Strategy leads to tactics. With the strategic planning under your belt, it is time to proceed to the tactical construction of the intranet site itself. You may be tempted to jump right in and write a bunch of HTML for Web pages. Resist that temptation. Many of the sites on the World Wide Web that are confusing, hard to navigate, and seemingly without structure were built by somebody anxious to write HTML.
Building an intranet requires careful planning to be effective. Consider how movies are made. Each scene is sketched; every angle is translated into a drawing that represents the filmmaker's conception of how that particular shot will look when it is committed to film. It is easier, and cheaper, to change the sketch until it's right than it is to go back and reshoot the scene. In documentaries about the making of movies you see walls covered with sketches. Follow these drawings sequentially, and you see a rough sketch of the entire film. Take the time to scrutinize the angles of your intranet before you begin the implementation.
Before you insert a single bracket in your first line of HTML,
you need to have a good idea of what your intranet is going to
look like. To accomplish that, you should create a storyboard.
The storyboard addresses the Web component of the intranet. To
be sure, I have made a strong case that the intranet is more than
just the Web; it comprises a variety of Internet-grounded technologies.
However, the Web is the interface that employees will use to access
all areas of the intranet-the road map they will follow to get
to the information they need-and therefore it is the component
that requires up-front strategizing.
| NOTE |
A storyboard that clearly delineates the key relationships will make construction of the Web a breeze. |
The storyboard is more than a flowchart to illustrate the links that descend from each home page. It also defines the cross-links, which are a fundamental advantage of an intranet. Trying to establish all of these cross-linked relationships without a road map can eventually lead to total frustration. You can share the storyboard with any employee who also is providing content to the intranet. (You can even make it available on the intranet!)
Let's look at a typical situation. Your company is introducing a new product; let's call it Brand X. To see the product through, a Brand X product team has been assembled. This team consists of representatives from across the spectrum of the company. Somewhere on the intranet that you will build (it doesn't matter where), a page will list the team members and their roles on the team. Each name will be linked to the team member's listing in the employee directory, which will include their mail stops and phone numbers. Their names will be linked to the HTML mailto command, so clicking on the hyperlinked name will launch the browser's e-mail client.
Someone may establish a directory of all of the company's products. When you click on Brand X, you will retrieve a page with information about the product, featuring a photograph of the product and including a link to the Brand X product team (the team members' page just described). A list of all teams allows employees to click on the Brand X product team link, which brings them back to that same page.
Since the intranet will allow employees to establish profiles others can view, Jane Smith, who works in marketing, will have established her own profile in the Employee Profile section of the intranet. On that profile, Jane might include the notation that she serves on the Brand X product team. Click on the link highlighting the words "Brand X Product Team"; guess where it takes you?
When members of the team who work in far-flung geographic locations want to engage in discussions about their efforts, or even solicit ideas from other employees, the intranet will allow them to establish a discussion area using newsgroups or Web-based conferencing capabilities. Employees will be able to get to the conferencing area by clicking on a link on the team's home page.
Down the road, Employee Communications may write an article about the launch of Brand X. Rather than list the members of the team, it can simply create a link to the team's site on the intranet.
In this scenario, we have seen a single department take advantage of several pages on the intranet, along with e-mail and newsgroups. The road map will make it easy to develop an intranet that accommodates this kind of functionality. Employees will be able to get the information they need without sifting through a lot of irrelevant data, which results in that uncomfortable sensation of "information overload."
To build the storyboard, use any software with flowchart capability. You can even draw it by hand if you like; there is no rule that suggests the storyboard must be computer generated! I use Inspiration, a software package that has great flexibility when it comes to this type of flowcharting.
Start with a home page. Under ideal circumstances, this is the first page employees will see each time they access the Web site. For the home page, you'll need a simple box that says Home Page, as shown in Figure 4.1.
Figure 4.1 : Storyboard step one: home page.
