Intranets: what's all the excitement?

It made the cover of Business Week, and was number three on Fortune magazine's top-10 list of technology trends. It has led to an alliance of Microsoft, MCI and Digital Equipment Corporation. It is the subject of conferences and workshops. According to Forester research, the majority of U.S. companies either have it, plan to get it or are studying it. Netscape claims it is selling more of its wares for it than for the Internet. Software and hardware companies are scrambling to develop and market products for it. Experts in the media suggest that it spells doom for one of IBM's showcase businesses.

"It" is the intranet, a duplicate version of the Internet that operates within an organization - an employee communication tool unlike any other.

"The advent of the intranet reminds me, in some ways, of the ballyhoo that accompanied the use of corporate video 15 and 20 years ago," says Dave Orman, manager of Employee Communications at ARCO and one of the innovators of modern employee communications. "Publications, we were told, would soon be obsolete; all 'significant' communication with employees would be via video. For a number of reasons, corporate video never did reach its potential. What's different about the intranet, however, is that it is going to emerge in many organizations as the key means of communication. For many, it already has! There will probably always be some reasons for print, but the intranet is the bullet train careening down our tracks. We had better learn how to help guide it - or get the hell out of the way."

Intranets provide organizations with unprecedented ability to communicate, but they don't use a traditional model. While you can publish old-fashioned employee information on an intranet, the system empowers employees and departments themselves to become publishers and communication facilitators. An intranet allows anyone in the company to tap into the entire organization's intellectual capital, rather than the limited circle of fellow employees with whom most employees have day-to-day contact.

Intranets can improve productivity and save money. They can speed up projects and enhance quality. They can facilitate two-way and multidirectional communication. They can improve existing processes and simplify workflows.

The emphasis is on can, not will. "To paraphrase 'Field of Dreams,' it's not 'if you build it, they will come,'" notes Kim Hanson, who helped build People's Bank's intranet in her role as manager of communication and community relations; "it's 'if you build it right, they will come.'"

Intranets are a new phenomenon. Two years ago, nobody had heard the term; today, organizations are slapping them together at a dizzying rate, yet many are being assembled based mostly on technical specifications, with little thought to their strategic communication role. Many intranets are evolving without the involvement of communication professionals. For their part, the communicators are often surprised to discover that an intranet has taken root. Since they don't understand the technology - TCP/IP, routers, domains, IP addresses and so forth - they remain uninvolved in its construction, despite its relevance to employee communication. And many organizations that implement internal webs claim to have intranets, even though a true intranet integrates many Internet capabilities, not just the Web.

Hence this lesson in intranets - what they are, how they work, and the role professional communicators can play in their development and maintenance.

The Internet inside

The Internet - subject of so much media hype of late - is a gigantic network of computer networks. The computer systems that comprise this network are able to pass data through and to one another because they use a common protocol that is, they speak the same language. That language is called Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol, or TCP/IP.

Thanks to this common language, the combined resources of these computers act like one giant operating system. Think of the Internet as a global version of Windows or DOS or System 7: Alone, these operating systems don't do much, but you can run some pretty amazing applications on them, such as word processors, desktop publishing programs, databases and spreadsheet programs. That's precisely the case with the Internet. By itself, it's just a network, but it enables powerful applications including E-mail, the World Wide Web, Gopher, FTP, Internet Relay Chat, and Usenet Newsgroups.

If the computers that comprise the Internet use TCP/IP, they can do everything within the local network that they can do as part of the global network. That's the intranet concept. That is, you can use the TCP/IP foundation of your company's Local Area Network (LAN) or Wide Area Network (WAN) to establish an intranet, a private Internet accessible only to your employees. And any employee with a workstation linked to the network can access the intranet.

Which opens up a universe of possibilities.

What it does

While the Web alone does not make an intranet, it should be the central interface employees use to access the intranet. The web is easy to learn, is simple to use, and provides access to a variety of non-Web applications, including E-mail and newsgroups.

At least one of the computers on the organization's network needs to play the part of a Web server - the machine that accepts requests for Web pages from employees' individual workstations and dishes those pages out to the requesting employees' desktop computer. (The organization doesn't have to be limited to one server - in fact, every computer on the network potentially can be a Web server, as long as the proper software is installed on it and it has a dedicated IP address.) On the server, you can store web pages of every kind, along with programs that allow employees to use Web pages to interact with databases. Sound more like technical work and less like communication? Consider the following scenarios . . .

