|
|
Articles and Presentations
INTRANET ARCHITECTURE
Integrating Information Design with Business Planning
Reprinted from Intranet Communicator
By Anthony
Schneider
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 magnets 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.
|
