Projects: Intranet

A large multinational company needed to develop a company-wide intranet. The problem was that the information technology organization (IT) was staffed the best and brightest technologists in the industry. The reason that this was a problem was that the remainder of the company was composed of employees who had little no experience with computers. The two groups found it difficult to communicate with each other. There was also some mistrust and fear of IT. My became forming a communication bridge between IT and the business units and webify the company.

A choice had to be made between building a single Web site where all content would be managed by a Web czar or to empower employees to build their own Web sites following a loose set of guidelines. My vision for the company's intranet was much larger than a single Web czar could handle at the speed needed to disseminate information. I also believed that content growing from the ground up would be more organic and spontaneous than content dictated from above. This was a bold move that was possible only because I was supported at the CIO and director level by enlightened visionary management.

My first objective was to negotiate with IT to obtain the basic intranet infrastructure required to publish Web sites and to enable those employees connected to the intranet to access published Web sites. I needed a Web server and account administration authority. I also needed staff to build and maintain the Web server.

Microsoft FrontPage was established as the corporate standard for Web publishing software. It had the advantage of having an interface that was familiar to Microsoft Office users. This reduced the learning curve for new Web publishers. FrontPage was also the only tool that adequately managed Web sites. Most of the Web creation software at the time was page oriented rather than site oriented. I wanted to empower the Web publishers to publish large amounts of content distributed over dozens and later hundreds and thousands of Web pages. IT disliked FrontPage because they were anti-Microsoft and preferred using Unix servers and FrontPage worked best on Windows NT servers. The compromise was to install FrontPage extensions on what was the first of many Unix servers. Unfortunately, I never convinced IT to install all of the needed FrontPage extensions on their Unix servers. The result was FrontPage never operated as smoothly as possible. The religious war waged by the Unix faction of IT against Microsoft products was a constant impediment to success. Concessions were gained slowly and painfully. It took nearly three years to win enough concessions to install Windows NT servers and most of the FrontPage extensions, which worked perfectly.

IT, the organization I worked for, was nearly always at odds with the business side of the company. Business units wanted technology that they could use to do their jobs better. They wanted to be competitive in the marketplace. They saw their competition using technology and software that had not even been planned for implementation within their own company. Whenever they asked for a new technology or software IT said no. In the defense of IT, it was faced with a fixed budget and a fixed head count. There was nothing they could do to rapidly respond to the needs of their customers. The result was not beneficial to either group.

My team's Web publishing effort was successful because we were able to bridge the gap between the business units and IT. My success with the business units was a result of an unlikely change agent tool, chocolate chip cookies. Our team also did something even more radical, we held the first user group meetings in the history of the company. I baked chocolate chip cookies for nearly all of our user group meetings. At every user group meeting we asked the previously unasked question, "What can we do to help you do your job better?" The user group meetings were held at lunchtime and were voluntary. Our first user group meeting attracted just a few early adopters. Our team outnumbered the audience and we had a small team. At that time there were only about a dozen Web pages on the Intranet. In the third year the user group meetings grew to more than a hundred people. They evolved from roundtable chats to workshops and demonstrations, but we always asked how we could help.

Another reason for our success was that our team provided outstanding customer service. One of the required qualifications for becoming a member of our team was a strong belief in customer service. When we started issuing Web sites to business units, we invested a great deal of time in desk visits. When one of our Web publisher customers had a problem with publishing their Web site or using FrontPage, we stopped whatever we were doing and rushed to the customer's desk. We walked our customers through their problems and left them with a new positive feeling about IT. One customer was so impressed at our willingness to help that they expressed the intensity of their emotion by taking the papers from their desk and throwing them on the floor. They said that they had never encountered a team like ours at any company they had ever worked with.

We had our detractors. Some didn't like the organic nature of the way we empowered organizations to develop Web sites. It was admittedly messy at times. Over time, users of messy Web sites let the publishers know their complaints and the offending sites were cleaned up and organized. Some wanted us to impose a homogeneity of look and feel on all of the Web sites. We argued that organizations should have the freedom to determine the look and feel of their Web sites after basic requirements were met. We lost that argument. As the intranet grew it became one of the most valuable assets of the company. Competition for control of the Intranet became heated. We lost that competition.

