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Internet Marketing Case
Studies we would like to
share with you. Intranets
are fast teaching the lesson
that they do not transform
an organisation's culture,
and do not create
collaboration where none
existed before. As a key
ingredient in a
comprehensive knowledge
management strategy, they
hold pride of place. |
How intranets change the way
we work
By Paul Wright
Collecting and sharing
information was once
considered a job best left
to librarians. With the
advent of the corporate
intranet, everyone has a
role to play in that game.
In a traditional library,
it's the books on the
shelves that serve as the
central attraction.
Intranet-browsers are as
likely to be interested in
what their colleagues know
as any library reader might
be in seeking out some rare
text.
Indeed, this sense of
collective resourcefulness
that an intranet may
stimulate offers a clue to
what sets some corporate
intranets apart from others,
and underscores their
dynamic nature. Intranets
have acquired the reputation
of being passports to
magical new corporate
behaviors. Confronting the
myths that prevail about
intranets can make all the
difference between their
becoming remarkable tools
for knowledge management
innovation and stultifying
tangles of information
overload.
Susan Wiener and Patterson
Shafer, at Cognitive
Communications (New York,
NY), point out the traps
that can derail an intranet.
A paramount lesson, they
stress, is the importance of
addressing one's business
before creating an intranet
application or site because,
says Wiener, "knowledge
management means putting
into action the knowledge
that exists in the company
so it can meet your business
goals." Simply asking what
an organization is trying to
achieve by building an
intranet can help avoid a
lot of disappointment later.
That approach also helps
surface an awareness of some
of the myths that can
frustrate even the best of
intentions.
Myth #1: An intranet is a
product.
In fact, observes Wiener,
it's a process, interactive,
evolutionary, and without
end. The hardware and
software that support it are
not what make an intranet
function well, but rather
the notion of carefully
constructing the policies
and guidelines that keep it
moving and steadily
integrating feedback and
content. This links up with…
Myth #2: The infrastructure
is the product.
The infrastructure may be
mission critical along the
way, stress Wiener and
Shafer, but the real
challenge comes with
overcoming mindset and
culture to tap into the
potential of what the
network offers.
Myth #3: Build it and they
will come.
Says Wiener: "If it's not
embedded in your work and if
it doesn't scream value,
employees may not come, and
if they do, they probably
won't come back." Shafer
adds that by taking care to
develop sound ergonomics and
ease of use, and by
stressing perceived value,
return on investment can be
impressive.
Myth #4: Intranets are
inherently collaborative.
This myth goes to the heart
of many an assumption of
what an intranet can
accomplish. Because a
corporate web requires
considerable focus and
commitment, it reflects the
culture that already exists.
Without a collaborative
culture, an intranet can do
little to create one in its
place. Collaboration comes
about, in part, as an
imperative of market forces:
in a fast-paced world, it's
crucial to respond ever
faster to customer needs
with new products and
services. This means
supplying information
rapidly to your workforce,
and putting in their hands
the means to get it
independently. Wiener and
Shafer suggest that those
companies interested in
becoming collaborative
consider using the intranet
as a tool along the way as
they re-structure, and
develop in tandem a
compensation structure that
rewards information sharing.
Harmonizing information
Post-Acquisition
Let's look at some examples
of intranets that have
evolved with some of these
myths in mind. Platinum
Technology, Inc. (Oakbrook
Terrace, IL) faces the
problem familiar to many of
rapid growth and rapid-fire
acquisitions. Glenn Shimkus,
Platinum's director of
worldwide sales enablement,
reports that in the past
five years the company has
seen its sales reach
$1billion from a
starting-point of $50
million. Behind this climb
lie some 70 acquisitions,
resulting in a knot of 30
intranet sites, over 80
Lotus Notes—databases, and
more than 1,000 network
drives. Shimkus reports that
this presented the sales
force with a difficult
challenge of sorting out
where to find the up-to-date
product and company
information it needed to do
its job. In 1997, Platinum
began to untangle this snarl
by developing an intranet to
capture explicit data in
document format from
throughout the world. Its
goal was to ensure that
sales members in Singapore
had the same information
available to people two
doors down the hall. The
initial result, says
Shimkus, was a productivity
improvement of six to seven
percent, or a minimum of one
hour a week saved by each
member of the sales force.
The intranet base
established has spurred the
company to move forward to
looking at ways to use the
web to capture best practice
sharing, in part through
establishing chat rooms,
bulletin boards, and rapid
response e-mail.
Shimkus reports that as
decision-making occurs
increasingly in the field,
fewer calls come into senior
management for referral and
advice. Weekly sessions
convened on the intranet
introduce company experts to
their peers, and bring
together people who would
not ordinarily find
themselves talking. A
particular challenge is to
monitor the age of content
on the 'net. The company
looks at how frequently
content gets updated
(content not refined for a
period of time gets pulled
for review). The intranet
also allows for monitoring
to determine how quickly
feedback from users results
in action, and a rating
system is being developed to
allow users to assess
content and usability.
How USWest Avoids
Reinventing the Wheel
Similar forces have spurred
USWest Communications
(Denver, CO) in development
of its intranet. Daya
Haddock, project manager for
the company's Global Village
Labs (Global Village refers
to the USWest intranet),
reports that the rapid
changes unleashed by the
Telecommunications Act of
1996 have driven the company
to rethink its business.
