Hot Questions
Jakob Nielson, Principal, Nielsen Norman Group, warns about designing portals for the business units rather than employees
How should companies begin conceptualizing and planning their intranet?
Companies need to realize that they're designing for the users and not for
the various departments. They need to learn about the day in the life of an
average employee. There's probably several types of employees—those at
headquarters, in branch offices, out in the field. They need to pinpoint these
employees' true needs.
How do they identify these?
I would recommend a study where you identify the main types of users, and you
really shadow them for a day or two to see what they do, see what their
information needs are, see how they go about their job. You will identify unmet
needs, ways in which people do awkward, clumsy things working around problems
with the system.
You need to know how the employees think about the different services that are
offered, and what they think are related services. Get a hold of 20 employees
from different divisions and put them through card-sorting exercises, where
they're given lists of services and asked to put cards together in piles
[according to which services] they think are similar.
Are these employees, managers or end users?
It has to be the end users because the managers know only how things are
supposed to be done, not how they're actually done. Most internal systems are
going to be used by the people on the floor, so to speak, most of the time.
Therefore, they are the ones you want to test. They're the ones you want to
interview and follow around for a day, whatever methodologies you use.
What type of development team would best translate these results into content?
Small teams work well, with experts on web design and employee communication
and web technology. These small teams make decisions according to their studies
of average employees' jobs and their information needs. You should not assume
that an uninformed group of managers knows what information people out in the
field actually need from their department.
How should an intranet development team divide its tasks?
I would want to have a group that focuses on, let's say, the German office.
Another group focuses on the staff at headquarters. Yet another group focuses
on the needs of the traveling salesperson. The site and development team should
be grounded in the human reality, not in the system reality.
So intranets should be more focused on employee types rather than on the types
of action that all employees execute?
Exactly. And on the tasks of the jobs these people have. It's not just their
jobs in terms of formal job description but what they actually do in a day.
This includes viewing their benefits or checking out the menu in the corporate
cafeteria. Yes, there are a variety of things that people do, but you need to
look at the people's roles.
Future Trends
We identify the following top 10 trends for intranet/extranet development:
Trend 1: Customers Are Becoming the Focus of the System
When companies began to deploy web systems five years ago, the focus was on providing easier access to information. These systems soon evolved into tools that simplified and enhanced customer interactions, in addition to helping companies get to market faster and create new online business opportunities. More recently we saw companies focused on helping make the customer more successful, and in the process reap customer loyalty — and profits. Clearly, making it easier to do business with your company can mean more profit, but, more important, in the long term it can help develop customer loyalty.
Trend 2: Delivering Information Where Its Needed
Companies are now delivering information to a wide variety of locations. Mazda North America gets information down to the repair shop floor, where mechanics access details about a car by its VIN. Milwaukee-based Cleaver-Brooks is delivering design information to boiler rooms, helping 10,000 engineers worldwide design and specify products better, faster and more accurately.
Trend 3: The Intranet Is Becoming a Utility
The trend of the intranet becoming critical for doing business continues. Ninety-eight percent of Cisco's employees use their intranet on a regular basis, and Cisco enjoys one of the highest revenue per employee in the industry.
Trend 4: Integration into All Business Processes
One of the key messages from the companies we saw in this category is that value is best created by deep integration with the entire business process. At Cisco, each of its 16,000 employees is considered a web developer, all systems development is web-based and all web development is funded by the business. Cisco calculated its ROI for web work at $35 million per year.
Trend 5: More Interesting Applications
Recently we have seen a number of especially interesting ways of deploying the web. There is the "Ask Mom" section on Remedy's intranet, Sandia's rumor area, the ticker that tracks the status of major projects and National Semiconductor's tools that help customers create homepages.
Trend 6: More Support for Collaboration
More webs are helping people work with each other, not just inside corporations but also with other business partners. 3Com has its 3Community site, and the U.S. Navy and Boeing have a system called GOSNET that helps them share information.
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Trend 7: More Sophisticated Development Models
As the web becomes more important to businesses, we are seeing companies become smarter about how they develop, maintain and extend their internal systems. PHH has adopted the "design big, build small" approach, which allows the company to extend its web piece by piece, based on an existing model and architecture.
Trend 8: Less Is More
As we combed through this year's applications, we saw that while more companies are formally funding web projects, they are not building large teams to accomplish their internal systems. Many (the U.S. Navy, Sandia and Fujitsu, for example) are deliberately keeping their teams small.
Trend 9: Creeping Knowledge Management
KM is hitting the intranet, initially in the form of "communities of interest." Companies that have started knowledge management deployments report that they are better able to compete. We saw examples of such deployments at Cisco, where they were built around classes of people (sales and IT for example), Ford and some of the consulting companies.
Lesson 10: New Business Opportunities
As companies do a better job of capturing and sharing information, some are finding new opportunities. CKS, which focuses on capturing knowledge from its over 2,000 employees, found that the company had skills internally that were not obvious, leading it to extend its offerings.
Tech Talk
Jude O'Reilley, research analyst for enterprise networking strategies at
Gartner Group Inc., in Stamford, Conn., has developed basic guidelines for
users getting ready to evaluate VPNs:
Security—Is the encryption provided by the VPN appropriate to the
application? For example, extranet applications may require a higher level
of encryption than Internet applications.
Scalability—Does the cost per node increase or decrease as more end
points are protected? Can the network handle growth without becoming too
slow or unreliable?
Manageability—Are there facilities for flexible configuration and remote
auditing and monitoring?
Simplicity—Are administrators protected from underlying complexity or does
the VPN require trained engineers to administer it?
Quality of Service—Can the application tolerate unpredictable delays? If
the application relies on real-time information, delays of even the shortest
duration may not be tolerable.
Learn More
Assessing intranet cost-benefits
http://www.fastrak-consulting.co.uk/
tactix/Features/costbens/costbens.htm
Walk-through of some of the issues and approaches to costing intranets. May give you ideas as you create your business plan. By Clive Shepherd.
Intranet Design Magazine(sm)
http://idm.internet.com/
A biweekly zine, featuring articles, news & analysis, a how-to section and a discussion forum: the Intranet Exchange(sm).
Lotus' Domino home page
http://domino.lotus.com/
Notes-focused site with news, sample templates, downloads and product information.
Making a Case for Intranets
http://www.iorg.com/
intranetorg/chpt1.html
This is the first chapter of an online book by Steve Telleen, one of the first intranet pioneers. Later chapters cover security, logical architectures, intranet evolution and more.
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