Our team successfully Webified an entire global company. Nearly every process, document, or database became accessible through a Web browser over the company's intranet. We used the intranet in ways that no one imagined. We introduced desktop to desktop video conferencing. We bought digital still cameras and showed our customers how to publish digital images to their Web sites. We used the intranet to support volunteerism. We used the intranet to create communities beyond the Web publisher's community. We used the intranet to support community activities like Take Our Daughters to Work Day. For one Take Our Daughters to Work Day I worked with the National Science Foundation to establish a real-time desktop to desktop video conference with a scientist stationed at the South Pole.

Our methods were successful. The company's intranet grew from the original dozen pages to more than seven Gigs of mission critical information. The first few Web publishers grew to more than four hundred. The number of Web sites grew from a few to more than eleven hundred. To support the growth, our team grew from one person to eight people over the three years of our operation. Our team changed the entire corporate culture for the better. We received awards, letters of recommendation, and praise from the CEO for our work. Most importantly had gained the trust and respect of our coworkers in both IT and business units.

Since there are no accepted standards for measuring the return on investment for intellectual capital. It is difficult to estimate the exact value that our team added to the company. Estimates ranged into the tens of millions of dollars, but my guess is that the figure was much higher.

We could not have been successful if we didn't have the support on enlightened management especially at the executive level. When we attended industry trade shows and listened to experts in the fields of knowledge management we heard repeatedly that executive level support was absolutely essential for the success of projects like ours. They were right.

Even with great managers and enlightened executives there were some concepts that the company never understood. The corporate intranet outgrew IT. The intranet was a larger concept than IT. At a conceptual level it was on par with IT, marketing, sales, and operations. Not getting this is not a criticism of the company I worked for as much as it is for companies in general. Corporations lack the history of dealing with new concepts of the magnitude of the Internet, intranets, and Webs. Intranet development is, more often than not, relegated to a department status within IT or communications. In reality, intranets are more important in the hierarchy of organizations than IT and communications combined. The head of an intranet should be an executive level position on par with the CIO, COO, and CFO. Neither IT or communications organizations have the skills necessary to grow the needed content for an intranet. IT organizations are notorious for their lack of customer service skills. Communications organizations are too controlling and by their nature flow information in one direction only. If I had to name an existing executive level position that should be in charge of a corporate intranet it would be the CKO or chief knowledge officer. Corporations have a great deal to learn about intranets and managing knowledge.

One of the clichés of business is that the only constant is change. As a result of numerous reorganizations we lost our executive and director level support. Everything we spent years to develop unraveled in weeks. Ownership of the intranet changed. The culture we encouraged was discouraged. When I was told that chocolate chip cookies would no longer be served at the user group meetings I knew that an end of an era had arrived. That's when I left that company to found an Internet start-up company.

If we had the opportunity to continue with the same executive and management support, our organization would have evolved to the next level of intranet development, knowledge management. It was clear to us that the amount of information being published to the intranet overwhelmed seekers of information. It was time to upgrade the search engine, introduce the concept of Meta tags, and implementation of advanced document management technology.

Implementation of an intranet radio station and television station was next on my to do list. Nearly every employee who could was already viewing and listening to video and music on or through their computers. The next step was to use that same channel to communicate with employees and empower employees to communicate with each other and management. I knew several employees who maintained personal online radio stations at home. I was going to leverage their hobby to create a brand new channel of corporate communication. The potential opportunities of running an in-house online radio and television station were awesome.

Our ability to support users with desk visits ended when our first out of city Web publishers started publishing. When out of state and out of country Web publishers became active we knew that we had to develop a means of scaling customer service. We were just beginning to explore desktop to desktop video as one means of providing support. We also developed a train the trainer process to spread support out to remote operations. Unfortunately, these solutions were not implemented.

What I learned from this experience is that it is possible to build an incredibly valuable intranet with executive support, little funding, and few staff. I learned how very important customer service is. I learned the importance of developing communities within companies. I learned how important it is to use technology in very human ways as means of helping people adopt that technology. I also learned the value of a great chocolate chip cookie recipe. That recipe is online at http://www.inforochester.com/cookie1.htm. This is the cookie recipe that helped change the culture of a company.

Looking back I now know how visionary we were by giving intranet Web publishing privileges to employees. Web 2.0 and 3.0 is all about enabling individual users to publish upward. Web czars are history. If I were given the same task again, I would give every employee the power to publish to the corporate intranet Web site. Additionally, I would establish an intranet Wiki that would enable everyone to edit every document used in the company. Enabling employees to write their own user manuals for everything that they do and for every process used in a company would be awesomely powerful.

Contact Information:

Max Lent
Business and Web Consultant
812 Coventry Drive, Webster, NY 14580
Telephone: 585-670-9707