Where to Begin: Every Intranet Project Starts Somewhere and the Best Ones Never End
Reproduced with permission from CIO Magazine, this excerpt from an article (from the Power Source Column) by Tim Horgan, CIO Magazine webmaster and vice president of technology, discusses strategies for making an intranet an indispensable business asset rather than a failed collaboration tool.
On This Page
 | 2. Intranets are Everywhere |
| 3. Getting Started |
| 4. Recipe for Intranet Strategy |
Source of Content:
2. Intranets are Everywhere
Intranets are everywhere. In a recent Forrester Research Inc. survey of executives at 50 Fortune 1000 companies, 96 percent of those polled were either building or already using internal Web sites. Only 4 percent had no plans to invest in intranet technology. Other surveys indicate that 65 percent to 90 percent of America's biggest corporations expect to implement intranets by the end of this year.
There's no doubt that intranets are the emerging big business information infrastructure. And there's little debate about why. Used successfully, such a powerful one-stop information tool can help the organization improve communication, cut costs and ultimately shrink time to market.
What's still open to debate are the best strategies for developing an intranet that best serves those purposes. The bigger the company, the greater the cause for concern: Issues scale up for companies with more than a hundred users. In large organizations, intranet development—both construction from scratch and major renovation—often happens in a scattershot way, with different groups creating their own sites or pages and with little coordination or oversight. That approach can lead to information chaos: a patched-together intranet with clunky navigation, information gaps and redundant, conflicting, unreliable or outdated content. It's a result that is unlikely to inspire confidence in the intranet as a collaboration tool or a knowledge-management repository. Some corporate intranets that have fallen into that category have already been mothballed; it's a safe bet that in the next year others will follow.
Ideally, intranet creation (or rehabilitation) should start with a Web development team representing a cross-section of business and IT managers. Before spending a penny, assigning a single staffer or choosing the first image for the home page, that team must craft an intranet strategy: a clear collection of business (rather than technology) goals and a sense of how the Web site will help achieve them. The strategy must also address ways to integrate the internal Web site into the company's information systems, as well as into its culture and business processes. (For elements to consider in developing a strategy, see "Recipe for Intranet Strategy<http://www.microsoft.com/technet/deploy/begin/begin04.htm>")
The best place to start: at the top. Because the big guys oversee funding, user access, security levels and other key issues, their buy-in is critical for the intranet's success. To convince reluctant leaders, teams might want to promote not only t he Web's expected benefits and ROI but the possible consequences of not building an intranet, such as losing competitive advantage because of inability to cut time to market. As always, it's better to show than to tell. Thus, the management team may want to consider a business plan that outlines costs, allocates resources, projects ROI and emphasizes competitive advantage in addition to one-on-one demonstrations and training.
Next, the strategy statement should call for stimulating widespread employee interest through an aggressive evangelism effort. The strategy might call for a pilot project with key user groups that would help sell the concept to others. As success stories circulate, demand will grow.
From the start, the Web team must consider—and periodically reconsider—a variety of management questions (many to be discussed in more detail in future Power Source columns).
| • | Applications: How will the business use the intranet? Who is our audience? How will that change down the road? |
| • | Organization and management: Who will control the intranet? Who will set standards? Who will set policy? How will the effort be funded? How will the intranet be integrated into the business? What is the IS role? |
| • | Staffing: Who will be on our Web development team? Will we use our own people or consultants? What do we do about training, services, support, testing new tools, keeping an eye on emerging technologies? |
| • | Prevention of information chaos: How do we make sure people will find the information they need? How do we prevent redundancy, dueling data, stale content? Do we want an enterprisewide look and feel? Or do we want some diversity between business units? |
| • | Publishing: Who owns information? What standards will we have for publishing, and who decides what can be published? How will it be updated? What happens to the information when users move on or lose interest? |
| • | Network infrastructure: Can the current network handle the traffic the intranet will bring? Will it be able to handle more sophisticated types of tools, such as multimedia? Can it scale up to support thousands of users and advanced applications? |
| • | Security: What information do we protect? How do we protect it? What are the policies, and how do we enforce them? |
Intranet education never ends. Once Web evangelists have sold their vision, they must continually train users, either in face-to-face seminars, with real-time hotline support or through online options such as FAQ (frequently asked questions) documents, help guides, tutorials and seminars.
