INTRANET ARCHITECTURE TalkBack

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
Let us know how you feel about this article. We would love to hear from you at [email protected]
Talk