FYC is a furniture company that is moving slowly into the twenty-first century as far as technology is concerned. It has only recently enabled its customers to place orders on the Internet (previously, they used the Internet as a catalog and placed the order via phone). Internally, there is a broad spectrum of eagerness to embrace new technology as well as a broad spectrum of technology available. Some departments continue to use manual paper methodology while other managers use Excel spreadsheets. At the same time, the company is considering how best to integrate its Web presence with external customers and vendors, and leverage the technology that it recently implemented to reduce transaction costs. This research considers the next step-intranet or extranet-for FYC.
An intranet, as its name implies, takes an internal focus within an organization. It connects departments and enables data to flow free and be manipulated throughout the organization. An extranet connects the company to the outside world, but in a more controlled environment than "just" a website. Extranets are often used to connect a company with customers, vendors and service providers such as payroll companies and banks. In FYC's environment, an intranet could be used to automate processes that are currently handled manually, such as order entry, while an extranet would do the same for external transactions, such as placing purchase orders. The company's recent innovation of allowing orders to be placed via the Web means that some information is already available electronically on an internal basis from external sources; this lends itself to both an intranet and extranet (Lazzara, 2007).
Eventually, FYC should make use of both an intranet and extranet that are linked; at this point, however, the company is able to roll out only one. Internally, the company
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