIIT answered the questions and put them out on the portal for all its 3,500 employees across 40 countries to see.

If you are not on the intranet bandwagon, don't even think of doing anything like that offline.