* You no longer have to print an employee handbook or manual that is likely to go out of date the instant it rolls off the press. Instead, you can store the manual on the intranet, where employees can find just the information they need in a flash, without having to study an index or a table of contents - simply type in a key word, and all matching entries are suddenly a mouse-click away. You can make sure that the information is always current. (At the Mayo Clinic, the savings generated by putting nursing manuals on the intranet justified the cost of the system.)

* The employee phone directory can now be interactive - and far more useful than it ever was on paper. You can look up employees by name, department or geographic location. When you find an employee, you not only get the data you would have found in the old book, but links to the employee's profile, information about his or her department, and a link that, if you click on it, allows you to instantly send an E-mail message.

* Organization charts can be up-to-date (and never printed again), and include links to phone directory listings and other pertinent information.

* Employees can get information on their benefits and participate in the annual benefits enrollment, all from their desktops; the interactive capabilities allow employees to produce various benefits scenarios and explore the associated costs before making a final decision. Intranets also can allow you to browse internal job openings and submit their applications. In both cases, information input by the employee goes directly into the appropriate database, eliminating data entry chores for the benefits and recruiting departments.

* Company advertisements from around the world can be viewed, enabling employees to see how the organization and its products and/or services are being positioned in different environments.

* Contracts and other customer-related information can be stored in searchable databases, allowing customer service representatives to find information and answer customer questions far more quickly than had previously been possible.

* You can archive any organizational information, from product descriptions to sales results, from back issues of employee publications to technical specifications, so that employees can find the information they require quickly and easily, and adapt it to whatever format they need.

* Managers unable to attend the quarterly manager's meeting can view a video of the entire proceeding, or select only those elements of the video that interest them. They can copy charts and graphs that were used to explain issues to their own computer, where they can adapt them for communication to their own employees.

* Employees can listen to the president's address to shareholders live, or call it up later when they have time. They can listen to the entire speech, or select segments that interest them.

* Departments can make information available about their efforts, their schedules and the services they provide. Likewise, project teams can post their objectives, progress and results - for one another or any other employee with an interest.

* Newsgroups can be established in which employees with specific interests can engage in discussions, ask questions or provide answers to other employees asking questions. An engineer in California, for example, can submit a problem she's encountering on a project and an engineer at the company's Chicago facility can read it and post a solution. The posts of newsgroups can be archived and made searchable.

In fact, if information exists in an organization, it can be made available via the single, common, graphical, multimedia, point-and-shoot interface of the Web. Some fear that such a wealth of information at employees' fingertips will result in information overload. However, in a society that craves information, we want all we can get about topics and issues that are important to us. Information overload occurs when we are faced with too much information that doesn't satisfy our needs. Thus, an eight-page newsletter that contains only a single article of relevance to a given employee will cause more overload than the entire intranet, which the employee can use to hone in quickly on exactly what he or she is looking for.

Integrated information

An internal Web also enables employees to find information in a way that makes sense to the employee. An employee can find benefits enrollment information, for example, from the human resources home page, by clicking on the words "open enrollment" in the text of an article appearing in the company's online employee newsletter, by finding an open-enrollment meeting in a list of upcoming meetings or by entering "benefits" as the key word in a search for information.

Or, consider the online article that introduces the enrollment. An employee can click on the name of the benefits manager who is quoted to send an E-mail message. Other links lead to detailed meeting information, an overview of the company's benefits plans, a summary of changes to the plans for the upcoming year, or directly to the online enrollment form.

The ability to create such contextual links to information solves one of the communicator's greatest challenges: encouraging an employee to switch from one medium to another. If the article about the upcoming benefits enrollment in the employee newsletter refers the employee to a printed benefits brochure, the odds dwindle that the employee will find the brochure, open it and read it, which requires knowing where the brochure is, making the effort to get it and taking the time to read through it for the information. It's much easier to click on a related link to retrieve instantly the information you want!

The information available on the Web is limited to the uses an organization can dream up. And the cost of publishing the information is practically nonexistent, enabling you to publish information of interest to a limited audience that you would never dream of publishing in print. But why not? Particularly if those few employees who value the information are able to do their jobs better, innovate on behalf of the organization more effectively or satisfy customer needs more efficiently.

