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Come Together: Use Your Company's Intranet to Your Advantage October, 2001 By Chuck Kapelke (from Continental Magazine)
Henry Ford
Old Henry Ford would have been proud of his company's intranet. Not since the assembly line has a single innovation done more to oil the Ford Motor Co.'s inner machinery than the company's internal Web site. Employees can plan meetings, book trip, take out loans from the company's credit department, browse through the competition's product reports and even take online courses in dealing with difficult coworkers all from the comfort of their cubicles. Five years after its inception, Ford's intranet is drawing more than 150,000 regular users worldwide. As a result, the days of knotty, paper-clogged internal bureaucracy have gone the way of the horse and carriage. "Because of our Intranet, office-to-office phone calls at Ford have been cut 75 percent, and the amount of paper moving between office has been cut at least 75 percent," says John Ochs, a Ford director of public affairs, Consumer Connect, in Dearborn, Mich. "We've seen tremendous savings on time and expense in managing all our data." Ford is not alone. According to Tim Horgan, senior vice president and general manager of Online at CXO Media Inc, in Framingham, Mass., MCI Worldcom has saved $45 million in publication costs, increased productivity and reduced maintenance costs by deploying an intranet; Sprint saves more than $7 million annually by posting job listings, benefit information and marketing updates online; and IBM has saved more than $200 million by using its intranet to deliver employee training. What's surprising, then, is that a majority of corporate intranets may actually be reducing productivity. At least that's the word from Fuld & Co., an international competitive intelligence organization in Cambridge, Mass., which was commissioned to look at corporate intranets. "Right now, many intranets tend to be more of a broadcast medium, with people pumping out information and no one reading it," says Leonard Fuld, an intelligence expert who founded the company. "There's very little information discipline inside companies. It's like giving a kid a car and saying, 'if you an reach the gas pedal, it's yours.' Employees step on the informational gas pedal and funnel all sorts of information around the company, even rumors."
"Intranets have great potential as tools to help people do their work smarter, faster an more in synch with the needs of their customers and business partners," adds Horgan. "Unfortunately, only a percentage of companies are taking full advantage of this tool, as many are using it as simply a corporate communication tool." So what do experts recommend for a company looking to transform its intranet from a burden to boon? Many dedicated users, for starters. "An intranet can't do anything if everyone who is supposed to use it doesn't do so," says Anthony Schneider, president and founder of Web zeit, an Internet strategy developer in New York. "Intranets are becoming the water coolers, the whiteboards, the directories. A good corporate intranet is where people share ideas, not just the place they to look up a phone number or download a product logo." To make the intranet appealing to employees, consider following the lead of Satyam Computer services Ltd. In Hyderabad, India, whose 10,000 worldwide employees use their corporate Web site to stick together in all sorts of way through matrimonial ads, online psychological counseling, requests for blood donations and trivia quizzes. "Our company is scattered around the world, and our intranet is how we stay connected," explains Samir Bagga, senior marketing manager for Satyam. "The objective is to create a lot of fun while building connectivity for all the people. Across the world, we have the same forum and we are talking about the same issues." Fuld suggests that, when employees sign on to a bulletin board or a platform, they qualify the data as being fact or rumor and be able to identify where it came from, Another tip: A corporate intranet is only as good as its boss which can be a problem when nobody knows who is in charge. "I'm not sure who the boss should be, but there has to be one," Fuld advises. "And [the intranet] has to be managed successfully. Unless there's discipline, information can suck way a lot of time and productivity." Finally, when deploying an intranet, never undo the secret to Henry Ford's model T assembly line: specialization. An intranet that tries to inform every employee about every aspect of the business will be doomed to a snail's pace. While putting a vacation request form online might save the personnel department time, the employees shouldn't have to waste a lot of time figuring out how to use it. "All happy families are the same. All good intranets are the same. They're well built, widely deployed and universally used," says Web Zeit's Schneider. "For larger, more complex organizations, intranets save time and money. And what company doesn't want to be richer or more efficient?"
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