Now add a layer of boxes one level down. Each box represents an item that will appear on the home page. Our fictitious company's home page will feature-in addition to Today's News and At Work-Products, Sales, Competition/Marketplace, Specialty Center, and Miscellaneous. The boxes appear as they do in Figure 4.2.
Figure 4.2 : Storyboard step two: one layer deep.
Before we go any deeper, note that there will be navigation buttons on every page. (This is one of the possible policies I will explore in the next chapter.) Navigation buttons make it easy for employees to get to a few key functions from anywhere in the intranet. For the sake of this example, the buttons include Search, Directory, Home, and Index. Since these will appear on every page, we'll add them as a side-link to the intranet Home Page, as shown in Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3 : Storyboard step three: repeating navigation buttons.
Next we'll fill in some of the main content that will be available from each of the home pages. Today's News is not actually a home page of its own. On the intranet home page, Today's News would be a headline and, perhaps, a graphic of the hottest news item or two in the company that day. Clicking on that link would take an employee directly to the news item, but not necessarily to a home page for news items. I'll discuss how to communicate news and how to do publications on the intranet later in the book. For now, just note that the Today's News box has no links because it is not a home page in its own right, while the others are.
Figure 4.4 shows the second level of the storyboard with the major components of each sub-home page filled in.
Now comes the fun part: identifying all the potential places for cross-links. Use a different kind of line to symbolize these connections, as shown in Figure 4.5.
Figure 4.5 : Storyboard step five: complete storyboard with cross-links.
This is a highly simplified example of what a storyboard would actually look like. It does not include all of the links that would exist on an intranet home page, on sub-home pages, or all of the appropriate cross-links. If I tried to cram all of that into an illustration that would fit on a page of this book, I would have to issue a magnifying glass with each copy. (As it is, you're already getting a CD-ROM!) This example is designed simply to give you an idea of how to proceed with a flowchart you can use to build your site. Your storyboard can take up an entire wall!
The storyboard is your blueprint to the entire site. Like construction blueprints, you can change it, shuffle it around, and add and delete elements as you continue down the road of site development. By referring to the storyboard, you will always be able to find the page you are looking for.
Unfortunately, employees using the intranet as a day-to-day business tool cannot run to your office and chart their paths to a page on the intranet every time they need to find information-particularly if they are located in an office across the country or halfway around the world. That's why it is important to establish consistent navigation tools and concepts that make it easy for employees to find their way around, no matter where on the intranet they happen to be. The ease with which employees will find their way through your intranet depends on the consistent, intelligent application of two elements: the way navigation works and the look of the navigation tools.
It's not likely that an intranet will consist of only a few pages, or that it will reside on only one or two servers. Most organizations have hundreds or thousands of pages to explore, and servers reside wherever logic dictates. Silicon Graphics' intranet, Silicon Junction, consists of over 1,000 servers. Content can be organized any number of ways: by country, by department or division, by product line, by job category - however, it makes sense for an employee seeking information.
Without help, it won't take long before employees get lost. To avoid that, you should provide some key signposts at every juncture, such as the following:
To use the navigation tools - Home, Section Home, Search, Index, and Directory- employees need some recognizable symbol on which to click. Of course, text works, too. You could simply run the same line of text across the bottom of every page, each one hyperlinked to the appropriate page, like this:
Home | Section Home | Search | Index | Directory
The problem with text, however, is that it tends to get lost in
all the other text that makes up the content of the page. They
shouldn't have to read a lot of text to find what they're looking
for.
| NOTE |
Remember, the idea is to make it easy for employees to find their way around. |
If the same buttons or icons are in the same place on every page, employees will know exactly what to look for. For example, while on the intranet for another reason, an employee gets a phone call from a customer who needs to know who his Malaysian counterpart can contact in order to make a purchase. To obtain a list of Malaysian sales staff, the employee should be able to drop to the bottom of the page (or jump to the top), click the search icon, type Malaysia, and find a link to the staff list. It should be second nature, and by supplying graphic icons, it can be.
