Intranets Matter
Much has been written-and proved-about the efficiencies intranets deliver. But what about the individual employees whose workplace rhythms are fundamentally altered by the arrival of intranets? Do organizational efficiencies translate directly or indirectly into a better, more satisfying workplace for employees with a new tool at their disposal? A newly released market study says the answer is a resounding yes.
The study, "The Organizational Impact of Intranets," was conducted by Transition Management Advisors in Westerville, Ohio. It surveyed 1,000 new intranet users at Columbia Gas, Owens Corning, and Silicon Graphics.
Chief among its finding is that there's overwhelming agreement among those surveyed that the organizations' intranets are a valued and valuable new personal productivity tool - regardless of the geographical locations of the companies or the end-users markets they serve.
Jim Canterucci, president at Transition Management Advisors and the study's author, says the "bottom-up: nature of most intranets is the main reason users are so quick to embrace the new technology. "Intranets are different from much of the technology implemented previously," Canterucci says. "Intranets typically start form the bottom and reach upward through an organization. Though executive support is critical, intranets are great examples of grassroots efforts that take hold and grow quickly."
Ironically, the survey finds that the latest communications medium owes its usage in large measure to efforts that make use of the most traditional corporate communications medium: paper. Sixty percent of the users surveyed learned of their organization's intranet through paper memoranda or company newsletters.
Further illustrating the organizations' sites, users are quick to embrace the intranet as a critical workplace tool. Forty-four percent of respondents said they access their intranets at least daily; 40% said they access their sites at least hourly. Only 16% said they accessed their intranets on a weekly, or less frequent, basis.
Canterucci says that while some of the enthusiasm can be attributed to the novelty of the medium among those surveyed, this shouldn't obscure the operational role intranets assume within organizations. "The newness of the technology accounts for part of the high usage, but we are definitely seeing an increase in the number of mission-critical applications being delivered through intranets," Canterucci says. "As intranets become a more important part of an organization's infrastructure, users are actually connected to the intranet most of the day."
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Important Features
The respondents made it plain, however, that the "personal" nature of intranets is critical to repeated usage. When asked to rate the intranet features most important to them, the respondents placed task and project implementation fifth, trailing the ability to access company stock price; calculating the personal value of retirement funds; viewing job openings; and reading company and industry news.
Canterucci says the distinctly noncorporate preferences of the respondents shouldn't necessarily be seen as a productivity sinkhole. "The respondent's preferences, with the exception of task and project implementation, are not exactly mission-critical applications," he says. "But the lessons learned from successful sites on the WWW show that it's critical to generate enough interest that people come back repeatedly. To do this, content must be current and must apply directly to people's concerns. Once that is established, organizations can easily move users to more mission-critical applications. That's done much more easily if employees have an interest in the intranet site in the first place."
Underscoring Canterucci's contention that personal information is critical to repeated usage, the respondents' intranet usage patterns showed that the intranet pages with the greatest number of hits were, in order, those showing an "image of the day:" photos and brief stories highlighting something taking place within the company that day; stock price updates; "words of wisdom," or motivational quotes; employee pages showing 401(k) values, remaining vacation time, and benefit status; and company news.
Content issues aside, the respondents also said underlying technologies have contributed significantly to the popularity of their intranets. At the organizations surveyed, many users previously worked in mainframe-based environments and the Web interface represented a significant improvement in terms of navigational ease, even though the amount of content available increased dramatically.
The respondents also cited the inclusiveness of intranets as a major factor behind their popularity. Canterucci says this intangible factor is often a make-or-break element behind the success or failure of intranets. "Most successful intranets start off unofficially, usually with a volunteer effort," he says. "But the surprise is that the volunteer effort sustains itself into an official application for the organization."
The Great Equalizer
The application, in turn, leads to a self-sustaining medium that encompasses both personal and professional content, Canterucci contends. "Intranet technology equalizes communication across organizations, a factor that is certainly recognized by those who may have felt excluded in the traditional communications media," he says. "This, in turn, leads to a desire on the part of the intranet community to publish information and participation and participate more fully. As a result, we see a positive growth curve for useful information."
Chief among the negative aspects of intranets is the fact that not everyone in the organization has access to a computer on a regular basis, so intranet-disseminated information may not reach everyone within an enterprise.
There is also the inevitable lag time between an announcement and word of that announcement reaching the intranet. Where it once was tolerable for there to be a delay of a day or so in informing employees of an organizational development, the survey shows that intranet-empowered employees have diminished tolerances for information that's not published on a timely basis.
Within the specialized segment of intranet users who work in their organizations' IT departments, the most frequently cited negative factor was the loss of "control" over a key aspect of their organizations' technology infrastructures. Canterucci contends that turf wars of this sort are inevitable and, in many ways, healthy.
"Rather than IS determining what technology will be used, business lines now have the ability to publish information and have an accepted mechanism for delivering this information," he says. "This leads to resistance to the technology on the part of the technologists. We've also seen cases where corporate communications departments have been 'scooped' by individual departments within their organizations. These sorts of things don't sit easily among some of the people involved."
Ready For The Future
However, by solving these intranet-related difficulties, companies find themselves better aligned for future organization-wide technology and communications initiatives, Canterucci says. "Creative management solutions are required to solve these problems, which existed before intranets were inverted."
"Intranets have raised the bar and increased expectations for the delivery of information and services," Canterucci adds. "This puts pressure on communications and IT departments to deliver in this new environment," he says. "Ultimately, though, the IT and communications departments are pushed toward higher standards by the pressure that comes from users. This is decidedly a positive."
In the end, Canterucci contends, intranets are a dramatic step forward for the single factor he says separates successful organizations from also-rans: internal communication. "It has been proven that successful organizations communicate performance, communicate at the local level, and communicate through more than jus the written word," he says.
"Intranets are not the only answer," Canterucci adds, "but as a communications tool, intranets pass all these important tests. Given well-thought-out intranets, employees can accomplish a great deal more than they have in the past toward creating, and maintaining, a high-performance work environment."
Copyright (c) 1998 CMP Media Inc., Information Week