Leveraging its web
technology with its legacy
and mainframe information
systems became a priority to
move information efficiently
and quickly to its
employees. While much of its
intranet effort has focused
on eliminating manual
processes enabling its work
force to tackle more complex
problems (say, rapid
information exchange between
work areas without the need
for rekeying), considerable
effort has gone into
developing ways for
employees to help themselves
and one another. With 35,000
browsers on employee desks
(out of a workforce of
50,000), the USWest
intranet, says Haddock,
reflects a certain
self-service bias. Training,
for example, has been
converted to online
self-paced tutorials; a
unified help desk speeds
answers to employee
questions; an application
deployed within six weeks to
some 10,000 service
representatives now offers
current data on company
services.
In addition, observes
Haddock, work teams and
project teams have clamored
for web sites that enable
them to mount and exchange
information, "breaking down
barriers to information
sharing." A registration
process grew out of this
need, to design standards
and guidelines for
web-sites, paving the way
for easier keyword searches.
(Any business-oriented
web-site is permitted
without restriction.) One
standard that applies to
web-sites provides that each
must come complete with
feedback mechanism. Focus
groups, held at least
quarterly, also provide
input for user-oriented
refinements. Because growing
pieces of the company's
Global Village web represent
grass-roots initiatives,
says Haddock, information
formerly housed in the
company's silos is rapidly
becoming distributed across
the company. "We'd much
rather beg, borrow, and
steal than re-experience the
pain of re-inventing
something." That attitude,
in turn, spurs the freedom
to create anew.
How the Intranet Supports
Work Processes at The
McGraw-Hill Companies
Meanwhile, fifteen years
ago, reports Jack Goodman,
senior director of corporate
communications at The
McGraw-Hill Companies (New
York, NY), the then-chairman
envisioned (long before the
supportive technology
existed) an "information
turbine" that, as a meeting
place of sorts for goods and
services from throughout the
organization, would spur the
creation of products in new
permutations. This vision
later took root as one of
the company's five
objectives for launching its
intranet some four years
ago. (Saving money,
improving communications,
expanding relationships
within and outside the
organization, and enhancing
work processes rounded out
the set of five.)
While Goodman points to
demonstrable results in use
of the intranet to cut costs
and strengthen
communications, assessing
its impact on work processes
and collaboration requires
more care. In December 1996,
The McGraw-Hill Companies
launched two newsgroups on
the intranet. (A newsgroup
rates as an exercise in
collaboration involving at
least one employee outside
one's individual business
unit.) The newsgroups now
number 40, and extend
throughout the enterprise.
As the web's "adopter"
community expands, the
network, suggests Goodman,
approaches the frontier
separating intranet as
novelty from intranet as a
tool essential to do one's
job. The fact that The
McGraw-Hill Companies is
moving toward its third
generation underscores this
shift. (Goodman reflects
that McGraw-Hill initially
seeded the "intranet
marketplace" by identifying
and spotlighting those who
would be its "early
adopters." In hindsight, he
voices a preference for
top-down, as well as
bottom-up, support to launch
the web into the company's
mainstream.) As the
newsgroups provide a growing
number of forums for
employees to raise
challenging problems,
explore alternative
solutions, and broach new
ideas, the workforce no
longer depends on offline
mechanisms to validate their
ideas. Employees can instead
obtain rapid validation
online through their
colleagues' expertise.
In this sense, the
collaborative potential of
the web begins to dovetail
with its capacity to alter
the way people work. Goodman
notes that, once people
begin to use the intranet,
they recognize many of its
benefits right off—its
ability to help one work
faster, for example, by
providing ready access to
information. But an
inherently collaborative
tool it is not. The first
generation of the
McGraw-Hill web served
largely as a publishing
medium. The second
generation, reports Goodman,
focuses more on the intranet
as a vehicle for "getting
the work done," pushing to
support work processes on a
function-by-function basis.
While the company hones its
global business objectives,
its senior management—now
recognizing new ways in
which the intranet can
support those
objectives—pushes its value
while employees,
understanding its usability,
pull to expand its reach.
True Collaboration at Xerox
Corp.
Perhaps few companies better
demonstrate the
collaborative use to which
an intranet can be put by a
committed workforce than
Xerox Corp. (Rochester, NY).
David Woodruff, program
manager in the office of the
intranet, reports that the
company, like others we've
seen, originally envisioned
its intranet as a publishing
medium. As studies showed
that nearly 80 percent of
users simply scanned for
information, and feedback
poured in that the web often
presented too much text,
content grew more concise.
"There was a desire to
interact with the content.
When people scanned a
document, they wouldn't get
enough information to allow
them to ask reasonable
questions." Here is a case
of less is more.
Interaction—questions,
bulletin boards, team and
individual web-sites—became
the hallmark of the
company's intranet, at the
behest of its users, who
knew what they wanted and
how they wanted it to work.
Some 8,000 web-sites now
populate the Xerox intranet,
with each contributor the
arbiter of access and
content. Woodruff notes that
his ultimate goal is that
everyone in the company
become a contributor.
Guidelines and protocols for
use of the Xerox web grew
directly out of agreements
among users, who understood
the value in having
uniformity for search
purposes, as well as to
facilitate creation for new
web sites. Use of the
intranet, remarks Woodruff,
has now become a given in
the company, with value
demonstrated constantly. He
cites the example of a team
in Italy picking up on
schematics published by a
U.S.-based design team. When
the Italians suggested
design changes that would
result in a better machine
at less cost, it was a solid
lesson in the value of
broadcasting information
beyond the usually accepted
boundaries.
Intranets are fast teaching
the lesson that they do not
transform an organization's
culture, and do not create
collaboration where none
existed before. As a key
ingredient in a
comprehensive knowledge
management strategy, they
hold pride of place. And
with a workforce galvanized
to share knowledge and
appropriately rewarded for
doing so, intranets can
become remarkable hothouses
of creativity that
demonstrate true ownership
among their users.
|
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