Thousands of free icons are available from various sites on the World Wide Web; others can be purchased on CD-ROM or floppy disk. The best are designed specifically for an organization, reflecting the character of the site and personality of the company. Figure 4.6 shows the navigation toolbar that appears at the bottom of every page of the American Civil Liberties Union's Web site (at http://www.aclu.org). I chose it as an example because the stylized icons reflect the character of the rest of the site-they are simple, they are clean, and they clearly tell users where the icon will take them.
Figure 4.6 : Example of a navigation toolbar (from the American Civil Liberties Union's Web site).
You don't have to use graphic icons. Buttons work well, too, and you can create them using HTML code. Buttons are more recognizable than text because they stand apart, but they are not as readily identifiable as icons are.
Once you have settled on a navigation scheme and the symbols that will represent the navigation options, it is important to make sure that the various content providers throughout the organization adopt the scheme on their pages. (I will say more about that in the next chapter, when I discuss policies and guidelines.) The next issue on the tactical agenda is the appearance of the site.
When IBM established its intranet, according to one of the consultants engaged to work on the system, CEO Lou Gerstner insisted that the design of the system's interface reflect a young, hip attitude. IBM had a reputation as an old company that employed older people who wore the IBM uniform-dark, solid suits with a white shirt and tie. Meanwhile, the burgeoning number of computer-related companies were attracting the long-haired, highly motivated, iconoclastic, innovative, new-breed programmers who were revolutionizing the industry. IBM wanted its share of those programmers, and Gerstner realized he wouldn't get them if they thought they were entering cookie-cutter corporate hell. He took a variety of steps to change the company's image, from relaxing the dress code to insisting that the IBM intranet be designed to attract the type of programmers the company wanted-and keep them.
An intranet can be cold, sterile, and void of character; it doesn't take much to make it so. Pure HTML with no graphics, or corporate graphics like those in a 1950s annual report for a bank, is all it takes to make an intranet uninviting. Why is that important? After all, who cares what the site looks like, as long as employees can quickly find the information they need to get their jobs done and enhance the company's bottom line?
Anybody who has ever worked in public relations can quote you one of that profession's most repeated axioms: Perception is reality. Consider your own work environment. Do you work in a building with long, gray corridors with no art on them? Are you in a vast cavern of cubicles with rules of conformity that prohibit the display of personal artwork? Or is your office a hotbed of creativity, where individual character is freely displayed? (The Los Angeles offices of Chiat-Day Advertising have no private offices or cubes at all; you grab a desk and make it yours, right out in the middle of everything.) Is your CEO an art nut who has authorized considerable expense on modern art to grace the wood-paneled hallways? What about the dress code? Are managers required to don their coats before leaving their offices, or is anything more formal than Levi's Dockers and casual shoes frowned upon? How about the character of all-employee meetings? Do you listen to long, boring talks about financial performance, or are these meetings more like theater, entertaining you while you absorb company information?
All of these trappings of the business create a perception about the nature of working there. You expect it to be creative and fun at a toy company. You expect it to be fairly sterile working for a pharmaceutical company. You are pleasantly surprised if you find the opposite to be true, and it influences your emotional response to working at the company. When someone asks how you like working there, you respond, "It's great!"
Your Web site is just as important a trapping. Don't make the mistake of thinking it is simply a computer interface. The intranet is a central part of employees' day-to-day work and a primary vehicle for meeting people and immersing themselves in the organizational community. As a result, it has just as much impact on employees' perceptions of the work environment-and the organization's culture-as the furnishings, the tone of employee meetings, the look and style of employee publications, and the dress code.
Be sure, therefore, to understand the way your organization's leadership wants employees to feel about working at the organization. The following are some of the perceptions management wants employees to have of the organization:
The look of the intranet's Web interface can help convey these impressions and reinforce them in employees' minds. (Of course, no amount of interface design can overcome an organization whose management does not walk the talk. That goes for company publications, dress codes, and catchy vision statements as much as it goes for the design of the intranet's Web pages.)
