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INTRANET ARCHITECTURE
Integrating Information Design with Business Planning
The corporate intranet has been hailed as the most important business
tool since the typewriter, but the track record so far has been mixed.
Despite many successes, particularly in cost and time savings, many
sponsors of corporate intranets are dissatisfied. They have spent time
and money on development, Net-enabled desktops, even intranet training,
but still aren't enjoying significant enough productivity or cost
savings. Why? While critics often point to technological glitches, the
real problems may lie in information design.
Intranets should help employees collaborate on business processes such
as product development or order fulfillment, which create value for a
company and its customers. Specifically, intranets centralize the
business process in an easily accessible, platform-independent virtual
space. Successful intranets allow employees from a variety of
departments to contribute the different skills necessary to carry out a
particular process. While each department of a company may have its own
virtual space, intranets should be organized primarily around the
business processes they help employees carry out, rather than the
organizational chart of the company.
Focusing on processes rather than departments is a widely-hailed
business trend. Recent shifts in corporate structure point to the
emergence of "communities of process." Management gurus are helping
companies move away from vertical, hierarchical organizational lines
towards horizontal, process-oriented groups that link cross-functional
teams focused on the same set of business tasks. The trouble is that
this requires significant interaction between departments, functions,
even countries. Enter the intranet, the ideal vehicle for creating and
empowering process-based corporate communities.
Successful process-oriented intranets look and work as differently as
the processes they enable, but they share several common
characteristics. First they are built on smart information design.
Second, they focus on tasks, not documents, and aim to integrate those
tasks into distinct processes. Finally, the best intranets encourage
collaboration by creating shared and familiar spaces that reflect the
personality of the company and create a common ground for all
employees.
Don't Overlook Design
Just as physical work spaces rely on architectural plans to optimize
efficiency, an intranet needs to be carefully designed to help employees
access information and collaborate effectively. Because the public
doesn't see the intranet, information design for intranets often
receives scant attention. Unlike customers, employees are assumed to be
insiders, able to easily locate company information. So, while the
company Web site usually has the input of the marketing department,
design and structure of the intranet is often relegated to the IT
department.
By default, an organizational chart of the company is often used to
organize information on the intranet. While seemingly the obvious
candidate for the structure of the intranet, an organizational chart
actually works against the collaboration the intranet is meant to
foster. An organizational chart can't help employees from the marketing
and legal departments collaborate on bringing a document through the
approval process. It won't allow employees from marketing and research
and development to work together to create a new product.
Think About Tasks Rather Than Documents
Thinking of the intranet as a tool means understanding the intranet as
more than a collection of documents. While important, documents are
usually a means to an end. People use documents to complete tasks. Tasks
include fulfilling orders, looking up a customer's billing history, or
collaborating on a research document. To complete these tasks, people
need to have related documents and tools close at hand.
The principal of organizing by task can be demonstrated by the example
of working at a desk. When you sit down to begin a task (e.g., creating
a budget), you have a variety of information and tools at hand. While a
spreadsheet is a "calculation" tool, and last year's budget is an
"internal document," both need to be next to each other in order to
develop a new budget. Similarly, on the corporate intranet, the tasks of
the users rather than the classification of documents or tools, should
dictate the organization of the intranet.
Designed effectively around dynamic tasks rather than static documents,
intranets can contribute to dramatic increases in efficiency (as much as
a 40% improvement in time spent processing documents, according to the
GIGA Group). Organizing documents within the context of tasks also
focuses employees on the function of the documents they are working
with. For example, to save employee time while signing up for various
retirement plans, information on various retirement plans (including
links to financial Web sites) should be placed near the forms actually
used to register for those plans.
Organize Tasks Into Larger Processes
Isolated tasks are usually part of a larger process. Intranets should
group together all the tasks that make up a business process. Processes
can be relatively discrete, such as tracking deliveries, or getting
approval for documents. Or, they can be more complex, such as developing
or selling products. The most important processes in a company are those
that create value for a customer. These are the central processes which
every intranet should help employees accomplish.
Even simple processes can become more efficient when incorporated into
an intranet. For example, when Ford implemented an intranet, the company
included an application to help geographically dispersed engineers to
get authorization for new projects. What would previously be a
time-consuming, expensive process, involving the potential for lost
documents and delays, is now centralized in an efficient electronic
process.
