At many companies, there's an almost unstoppable desire to centralize anything that is working well, including internal Web sites. Overcoming that urge may be the hardest part of building a thriving intranet. But different functional or regional divisions of an enterprise often have needs that are best served by separate, quasi-independent sites.
State Farm, for example, has set up region-specific sections of its intranet and has made them available to its agents nationwide. Now agents in Florida can follow insurance-law developments in their state's legislature, and agents in California can plan a spring meeting in their state -- in each case, without distracting their counterparts elsewhere in the United States.
Of course, State Farm officials do screen content to make sure that nothing embarrassing or disruptive finds its way onto a site. And they have standardized a few basic navigation elements to help users stay oriented as they hop from one State Farm site to another. But site managers tolerate a wide range of typefaces, presentation styles, and even site missions. (Kelly Thul, intranet manager at State Farm, says that he has imposed just one unbreakable rule about Web-site gimmickry: "If you use animation on a site, it has to stop at some point. People just can't concentrate if something keeps blinking at them.")
What good is filling an intranet with a wealth of information if people can't find any of it? Like the public Internet, a well-run internal Web site depends on the effective use of search technology. But according to Robert Geib, a business-development specialist at PeopleSoft, companies should focus both on improving technology and on changing people's habits. Document creators, he says, need to understand how important it is to tag their work properly -- that is, to include invisible "metatags" that identify the major themes in a document.
Geib and others at PeopleSoft, an enterprise-software company based in Pleasanton, California, have given this matter a lot of thought. The company not only develops intranet technology -- it also relies on such technology in its own operations. Geib points to a recent white paper titled "Selling to the Government Market," which PeopleSoft posted to the company intranet. The document carries metatags that incorporate the keywords "federal," "education," and "public sector" -- words that correspond to the way that PeopleSoft organizes its sales force. Thus, if people in the federal-accounts group type the word "federal" into a search window, they will find that white paper easily, and they won't need to press on with related-word queries.
PeopleSoft is also attempting to address a shortcoming of current intranet technology: In most cases, a document that's posted to an intranet is available to anyone who turns it up in a search. Next-generation intranet technology will have the ability to shelter documents so that only an intended group of people can access them. That way, for example, managers who type "hiring guidelines" or "2002 budget planning" into a search engine will be able to see documents that are off-limits to rank-and-file employees. By reducing security risks, this layered approach will enable companies to use their intranet as a tool in high-powered decision making.
Talk to intranet champions at big enterprises, and you'll soon hear a familiar, poignant lament. "If only our employees would spend some time getting to know our site," they complain. "Our intranet is packed with useful material. But people just skim the home page, and they don't even bother to explore what else we've got."
The solution to that problem, of course, is to make your intranet an undeniably essential part of every employee's workday. And there's no better place to start than the site's home page. When people log on to the site, they should see more than just a company logo and a message from your CEO. Give them news they can use right away, such as links to information on medical deductibles or vacation pay. For a factory site, something as simple as a cafeteria menu or an update on parking spaces might be the hook that snags employees. For a research-center site, up-to-the-minute competitive intelligence about major rivals will often keep users coming back for more. In any case, whatever the audience, your home page should offer something of immediate value.
At PeopleSoft, executives have gone a step further by putting pay stubs on the company's intranet -- and only on the intranet. Getting rid of old-fashioned paper statements can save the company thousands of dollars in printing and mailing costs each pay period. But just as important, that simple decision has been a fiercely effective tool for driving intranet usage. "People care about their paychecks," notes Robert Geib. "And if they want to see what they're getting paid, they need to come to our intranet."
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