Work with a graphic designer experienced in online design to establish
a look for the intranet that reflects the tone the organization
wants to convey. Here are some ideas about how to convey a particular
impression on your intranet:
| Look | Design Elements |
| Corporate | Background of marble or granite Embossed or carved graphics |
| Hip/young | A lot of color, trendy icons, animation, and sound (the look of some of the popular e-zines) |
| Innovative/creative | Independent graphics that form a cohesive whole even though they appear to float separately from one another; each graphic serves as a link to a different component of the intranet |
| Aggressive | Action images-people moving, salespeople interacting with customers, contracts being signed Prominent place on the home page for bold announcements of the latest deal that was closed, the latest acquisition that was made, the latest milestone that was reached |
| Family-oriented | Images of people |
An important point to keep in mind about graphic appearances on your intranet is that they apply only to the corporate home page and those pages over which the corporation has direct control. Each department that provides content has its own character, which is only partly wrapped up in that of the host organization. It is a good idea to allow each department to establish their own character and look for their site on the intranet-as long as they adopt the navigation scheme that the organization should mandate for all sites on the intranet.
I can hear you now. "Wait a minute," you protest. "Graphics? Backgrounds? Isn't this what people on the World Wide Web turn off in order to get to the information faster? And here you've been telling me that employees are even less patient online than the average Web surfer. They want the information they need to do their job. And now you've gone and contradicted yourself by talking about graphics!"
I'll answer by making two points about intranet graphics:
If you are not responsible for all of the content-if that responsibility rests with the various departments and divisions that own the content-how do you make sure it all gets linked through the organization's intranet home page? For all content that will be maintained on the same server as the intranet home page, this is not a problem. The pages must be submitted to you for installation on the server. In general, you do not want an inordinate number of people to have access to the files on the server. Since you install the files that content providers send to you, you are in control of the links from the home page to those various pages.
With multiple servers under direct control of the content providers, however, you need to initiate a procedure to ensure that you know which files are where. If human resources, for example, opens a new module that allows employees to access benefit statements on demand, you may need to link that module to several pages on the home server.
Of course, the link to the human resources site already exists: An employee clicking on the human resources link will go to the human resources home page which, in this instance, resides on the human resources server. The individual responsible for maintaining the HR server presumably will have updated the HR home page to indicate the availability of the benefit statement service. However, following are some of the places where you will want to indicate the presence of the service:
| NOTE |
Search engines represent one of the key advantages of an intranet. |
A search engine also is a de facto requirement for an effective intranet. You will need to know when a new feature or service is offered so you can reindex the engine, making it possible for individuals conducting a search to find the new service. A search engine allows employees to enter keywords or phrases and find every page on the internal Web that contains those words. Consider an employee working on a major new product launch. A few searches can produce information on previous launches for similar products, task forces that have handled launches, outside vendors that have done effective work on launches-anything that has to do with the key words he or she entered.
However, search engines do not search all sites on an intranet whenever an employee queries the engine. Instead, those responsible for maintaining the Web periodically build an index. They build the index by instructing the search engine to search all of the sites on the intranet and build a table of words that occur throughout the intranet. When an employee queries the search engine, it searches the table. For each occurrence of the word it finds, the search engine returns a link to the file from which that word was originally indexed. Thus, if new pages are added but the search engine's table is not updated, the new pages won't be included in an employee's query results.
Firewalls and other security measures make it possible to allow
your organization's employees to travel outside the intranet boundaries
onto the larger map of the global World Wide Web while keeping
unwanted outside visitors from gaining access to confidential
data on your internal network. The ability to build links from
within your intranet to the outside world enhances the value and
usefulness of the intranet to the outside world.
| NOTE |
Hyperlinks are what the Web-internal or external- is all about. |
By taking advantage of hyperlinks, you can avoid reinventing the wheel and provide access to a wealth of information that already exists on the World Wide Web. Later chapters that deal with specific departmental and operational applications of the intranet include a variety of examples of external links, but I will give you a sampling here just to make the point.