More complex processes can also be effectively integrated into an
intranet. For example, Cadence Systems created an integrated section of
the intranet for its entire sales process. Each phase of the sales
process is represented on the intranet with relevant information and
tools. So, the section covering an initial stage of the sales process
includes links to customer presentations, sample letters, and internal
forms. Organizing all steps of the sales process together also allows
for easy tracking of each sales effort.
Create Virtual Workgroups Organized Around Processes
Intranets can break though departmental walls to help accomplish
business processes more efficiently. For example, a customer complaint
might involve people and information from the accounting, sales and
marketing department. Even though the employees necessary to resolve the
complaint work in different departments, they are all involved in the
process of customer service. By creating spaces for cross-departmental
collaboration, the intranet can help employees collaborate to
efficiently carry out the central processes of the company, and cut
costs by avoiding in-person conferences and employee reallocations.
Intranets (and private extranets) can also bring together employees and
partners who are geographically dispersed to work on common problems.
Travel costs are eliminated, and employees can increase their
productivity by sharing knowledge. For example, a pharmaceutical company
is using its intranet to allow scientists all over the world to
collaborate on research. A major franchise retailer is using bulletin
boards on its intranet to coordinate major marketing projects.
Caterpillar is developing an extranet application so that experts from
around the world can collaborate with employees to design new products.
Other applications for intranet collaboration include complex
transactions with lawyers and multiple parties, which rely on access to,
and modification of, key documents.
The bulk of discussion about collaboration in and between companies
centers around security, certainly an important issue to resolve. What
receives less attention-but is central to the value of an intranet-is
the design of virtual spaces, which encourage new forms of
collaboration. These, in turn, increase the efficiency of key business
processes such as product development, marketing and customer service.
The Intranet Reflects the Company; the Company Reflects the Intranet
The corporate intranet can help a company organize around "communities
of process" both on- and off-line. When Texas Instruments initiated a
process-centered organization, oriented around collaborative work
groups, software development time fell from twenty-two to eight months.
The Texas Instruments intranet was established after this shift, and was
designed to reflect and enhance the new organization. Whether it
precedes or follows the organizational shift, an intranet that
encourages this type of collaborative work environment can provide a
significant return-on-investment.
At the same time, using an intranet to shift the way work is done in an
organization requires a cultural change within the organization. Unless
there is a clear commitment from senior management to have employees
collaborate across departments to more efficiently accomplish key
business processes, the intranet may have only limited application and
benefit. Even after the intranet is designed to encourage collaboration,
marketing the intranet to employees remains essential. As the intranet
creates new forms of collaboration, it will challenge traditional ways
of doing work and obtaining information. For the intranet to be
successful, it must provide ways of empowering all employees, offering
concrete incentives for employees to use, and encourage the use, of the
intranet.
The process-oriented intranet, then, is "in sync" with the company it
works for. And this is where graphic design, tone and standards emerge
as vital to the intranet's success. Like it or not, intranets have
personalities, which are amalgams of visual style, tone and content. An
intranet that reflects the culture of its company will make employees
feel more at home, will help dispersed employees feel that they share
the same space, and will encourage collaboration and communication
around the processes they support. Turner Entertainment Group, for
example, created a distinctive, casual feel for its intranet with a home
page that uses a refrigerator with magnates to represent the various
divisions. The unique imagery created a friendly, shared, familiar space
for all employees.
Good Design is Good Business
The architect Le Corbusier said buildings are "machines for living."
Good intranets should be machines for doing business. Just as design is
integral to a good building, it is key to creating an effective
intranet. The organization and design of information on an intranet
should map out the key business processes of a company, and provide
employees with access to the information and people necessary to carry
out those processes.
The truly effective intranet creates new channels of communication that
overcome inefficient organizational structures and foster new forms of
efficient collaboration. It serves as a model for a company centered
around processes rather than departments, collaboration rather than
closed doors.
Building an effective intranet means thinking about how documents can be
used to accomplish tasks, how tasks can be organized into processes, and
how those processes can be carried out collaboratively by virtual work
groups. The effective intranet is not only a tool, it is also a model
for an efficient, process-centered enterprise-a machine for doing
business.
Anthony Schneider and Christopher Davis are principals at Web Zeit, a
New York based interactive media consulting firm. They can be reached at
E-mail
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Last modified: November 20, 2000
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