Strategies should include the best possible information architecture and design, as critical an element for intranets as it is for external sites. Web teams must ascertain what information most people need most often and make that information easy to find as well as accurate and up-to-date.
On the technology side, Web strategists must consider server management, planning and monitoring to handle heavy traffic as well as overseeing physical site management and determining how legacy systems, such as databases, fit in.
They need to take a hard look at security, putting concerns in perspective to make sure they don't become just another excuse for avoiding investments in intranet technology. That means deciding whether top-grade security is worth the trade-offs in ease of use, widespread access, cost and speed.
Finally come the role players. The webmaster is chief technologist and evangelist; the Web champion can secure funding, clear roadblocks, identify new opportunities and keep the effort on track, and individual publishers are responsible for their business unit's pages.
Because those jobs will change frequently as the intranet expands, it's a good idea to assemble a kit of common tools, processes and services that, like the Web strategy itself, will survive the personnel changes and make the transition as seamless as possible.
The Web survival kit might contain the following components, many of which will be discussed in future Power Source columns:
1. | User tools: Packages of tested, licensed and supported tools, such as browsers and plug-ins, configured to go together, increasing user acceptance and reducing costs. |
2. | Discovery tools: Various methods that help people quickly find information. These tools include search engines, agents and Yahoo-like announcement directories. |
3. | Web toolbox: A centrally accessible and user-friendly collection of tools, hints, warnings and information-sharing anecdotes intended to build and integrate Web applications, improve Web-related decision making, bring new people up to speed an d cope with constant change. The toolbox, which might include tools such as editors, filters, forms, graphic tips, robots and tracking devices, helps not only the core technical team but also those individual users or groups who "own" their pages. |
4. | Common applications: Tools most people use, such as online appointment books or conference-room schedulers. |
5. | Environment managers: Tools that help technical staff monitor and manage large, complex intranets, such as software that automatically tags broken links or reminds page owners to update their content. |
6. | Web publishing system: Tools and processes to enable information owners to convert ideas into Web content by creating and managing their own sites. These might include Web authoring tools, database access tools or templates such as Microsoft Corp.'s FrontPage® and Adobe Systems Inc.'s PageMill. |
7. | Information archives: An enterprisewide repository for corporate data, often residing in legacy systems. |
8. | Index pages: A single internal home page that everyone uses as a common baseline, even if individual groups create their own views. |
9. | Support systems: Creative support for all users. In the end, all the details of a Web site strategy can be condensed into a couple of concepts: First, it should be an enterprisewide effort to help all contributors build and grow their sites rather than do all the work for them. And, above all, the work is evolutionary, not revolutionary. If you're doing the job right, it's never truly finished. |
3. Getting Started
| • | Appoint a business-technical Web strategy team. |
| • | Develop a written vision and a strategy. |
| • | Outline necessary costs and work. |
| • | Hire or outsource. |
| • | Build a prototype. |
| • | Work with existing corporate culture. |
| • | Get executive support. |
| • | Start small: Sell a target user group. |
| • | Educate everyone. |
| • | Consider security trade-offs. |
| • | Measure progress. |
| • | Update the vision, strategy, budget and work plans as needed. |
4. Recipe for Intranet Strategy
| • | Big-picture vision |
| • | Business purposes and goals |
| • | Ongoing planning for all areas from content to staffing to security technology upgrades |
| • | Widely communicated policies for access and publishing |
| • | Constantly updated security procedures, including policies on access, monitoring and enforcement |
| • | Mechanisms to scale funding to hundreds or thousands of users |
| • | Evangelism to both executives and employees |
| • | Short- and long-term goals |
| • | Considerations for legacy systems |
| • | Methods for spotting emerging technologies and determining whether, when and how to incorporate them |
| • | A flexible, regularly revisited business plan |
Webmaster Tim Horgan can be reached at thorgan@cio.com.
CIO Magazine - October 1, 1997
© 1997 CIO Communications, Inc.<http://www.cio.com/>