An external link can provide access to information that helps employees understand issues or make decisions. At Cisco Systems, an employee examining the company's 401(k) savings plan site on the Web might decide it is time to transfer some existing funds from a low-growth fund to a riskier one. Cisco's benefits department provides links to the prospectuses of the various funds the company offers. These prospectuses have not been rewritten and posted on Cisco's intranet, though. Instead, the link takes employees directly to Fidelity's World Wide Web site, to the prospectus for the fund in which the employee has expressed an interest, as shown in Figure 4.7.
External links can save you from reinventing information just for your intranet, and they can supplement existing information. Silicon Junction, the intranet at Silicon Graphics (SGI), includes a section about how to do business in other countries. Wherever information on overseas business protocols already exists on the Web, Silicon Junction simply features a link to that resource. A site on the Web, for instance, provides information about acceptable business practices in Japan, saving someone at SGI the trouble of creating a whole document on the subject.
One final example: Competitive information can be the most vital information employees have. A set of links to competitors' Web sites and stock prices can help employees understand the forces in the marketplace and provide the information that allows them to move quickly and make decisions based on marketplace intelligence.
I have said it before, and it is important to repeat it here: The intranet is more than just an internal Web. In an example earlier in this chapter, employees used the Web interface to take advantage of two other elements of the intranet, e-mail and newsgroups. But I have focused on the Web interface throughout this chapter because it is the glue that holds the intranet together; it is the map employees will use to access virtually all of the other elements you build into the intranet.
Still, as you develop your road map, you should consider how each of the other elements of an intranet can be woven into it. Let's take a look at each of the components we addressed in Chapter Two, "Intranet Components," to see how they might be incorporated into the primary Web interface. Of course, these are only examples; you will find your own applications based on the direction your intranet takes and the communication and information needs you identify in your organization.
The organization can establish any number of newsgroups on any number of subjects. As initiatives come and go, products are introduced, teams form and disband, and issues arise, newsgroups can be formed to provide a forum for discussion about these topics. The mere existence of a discussion group, however, is not enough to make it useful. Ultimately, the discussion group needs to be available when an employee needs to participate in it.
Places to add links to newsgroups include pages that directly address the topic. For example, if the organization introduces a new vision statement and offers a newsgroup where employees can discuss the vision, the vision statement home page should include a link to the newsgroup. Employees should have easy access to a directory of newsgroups, as well.
The more current Web browsers-including Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer-will automatically link to newsgroups when an employee clicks on a link that includes the anchor for news, such as the following example illustrates:
<A HREF="news://acme.vision">Vision Statement Discussion Group</A>
E-mail links are a piece of cake. Around any employee's name, you can create a "mailto:" anchor, which automatically invokes an e-mail client. It works like this:
<A HREF="mailto:johndoe@acme.com">John Doe</A>
You can place these anchors throughout an internal Web. Wherever a name appears, an employee reading the name might want to contact that individual. Be liberal, but not too liberal, with these links, or a Web page can become cluttered with hyperlinks. An alternative is to create an e-mail link at the bottom of every page. For example, if a page is dedicated to work being done by a particular individual whose name appears repeatedly, the e-mail link at the bottom of the page would invite employees to "Send e-mail to John Doe." This is the same approach many World Wide Web pages take when they offer the ability to contact a company or a Webmaster.
As for general e-mail not related to access from a particular Web page, major browser clients are configured to allow users to send and receive e-mail, using the browser as the e-mail client. Netscape Navigator's e-mail client is built into the browser.
