Step back a moment and ask yourself: What made the public Internet take off? The answer: Users benefited from being connected to so many people, businesses, and ideas at once. People love to share what they know, what they care about, what they're proud of. A large intranet can capture some of that magic as well.
Sevin Rosen Funds, a leading VC firm based in Dallas and Palo Alto, recently created an intranet whose purpose is to share best practices and contact lists with 70 young companies in a wide range of high-tech industries. Take something as crucial as how to run a board meeting. A year ago, Sevin Rosen partners noticed that they were spending too much time discussing and ratifying stock-option plans at their startups. As partner Steve Domenik observes, the faster a board can deal with option-plan formalities, the more time it has to talk about how to build the business. Thanks to Sevin Rosen's intranet, even the newest CEOs at the VC firm's portfolio companies now arrive at board meetings fully versed in the firm's thinking on this subject. "At last," says Domenik, "we're getting rid of this long learning curve where it was taking up to 10 board meetings before we were really working together efficiently."
Another part of the Sevin Rosen site caters to startups that want to get their executives out on the speaking circuit, so they can raise their companies' profiles and perhaps find new customers. Conferences are plentiful, but there's an art to finding the right one at the right time -- that is, in time to lobby for a speaking slot. Sevin Rosen subscribes to a conference-listing service and puts detailed information from that service on its intranet. That's been a happy turn of events for ComSpace Corp., a wireless-systems startup in Coppell, Texas and a Sevin Rosen portfolio company.
Annette Gieseman, head of marketing at ComSpace, says that the Sevin Rosen intranet pointed her to a communications conference in Monterrey, Mexico that is scheduled to take place in October. Mexico is a large potential market for ComSpace, so once she heard about the conference, she immediately began to lobby organizers to include a speaking slot either for her company's CEO or for a key ComSpace customer. Without the intranet, she says, she never would have known about that opportunity.
One purpose of an intranet is to tell employees what's going on at your enterprise. But who should do the telling? It's easy -- and tempting -- to give your CEO a never-ending showcase on your home page. The CEO generates a ready supply of intranet-adaptable content: monthly memos, speeches to investor groups, and so on. And on big strategic issues, employees naturally look to the CEO for the decisive word.
But there's an argument for spreading such visibility around. If a new brand launch is a big hit, let the product manager in charge of it explain what the team did right. If three geographic regions are teaming up on a project, let people from each region discuss how turf battles were set aside. Such reports may not be of interest to every employee -- but they can be vital for, say, 10% or 20% of your workforce. Reports from the front lines also "make it a lot easier for young managers to feel that the site is relevant to what they do," says Kevin Salwen, president of dash30, an Atlanta-based intranet-development company.
To be sure, most of the content on your intranet will focus on intracompany news. But in an ever-more-interconnected world, employees also need help with navigating the daily torrent of news about the business scene at large. You can outsource that function to vendors such as Dow Jones, Moreover.com, NewsEdge, and Thomson Financial. They will cull through headlines from newspapers, magazines, and wire services, and sort them by industry, geographic region, or keyword. Sign up, and your intranet can display stories that are relevant to your business -- while weeding out the chaff.
In its simplest form, automated news sorting comes on a one-version-for-everyone basis. But vendors will usually customize your news feed, so that your research department might get a feed that's full of articles on technical subjects, while your sales force might get a diet that's rich in updates about competitors.
News filtering isn't perfect, at least not yet. Nick Denton, the founder and CEO of Moreover.com, estimates that when employees want information about a new topic, they rely on their intranet in only about 30% of cases, while using an all-purpose Internet search engine in the remaining 70% of cases. An especially thorny problem involves the tendency of employees' interests to change over time, as new business opportunities arise and old ones peter out. The winning strategy at some big companies: Use automatic news filters, but call on the services of a human editor as well. That way, news digests on your intranet will reflect an insider's informed judgment about what matters to your company right now.
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