Fwd: RE: [WEB4LIB] Where is your intranet? (fwd)

[Dan Lester]

My son, who explains his connection with libraries and intranets and
the internet, provided this information in response to my passing the
original question on to him.

dan

This is a forwarded message
From: Lester, Andy <ALester at FSC.Follett.com>
To: 'dan at riverofdata.com' <dan at riverofdata.com>
Date: Tuesday, April 18, 2000, 4:12:58 PM
Subject: [WEB4LIB] Where is your intranet? (fwd)

===8<==============Original message text===============
Dad, please forward this to web4lib, since I'm not a member.
...

Janet, I work for Follett Software Company (www.fsc.follett.com), and I
created our intranet 4.5 years ago.  Let me give you a few comments based on
my experiences.  (Speaking as me, not FSC, of course.  I don't think we want
to get into the Intranet Consulting business.)

> We are currently looking at whether the management of 
> intranet content belongs under IS, HR, or Corporate 
> Communications.

It depends on what you mean by "management".  I suspect you mean "decide
what goes out there", in which case I'll say "none of the above."  The
intranet needs very little of being told what should exist.  If there's a
need for it, someone will create it.  If no one creates it, or makes noise
that it should exist, it must not be very important.

There are really two "parts" to our intranet,  the Advisor: News stories and
departmental pages.

NEWS STORIES
The front page of the Advisor is devoted to news stories from around the
company.  Twice a day, a new story is posted.  The stories come from all
over the company, submitted through a web page.  The news editor (currently
me) tidies up the HTML in the articles, adds hyperlinks where appropriate,
and marks them as approved in the news database.  

All news stories come directly from the employees.  I write articles about
technology and the web every so often (more like columns than news), but
that's it.  I'm not the "official voice of the Advisor".  As examples, here
are some recent news stories:

  * [Sales Rep] retires  (written by Rep's manager)
  * [Manager] takes new position in Development (by Manager's manager)
  * Expense reports for FY2000 due Friday at noon (Accounting clerk)
  * National Library Week is April 8th-15th (Head of Marketing)
  * Congratulations from Corporate on 856Express award (Company president)
  * KID CARE: Health insurance for Illinois children (HR person)
  * BizBook Club: Review of "The Cluetrain Manifesto" (Club leader)
  * [Employee]'s baby is born (Friend of employee)

None of those came from me, or was dictated by me.  I didn't say "That's not
an appropriate article", because it's never been a problem.  The only real
"editorial" decisions I have to make is when the article runs.  For example,
the baby announcement will get bumped if anything else even remotely
business-related comes along.  

In almost five years, I've only had one problem where an article submitted
ran afoul of any sorts of guidelines: an article announcing a charity event
was deemed to violate HR's "no solicitation" policy.  It was up for an hour
before someone in HR noticed and had me yank it.  I did, and life went on.

...

DEPARTMENTAL PAGES
The other part of the Advisor is the department information.  Each set of
departmental pages is maintained by individual departments.  Customer
Service maintains their own set of pages, HR maintains their pages, etc etc.
Development and Technical Support even have their own servers and
webmasters.

For an intranet to work, its content needs to be distributed, collaborative
and grass-roots-based.  It's not the same as the old weekly newsletter that
people get in their pay envelopes, where the Official Corporate Voice
published information, one-to-many.  It's now many-to-many.

"Distributed" is absolutely critical.  The creation of content needs to be
in the hands of those who are closest to it.  If I were to try to create all
pages for all departments, I would fail miserably in two ways: I wouldn't
create the pages that people need, and I wouldn't have the time to do it
all, anyway.

> If you are outside of IS, how 
> does your relationship with them work for technical support?

I'm in IS, and I do all the supporting of users on intranet issues that the
first line Help Desk can't answer.  Mostly, what I do is maintain
infrastructure.  I create the framework for people to hang their pages on,
and provide support as they do so.  My biggest challenge is dealing with my
one big mistake: I thought I could just give people FrontPage and let people
go from there.  I thought they wouldn't have to deal with HTML and other web
internals.  That's just not so.  

...

As always, Your Mileage May Vary.  I was lucky going in to have three things
going for me: FSC is a pretty technically savvy company, we all have PCs on
our desks, and we all have web access and browsers.  If any of those were
not true, it would have changed the landscape quite a bit.  

I hope this helps some.  I'd like to recommend reading "The Cluetrain
Manifesto" (www.cluetrain.com) for some insight.  Although much of it is
geared towards marketing, it discusses the human aspect of the web and its
effect on how we work.  

Andy

--
Andy Lester
alester at fsc.follett.com


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-- 
Dan Lester  dan at RiverOfData.com
3577 East Pecan, Boise, ID 83716-7115 USA
www.riverofdata.com  www.postcard.org  www.gailndan.com