A number of chat clients are available that integrate with Webs, including one from Netscape. Additionally, Java applets have been developed that enable real-time chat within the Web environment. As noted in Two, however, real-time chat has limited applications in a business. It is probably not a good idea to provide an open area to which employees can wander for a chat, the way the chat rooms work in America Online. Instead, a scheduled chat should be announced in the appropriate site on the Web with appropriate links for joining the chat when it is in session. For instance, if the president will be available at 10:00 a.m. on Tuesday for a live chat with employees about the acquisition of a new company, employees would be invited to return to that link at 10:00 a.m. and click on it to participate. Once the chat is over, the link to the live chat room would be withdrawn.
You could establish an area where employees-supervisors and managers, in particular-could request access to a chat room, which could then be announced using the best vehicle to let employees know that the chat has been scheduled. These chat rooms also could be reserved for private chats, with selected participants notified by e-mail.
Like newsgroups and mailto commands, files archived on a Gopher system are accessible directly from the Web browser (as noted in Two). The anchor for linking to a Gopher site looks like this:
<A HREF="gopher://gopher.acme.com">The Acme Gopher</A>
Gopher, with its hierarchical filing structure, is ideal for archiving documentation that was created pre-Web and for documents that exist in non-HTML format (such as word processed documents and spreadsheets). Links to these documents-and even to entire sets of documents-can be built from appropriate Web pages. Also, a major link to the company's Gopher system should advise employees of the information that can be found there, providing an additional point of access to needed data.
FTP is another Internet technology that has been integrated into the Web. Best used for files that need to be downloaded from a server to a workstation-such as software-links to the specific file can be added to a Web page using the following terminology:
<A HREF="ftp://ftp.acme.com/shareware/file.exe">A Nifty New Utility</A>
Clicking on this link would automatically begin the process of transferring the file. In fact, employees would never even be aware that they have moved into an FTP environment, since the Web browser does all the work!
Use the FTP capability as a component of Web-based text for any files that supplement or support the text. For instance, human resources may have a page about the company's retirement savings plan, and offer for download a utility that helps employees project their retirement income needs. Making that software available by clicking a mouse over the words "retirement income calculator" would make finding and obtaining it a snap for employees.
A key link also should be made available to the FTP site itself. This would facilitate access to files for those employees who are advised that the item they are looking for can be found on the FTP site.
Access to a MUD or MOO currently is limited to Telnet, which means each employee would need a Telnet client on his or her desktop. However, the Web browser can list the Telnet client as a helper application, which would be launched immediately upon clicking the link to the MUD server.
Creating the appropriate links to MUDs and MOOs should be based on the same rationale as building links to newsgroups and chat rooms. For those MUDs or MOOs that are ongoing (the need for which is limited in a business environment), employees should be able to find points of access at any related Web site, as well as at a list of all active MUDs and MOOs. For those that are activated for short-term, single-purpose use-such as a conference for service representatives-an announcement should be made and invitations sent with instructions for accessing the site.
VRML has been a plug-in for Web browsers, but the latest releases of Netscape Navigator and Microsoft Internet Explorer have featured built-in VRML support. Assuming your employees have browsers that support VRML, you do not need to advise them of anything out of the ordinary, since VRML simply allows you to build three-dimensional sites that achieve the same objectives as standard HTML-based Web pages.
If your company adopts a three-dimensional capability for multiple users, such as Worlds Chat, you will need to provide instructions on how to enter the site. Currently, for example, Worlds Chat is invoked by clicking on an icon that is separate from the Web browser. Nevertheless, if your organization maintains such a site, information about the site should be provided on appropriate Web pages, along with links to instructions for getting and installing the software and joining the three-dimensional worlds.
The intranet can provide tremendous advantages to employees who need information in order to do their jobs. However, information that is not organized can easily lead to information overload-the syndrome employees suffer when they are exposed to too much information that does not meet their needs. In order to prevent overload and offer employees access to information that will improve their work lives and directly affect the organization's bottom line, the development of an intranet must be based on a well-thought-out plan. The plan also needs to be constructed based on guidelines and policies employees will follow when they use and contribute to the intranet. This is the subject of the next chapter.