Where intranets come from

Communicators accustomed to producing top-down communication tools may be surprised by how intranets evolve. While one model has an organization making a conscious decision to build an intranet and moving forward based on a carefully mapped plan, many intranets have been cobbled together from computers here and there that have been jerry-rigged to accommodate Web publishing.

Unlike other system-wide communication tools, such as IBM's Lotus Notes, intranets require neither huge investments nor specialized networking expertise. An employee in any department can decide to publish Web-based information to other employees in his or her department; all he or she needs is a computer with an IP address that talks TCP/IP. Web server software can be obtained cheaply - there is even free Web server software available on the Internet. If the other employees in the department have Web browsers (such as Netscape Navigator) on their computers, they can access Web pages stored on that employee's server-enhanced computer.

And so can other employees on the network from outside the department. If someone from another department thinks that's a great way to facilitate the flow and exchange of information, all he or she needs to do is ask, "How'd you do that?" Before long, an organization can find (as many organizations have) that they have an informal intranet up and running on several (even dozens) of servers without any plan or sanction. In this case, intranet-based communication occurs in spite of the communication department rather than because of it!

This democratic, everyone's-a-publisher nature of the Net (intra or Inter) is its great strength. The power of the Internet is the wealth of information that is provided by individuals and institutions that never before had the resources to publish, and the fast and easy access to that information by individuals and institutions that previously could turn to limited information resources. Why would the communication department wish to control the engineering department home page, or the finance department's site on the intranet?

That strength, however, also can be the intranet's greatest weakness. How do employees find information they need without getting lost, confused, overwhelmed? Where are links provided that make sense for the organization? And how does the organization convey important messages when employees can customize the information they get? These are just a few of the dilemmas that can be resolved by the strategic application of sound communication principles to the growth and maintenance of an intranet.

Where communication fits

An effective intranet cannot be the sole responsibility of either employee communications or the information technology department. It requires a common effort, a partnership between the two functions that results in an intranet that . . .

* Functions correctly and offers a high degree of interactivity (the information technology role), and

* Provides easy access to information in ways that make sense to employees in that particular organization, maintains fresh content and facilitates the flow and exchange of information (the employee communication role).

Many organizations have begun actively recruiting for this dual-management structure for their intranets; some have even sought to establish a troika: the Webmaster (technical), the Web managing editor (employee communication), and a publisher responsible for marketing the system within the organization and obtaining feedback and ideas from the users and prospective users.

One way to use the intranet as a component of a strategic communication effort is to publish as much detail as possible on it for employees to find when they need it. When you produce information on a different medium - print or video, for example - it will carry an air of importance because you will have reserved its use for special messages and information that begs to have attention drawn to it.

Similarly, the more you let employees provide information to one another, the more you will be able to concentrate on those important messages that still require a top-down communication strategy messages that address organizational strategy, for example. Newsgroups can allow employees to seek and receive specialized information from within the employee population, while permitting departments to build Web sites (and making it easy for those who need the information on those sites to find them) will provide you with the time to focus on those issues that still require management by the professional communicators in the organization.

You can ensure that important information gets a prominent spot on the Intranet. At Silicon Graphics, for example, the employee communication department determines the lead item to appear each day on the Silicon Junction home page. Employees start their information searches from that page, which means they will see that important "lead" story (and click on it if they want more information).

Communicators can assume an internal consulting role, helping other departments develop Web sites on the intranet that embrace the principles of effective communication. And they can build employee communication sites that provide the same information that's available in print and other media produced by the communication department. (Archived back issues of publications on the intranet can become a valuable information resource for all employees.)

Intranet Resources

As the popularity of intranets continues to grow, more and more sites on the World Wide Web are available to help you understand and learn about them. Here are three . . .

Netscape (http://home.netscape.com/comprod/at_work/index.html) - Netscape's take on the intranet, including press clippings, profiles, demonstrations and a white paper.

The Intranet Journal

(http://www.brill.com/intranet) - An online publication that includes news, opinions, links and an exchange where you can participate in discussions with other interested parties.

LiveLink - One of the first commercial software sites for the intranet from Open Text Corporation includes work flow management capabilities.

Shel Holtz, ABC, is principal, Holtz Communication & Technology, Concord, Calif.