How intranets change the way we work

How intranets change the way we work
By Paul Wright

Collecting and sharing information was once considered a job best left to librarians. With the advent of the corporate intranet, everyone has a role to play in that game. In a traditional library, it's the books on the shelves that serve as the central attraction. Intranet-browsers are as likely to be interested in what their colleagues know as any library reader might be in seeking out some rare text.

Indeed, this sense of collective resourcefulness that an intranet may stimulate offers a clue to what sets some corporate intranets apart from others, and underscores their dynamic nature. Intranets have acquired the reputation of being passports to magical new corporate behaviors. Confronting the myths that prevail about intranets can make all the difference between their becoming remarkable tools for knowledge management innovation and stultifying tangles of information overload.

Susan Wiener and Patterson Shafer, at Cognitive Communications (New York, NY), point out the traps that can derail an intranet. A paramount lesson, they stress, is the importance of addressing one's business before creating an intranet application or site because, says Wiener, "knowledge management means putting into action the knowledge that exists in the company so it can meet your business goals." Simply asking what an organization is trying to achieve by building an intranet can help avoid a lot of disappointment later. That approach also helps surface an awareness of some of the myths that can frustrate even the best of intentions.

Myth #1: An intranet is a product.
In fact, observes Wiener, it's a process, interactive, evolutionary, and without end. The hardware and software that support it are not what make an intranet function well, but rather the notion of carefully constructing the policies and guidelines that keep it moving and steadily integrating feedback and content. This links up with…

Myth #2: The infrastructure is the product.
The infrastructure may be mission critical along the way, stress Wiener and Shafer, but the real challenge comes with overcoming mindset and culture to tap into the potential of what the network offers.

Myth #3: Build it and they will come.
Says Wiener: "If it's not embedded in your work and if it doesn't scream value, employees may not come, and if they do, they probably won't come back." Shafer adds that by taking care to develop sound ergonomics and ease of use, and by stressing perceived value, return on investment can be impressive.

Myth #4: Intranets are inherently collaborative.
This myth goes to the heart of many an assumption of what an intranet can accomplish. Because a corporate web requires considerable focus and commitment, it reflects the culture that already exists. Without a collaborative culture, an intranet can do little to create one in its place. Collaboration comes about, in part, as an imperative of market forces: in a fast-paced world, it's crucial to respond ever faster to customer needs with new products and services. This means supplying information rapidly to your workforce, and putting in their hands the means to get it independently. Wiener and Shafer suggest that those companies interested in becoming collaborative consider using the intranet as a tool along the way as they re-structure, and develop in tandem a compensation structure that rewards information sharing.

Harmonizing information Post-Acquisition
Let's look at some examples of intranets that have evolved with some of these myths in mind. Platinum Technology, Inc. (Oakbrook Terrace, IL) faces the problem familiar to many of rapid growth and rapid-fire acquisitions. Glenn Shimkus, Platinum's director of worldwide sales enablement, reports that in the past five years the company has seen its sales reach $1billion from a starting-point of $50 million. Behind this climb lie some 70 acquisitions, resulting in a knot of 30 intranet sites, over 80 Lotus Notes—databases, and more than 1,000 network drives. Shimkus reports that this presented the sales force with a difficult challenge of sorting out where to find the up-to-date product and company information it needed to do its job. In 1997, Platinum began to untangle this snarl by developing an intranet to capture explicit data in document format from throughout the world. Its goal was to ensure that sales members in Singapore had the same information available to people two doors down the hall. The initial result, says Shimkus, was a productivity improvement of six to seven percent, or a minimum of one hour a week saved by each member of the sales force. The intranet base established has spurred the company to move forward to looking at ways to use the web to capture best practice sharing, in part through establishing chat rooms, bulletin boards, and rapid response e-mail.

Shimkus reports that as decision-making occurs increasingly in the field, fewer calls come into senior management for referral and advice. Weekly sessions convened on the intranet introduce company experts to their peers, and bring together people who would not ordinarily find themselves talking. A particular challenge is to monitor the age of content on the 'net. The company looks at how frequently content gets updated (content not refined for a period of time gets pulled for review). The intranet also allows for monitoring to determine how quickly feedback from users results in action, and a rating system is being developed to allow users to assess content and usability.

How USWest Avoids Reinventing the Wheel
Similar forces have spurred USWest Communications (Denver, CO) in development of its intranet. Daya Haddock, project manager for the company's Global Village Labs (Global Village refers to the USWest intranet), reports that the rapid changes unleashed by the Telecommunications Act of 1996 have driven the company to rethink its business. Leveraging its web technology with its legacy and mainframe information systems became a priority to move information efficiently and quickly to its employees. While much of its intranet effort has focused on eliminating manual processes enabling its work force to tackle more complex problems (say, rapid information exchange between work areas without the need for rekeying), considerable effort has gone into developing ways for employees to help themselves and one another. With 35,000 browsers on employee desks (out of a workforce of 50,000), the USWest intranet, says Haddock, reflects a certain self-service bias. Training, for example, has been converted to online self-paced tutorials; a unified help desk speeds answers to employee questions; an application deployed within six weeks to some 10,000 service representatives now offers current data on company services.

