"Company
Junk Drawer" No More:
Best-In-Class Intranets Are Corporate Workhorses
by Leslie O’Flahavan and Marilynne Rudick,
E-WRITE
This
month we had the privilege of being judges for the Content
Management Network's first annual Intranet Best In Class
(IBIC) award. (Congratulations to the winner: LexisNexis's
Employees Intranet.) The application packets were impressive
and showed in many ways how far Intranets have come since
somebody nicknamed them the company junk drawer: "It's
all in there somewhere; it's just impossible to find!"
Here's what we learned about how these state-of-the-art
Intranets improve communication and support the company's
mission:
1.
Successful Intranets save companies money.
All IBIC award applicants reported that their Intranets
save big bucks by eliminating paper forms, reducing employee
time spent completing tasks, and automating processes.
At a credit card company, the online employee directory
realized savings of $45,300 in 2003 employee productivity.
A publishing company reported that Online Benefits Enrollment
saved around $350,000.
2.
Successful Intranets respond to user needs.
Intranet teams use interviews, focus groups, polls, usability
testing, and surveys to identify users' information needs
and to measure user satisfaction with the Intranet. And,
as they say, surveys show that award applicants' users
are really happy with their Intranets:
•
From an environmental and energy systems business: "69%
agree the Intranet helps them be more productive in their
jobs…"
• From an automobile manufacturer: "Our post-launch
survey reports 91% overall satisfaction rate …"
• From the credit card company: "84% of employees
say that the Intranet is their primary source for information…"
3.
Successful Intranets get the support of top management.
Far from being a little "side project" well
under management's radar, these Intranets get attention
from the top:
•
"Leadership uses the Intranet as the primary way
of communicating with employees…" Award applicants
reported that leadership relied on data gathered from
the Intranet to develop webcasts and keynote addresses.
• "Our Intranet was one of the corporate-wide
success stories at our annual meeting…" Managers
use the Intranet to do their work. At one company, managers
are required to submit employee appraisals via interactive
forms available only on the Intranet. And for the ultimate
testament to its value, one CIO showed support by permanently
assigning developers to the Intranet initiative instead
of merely detailing developers one project at a time.
4.
Successful Intranets are well-governed.
In the past, Intranets were often patchwork quilts of
design, branding, and style. All IBIC award applicants
described orderly Intranets, ones that give users a consistent,
predictable, useful experience. And making the user experience
orderly requires consistent rules and "policing"
on the back end. Award applicants reported that their
Intranet content is governed by web policies and guidelines;
content must fit within templates. In their application,
the credit card company stated, "We developed a style
guide for content providers - and we do enforce style
guidelines."
5.
Successful Intranets involve everyone in contributing
content.
Though they use different tools to enable content contribution,
all the IBIC Award applicants shared the goal of drawing
content from across the organization:
•
The energy systems business: "We have 825 certified
authors using Front Page..."
• The credit card company: "Our Intranet has
150 content publishers…"
• The automobile manufacturer: "93% of departments
publish content on our Intranet…"
6.
Successful Intranets are big.
Yesterday's Intranets may have been big, too, but they
were big and unwieldy. Departments threw up content without
much thought to navigation or format. Today's successful
Intranets are big because they contain useful content,
structured so users can quickly find what they need:
•
"Our Intranet includes 650 websites consisting of
over 100,000 pages."
• "16 million page views; 15,000 different
pages…"
7.
Successful Intranets use content management systems.
Yesterday's Intranets suffered from shoemaker's-children-go-barefoot
syndrome. While the company's public web site used a state-of-the-art
CMS, the "family" Intranet was still managed
by hand. Not so anymore. Whether they build one in-house
or purchase one, the IBIC Award applicants use content
management systems for creation, maintenance, and automation
of Intranet content. Applicants see CMS as the only option
for managing such large and vital Intranets.
8.
Successful Intranets have long-term plans.
When thinking about the future, these Intranets planners
think big: an enterprise portal, a web content management
system, a federated search service, project collaboration
capabilities, and instant messaging. IBIC Award applicants
knew exactly how the Intranet would grow over the next
2 to 4 years:
•
"We plan to add portal technology in 2004…"
• "Future development for our Intranet is evaluated
quarterly …"
• "We launched v 4.5 this November and v 4.6
is already in development…"
As
you can see, today's Intranets are not the poor stepchildren
of their Internet parents, poorly dressed and underfunded.
As the IBIC Award applications showed, today's Intranets
are corporate workhorses that improve communication, streamline
and automate tasks, and save companies money. The words
of one applicant put it in a nutshell: "Our corporate
Intranet is a content-rich, user-focused portal to information,
tools, applications, and services for our 4,500 employees
and contractors in 30 offices around the world."
Company junk drawer no more!
E-WRITE teaches
people the new rules for writing quickly and well in the
electronic age.
We develop and teach writing courses, write the
content for web sites, and translate print to online writing.
Leslie O'Flahavan and Marilynne Rudick
E-WRITE
leslie@ewriteonline.com
http://www.ewriteonline.com
Tel. 301.989.4655
Fax. 301.989.9583
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