The Next Big Wave in Intranet Development

Did your company create an Intranet in 1998? Do people use it? A 1998 survey of major enterprises in Canada by the respected, Ottawa-based Phase 5 Consulting Group Inc. determined that 69% had an Intranet and 18% plan to implement one within a year. 43% of these were already starting to disseminate externally produced content through their Intranet.

Intranets have the capacity to elevate an enterprise to a new plateau of innovation and success. It is one of the great ironies that these technologies are often used to publish the administrivia of an organization like HR policies and information systems requests. Companies generate new revenue from insight and innovation - not in the better communication of and adherence to the rules.

Many companies have found that the big pay-off from their Intranet is not coming as quickly as they had hoped. Indeed, far too many started their Intranet content strategies by loading the information that they had, rather than what they needed to achieve their strategic goals. Some had technology goals in the absence of a clear understanding of their need for strategic content.

The next big wave in Intranet development is in the emerging area of enterprise knowledge management - the art of increasing the capacity of the organization to make better decisions, innovate and to increase the value of each and every employee in terms of their knowledge and competencies. Knowledge cannot be effectively captured and used in anything but a human being’s brain – hence the term ‘knowledge worker’ is overtaking ‘employee’.

Enterprises can, however, store and share lots of information through the effective management of their knowledge environment. Unfortunately, knowledge alone is not enough – business behaviours must be encouraged that focus on the enterprises mission. Additionally, the organizational infrastructure to apply knowledge and information to real business problems and to generate actual results must be in place.

The foundation for such success involves having skilled employees for selecting, mounting, distributing and making usable critical business information that will have a material and positive impact on the decision-making and innovation capacity of the enterprise. Enterprises that are further along the Intranet curve are discovering there is a pay-off to their Intranet strategies while those just beginning are merely dreaming of hard results. They’ve also discovered that huge databanks of information exist outside of their enterprise that must, in today’s competitive environment, be adopted. The question is how to do this without breaking the bank. Do your competitors know something you don’t? Are your employees armed with the external information they need to make agile decisions?

The Intranet Curve

Step 1	Enable all employees with Internet access (web, email, etc.).
Step 2	Launch an Intranet with workgroup tools and a goal of a knowledge-sharing culture.
Step 3	Add vital internal information that "informs" all employees without limiting them. Ensure that the organization, searching and quantity of "information" don't get in the way.
Step 4	Increase employee's "information literacy" skills through training and practice. Choose interfaces and content for their ability to integrate with your employee's learning styles.
Step 5	Add externally produced and acquired content strategically aimed at making more effective business decisions. Develop a customized "enterprise information portal" (EIP) to deliver the quality content that supports your organization's decision-making and innovation.
Step 6	Invite your business partners, customers, and allies to share your knowledge through an Extranet
Step 7	Limited by only your imagination and business acumen

What challenges are Canadian companies facing?

How do we ensure that our employees have the levels of information literacy required for success?

Giving employees the tools for research does not necessarily give them research skills, any more than giving them a calculator gives them the advanced numeracy skills of a CA. Truly false savings (and organizational damage) can be had by offering Netscape and the web to every desktop user and canceling quality external information services. This is the equivalent of putting calculators and MS Excel on every desktop and expecting to lay-off your finance and accounting staff.

Effective content strategies for your enterprise must recognize that employees need training for effective searching skills, the ability to evaluate the quality of the information they are viewing, and the ability to find what they need quickly.

We pay our employees to make decisions – not spend hours swimming though seas of information and finding little or not enough.

Combine the wild west nature of web content, and the poor indexing, lack of quality control, inconsistent branding, potential for downloading viruses with updating and timeliness issues, etc. and you have a recipe for corporate disaster. Quality, content-rich information existing equally alongside web sites of "Joe's 8-track Tape Collection" is not the foundation of an enterprise content strategy.

It has been estimated that the public part of the world wide web has less than one thousandth of one percent of the available electronic information and a micron of the world’s total information in print. The popular Internet search engine, AltaVista, indexes between 100-200 million pages of content. Comparing the web to one professional search service (Dialog), with an estimated 9,000 million pages, shows that web-based content should not be where the savvy executive demands that his company exclusively turns to for decision support.

Information has a funny quality – it increases demand for itself – each question generates more questions and this is the innovation process. Your plan must be long-term and comprehensive. You need the tools and staff to make the evaluations and re-evaluations of your content offerings.

Ask your professionals. Librarians, with two years of post-graduate study in library and information science, are experts in content acquisition. You can find them in major corporate libraries, in information publishers / vendors, and as independent consultants.

In addition, companies known to sell quality information and who have a good reputation in the industry can be trusted to provide a good start. For instance, Micromedia offers almost 500 different databases for Intranet or Internet subscription.

Detailed recommendations can be made for segmented and phased introduction of mission-critical content to the enterprise's desktops based on its specific business needs.

Choosing content is not purely a technical decision. It requires the skills of a small team to effectively consider technology, interface, content and the needs of the organization and user.

Desktops with access to content must have interfaces designed for finding answers, not mining or searching for information. New tools always take a little training or learning to get the most out of them. Content tools are no exception. Information literacy skills are beginning to be taught in schools but in the information and knowledge eras, much more is needed. Estimates are that up to 80% of decision support information can be moved to the desktop freeing up key analysts, researchers and librarians for the longer-term, strategic research projects

And yes, there are landmines if you're not careful. Issues of copyright and content ownership, negotiating content licenses on an enterprise or global basis, keeping the learning curve short by limiting the number of databases and interfaces desktop users have to use, and identifying quality Canadian content are just a few. Technologically there are other hurdles to overcome including firewalls, browser plug-ins, user authentication and assuring employee research productivity. However, the pay-off can be substantial, studies abound where simple end-user searches delivered key information at a cost of less than $100 that avoided millions in poor business investments.

Another consideration is the source of the information. You must ensure that your co-workers are basing their decisions on Canadian data and information. Quality sources of Canadian information must be identified and provided to staff in the right context – Canadians have the right to be front and centre in their own country and not just afterthoughts on the head office's global Intranet.

The leading firms in their fields have advanced Intranet strategies. Often these are combined with knowledge management initiatives where these enterprises are leading the way to financial success for their stakeholders. More importantly they have laid the groundwork for longer-term success through upgrading their human resources with the competencies required for success in the knowledge-based era. They’ve learned how to have their staff find answers, not go on information hunting expeditions on company time.