In addition, observes Haddock, work teams and project teams have clamored for web sites that enable them to mount and exchange information, "breaking down barriers to information sharing." A registration process grew out of this need, to design standards and guidelines for web-sites, paving the way for easier keyword searches. (Any business-oriented web-site is permitted without restriction.) One standard that applies to web-sites provides that each must come complete with feedback mechanism. Focus groups, held at least quarterly, also provide input for user-oriented refinements. Because growing pieces of the company's Global Village web represent grass-roots initiatives, says Haddock, information formerly housed in the company's silos is rapidly becoming distributed across the company. "We'd much rather beg, borrow, and steal than re-experience the pain of re-inventing something." That attitude, in turn, spurs the freedom to create anew.

How the Intranet Supports Work Processes at The McGraw-Hill Companies
Meanwhile, fifteen years ago, reports Jack Goodman, senior director of corporate communications at The McGraw-Hill Companies (New York, NY), the then-chairman envisioned (long before the supportive technology existed) an "information turbine" that, as a meeting place of sorts for goods and services from throughout the organization, would spur the creation of products in new permutations. This vision later took root as one of the company's five objectives for launching its intranet some four years ago. (Saving money, improving communications, expanding relationships within and outside the organization, and enhancing work processes rounded out the set of five.)

While Goodman points to demonstrable results in use of the intranet to cut costs and strengthen communications, assessing its impact on work processes and collaboration requires more care. In December 1996, The McGraw-Hill Companies launched two newsgroups on the intranet. (A newsgroup rates as an exercise in collaboration involving at least one employee outside one's individual business unit.) The newsgroups now number 40, and extend throughout the enterprise. As the web's "adopter" community expands, the network, suggests Goodman, approaches the frontier separating intranet as novelty from intranet as a tool essential to do one's job. The fact that The McGraw-Hill Companies is moving toward its third generation underscores this shift. (Goodman reflects that McGraw-Hill initially seeded the "intranet marketplace" by identifying and spotlighting those who would be its "early adopters." In hindsight, he voices a preference for top-down, as well as bottom-up, support to launch the web into the company's mainstream.) As the newsgroups provide a growing number of forums for employees to raise challenging problems, explore alternative solutions, and broach new ideas, the workforce no longer depends on offline mechanisms to validate their ideas. Employees can instead obtain rapid validation online through their colleagues' expertise.

In this sense, the collaborative potential of the web begins to dovetail with its capacity to alter the way people work. Goodman notes that, once people begin to use the intranet, they recognize many of its benefits right off—its ability to help one work faster, for example, by providing ready access to information. But an inherently collaborative tool it is not. The first generation of the McGraw-Hill web served largely as a publishing medium. The second generation, reports Goodman, focuses more on the intranet as a vehicle for "getting the work done," pushing to support work processes on a function-by-function basis. While the company hones its global business objectives, its senior management—now recognizing new ways in which the intranet can support those objectives—pushes its value while employees, understanding its usability, pull to expand its reach.

True Collaboration at Xerox Corp.
Perhaps few companies better demonstrate the collaborative use to which an intranet can be put by a committed workforce than Xerox Corp. (Rochester, NY). David Woodruff, program manager in the office of the intranet, reports that the company, like others we've seen, originally envisioned its intranet as a publishing medium. As studies showed that nearly 80 percent of users simply scanned for information, and feedback poured in that the web often presented too much text, content grew more concise. "There was a desire to interact with the content. When people scanned a document, they wouldn't get enough information to allow them to ask reasonable questions." Here is a case of less is more.

Interaction—questions, bulletin boards, team and individual web-sites—became the hallmark of the company's intranet, at the behest of its users, who knew what they wanted and how they wanted it to work. Some 8,000 web-sites now populate the Xerox intranet, with each contributor the arbiter of access and content. Woodruff notes that his ultimate goal is that everyone in the company become a contributor.

Guidelines and protocols for use of the Xerox web grew directly out of agreements among users, who understood the value in having uniformity for search purposes, as well as to facilitate creation for new web sites. Use of the intranet, remarks Woodruff, has now become a given in the company, with value demonstrated constantly. He cites the example of a team in Italy picking up on schematics published by a U.S.-based design team. When the Italians suggested design changes that would result in a better machine at less cost, it was a solid lesson in the value of broadcasting information beyond the usually accepted boundaries.

Intranets are fast teaching the lesson that they do not transform an organization's culture, and do not create collaboration where none existed before. As a key ingredient in a comprehensive knowledge management strategy, they hold pride of place. And with a workforce galvanized to share knowledge and appropriately rewarded for doing so, intranets can become remarkable hothouses of creativity that demonstrate true ownership among their users.

Paul Wright is a contributing editor to Strategic Communication Management .