E-commerce - Big Interest, Little Action

"People would rather come down and chat," reveals Jean-Luc Devis, operations manager for the 15-employee in-plant at Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory. "There is a certain amount of that interface that people like. That human touch."

He says that even though a fair number of people use the in-plant's intranet site to fill out work requests and send files via an FTP site, many others feel more comfortable walking their jobs to the in-plant. They enjoy the relationships they have built up over the years with the in-plant.