The Tao of Intranets

In Chinese philosophy, the tao is the "way"--a path to harmony. Think of intranets as the tao of your office--not a boxed solution you buy off the shelf. You probably have heard the standard definition: "An intranet is a Web site a company creates that is accessible only to its employees. Its power lies in its ability to allow departments with different systems to share information." But this reduces them to mere technological products. To create a truly useful intranet for your company, firm or client, you need to look at them as a process. It's true you need some technical skills (even if only to speak with a consultant intelligently), but first you must investigate the problems of managing information. Only if you examine the philosophy behind intranets can you create one that is a profitable investment, not an expensive toy. ASK SOME TOUGH QUESTIONS Your company already has an intranet of sorts: its papers, filing cabinets, policy manuals, reference books, spreadsheets and reports, all interlinked by three-ring binders, sticky notes, file folders, telephones and even people running all the information around the office--the so-called sneaker net. Apply technology and you have an intranet. But no intranet will magically organize information. That's something you have to do yourself, and it has nothing to do with the difference between Java and ActiveX. If your organizational thinking is fuzzy before you develop an intranet, you'll end up with a fuzzy intranet. That's because an intranet is not really about technology automatically solving all your problems; it is about using the features technology offers to logically organize and make easily accessible all the information you and your firm or company need every day to keep your customers and clients happy and your employees effective and efficient in ways that were never before possible. The first thing you need to do is ask yourself how you do what you need to do to get your product out the door. Consider the whole process, including your tools and all methods of conveying information: paper, pencil, phone calls, faxes, copiers, spreadsheets, filing cabinets, meetings, reports, e-mail, voice mail, express mail, snail mail, policies, procedures, accounting systems, billing systems and payroll systems. Ask yourself the following questions: * How efficient is your process? How effective is the result? Is there any room for improvement? Measure your responsiveness, which equals your competitiveness. * Are certain long-held beliefs clouding your expectations of how efficient these processes could possibly be? * How well do you recognize and deal with the planned and unplanned events of your daily business life? * How much does it cost you to achieve the quality level you and your competition demand? * Are different collections of information locked tight inside proprietary databases, stored on computer systems that do not talk each other? How many different copies of the same information do you have and are these different copies in sync? The way you answer these questions tells much about how your company handles the management of knowledge, which has become as important in business as capital, natural resources and labor. Knowledge makes your employees more competent, more innovative and therefore more responsive to your customers. So, if you can answer these questions, you'll have an idea of just what kind of information you'll need on your intranet and how to organize it. Consider the following: Imagine one of your customers is contemplating switching to a competitor. Would you be able to identify this problem and quickly respond? Or consider this--how much time and how many people would it take to let your employees (1) know their 401(k) contributions, balance and earnings, (2) determine whether they are investing in the right fund to help them achieve their personal goals and (3) change their investment? …