The promise of intranets: expectations and effectiveness.

Methodology:

The IABC Research Foundation staff began gathering potential panelists and questions several months before the Intranet Expert Panel discussion. A call for questions and topics was also posted on IABC's web site (general discussion area). More than 75 questions Falling

An April 1999 New York Times headline pretty much nails it: "The online revolution is not the end of civilization as we know it. But almost."

So where were you when the Internet neutron bomb silently exploded and blew your race sedate communication job to bits - literally? We're having fun now, aren't we?

For four solid hours last February, in the high-tech city of Seattle, Wash., six experts from the U.S., Canada and the U.K. wrestled with the thorny issues, challenges and changes caused by intranets, the latest offspring of the marriage between computers and internal web networks. The topic is so new that there simply is no scholarly literature on the topic. In fact, the word intranet was not even in the dictionary until 1994.

It's clear, however, that the intranet gold rush is now at fever pitch. A 1998 Data Analysis Group survey found 87 percent of Top 100 companies and 80 percent of Fortune 1000 companies were developing intranets. International Data Corporation estimates that there were 100,000 intranet web servers in 1995, and this number will grow to 4.7 million by the year 2000. And Miller Freeman, Inc. predicts intranet products and services will grow by 50 percent per year for the next five years, and at the end of the 20th century, four out of five servers will be used as intranet servers.

Perspective on the intranet phenomenon is probably the commodity in least supply these days, which is why the IABC Research Foundation chose to bring together a panel of experts, chosen for their breadth of experience with the topic. Because each intranet question has the potential of rinsing dozens of other sub-issues, Charles Pizzo, panel moderator and IABC Research Foundation chair, kept the conversation focused on a set of pre-selected issues. And because "we only have four hours, not four days," he challenged the panel to "Keep answers short and to the point. Think sound bites."

The free-ranging conversation that followed was like a walk through the intranet forest on a fine day with some very knowledgeable guides. We followed a winding path that took us through most, if not all, of the rough terrain and underbrush that makes intranet pioneering so difficult and complex. We were given lots of advice, shortcuts, danger signals and detours to avoid. We ended the day on a very high plateau where we could actually glimpse, on the far horizon, the beginnings of a very promising intranet vision.

Charles: If I am either your CEO or your client, what value is an intranet?

Pat: My response would be, I don't know. I can't answer that without understanding the need. Maybe the solution is not an intranet. Maybe it's groupware like Lotus Notes. Maybe it's bringing people together face to face.

Mike: In Bass Brewers, it's provided a major cultural revolution in the way we work, think and communicate. It's turned a control culture into an empowered culture. It's turned our doers into thinkers.

Jerry: I think it's a vital work tool to help bring a company together and give it a strong sense of common purpose.

Katie: It has changed the way that we communicate internally. With 70,000 people around the world, our intranet has truly allowed a global community to develop. It is really helping to turn our business around.

John: It fosters collaboration and the carrying out of the organization's business strategy. It should also do it in a way that's going to save resources.

Charles: What is an effective intranet?

Jerry: It's critically important that an intranet become a part of the way a company operates. It's not a piece of technology. It's not a piece of software. It's something that brings a company together and helps it work more effectively.

John: An intranet is successful if, after a short period of time, everyone is talking about it and has the attitude, "I don't know how we got along without this." If usage continues to go up and if content continues to build, these are signs that it has had a positive impact on the organization.

Jerry: When intranets get to the point where they're really doing what they need to be doing, we'll start forgetting about calling them something or thinking of them as a technology. An intranet has become truly effective when you stop noticing it.

Katie: One of the ways we're trying to measure success is how the intranet actually impacts our end customer. It should help our global work force bring products to market much quicker. Our intranet is a way to collaborate, design, develop and deliver. That's our success plan.

Pat: Despite my propensity towards metrics, there are times when you can go on faith that an intranet is really vital to the organization. Is it popular? Is there a buzz around it? Do people open Netscape before they open Word, Excel and all those other applications? If you find that people look to the intranet as their alternative desktop, you've scored a big win. The intranet is also a wonderful communication tool to help unify the work force in times of merger, acquisition and competitive crisis.

David: Intranets are excellent vehicles to put the power in the hands of the employees and give them an opportunity to feel like a significant element of the company.

Charles: What are some of the biggest challenges in creating your intranet?

Mike: Information management. The amount of information is huge and we have to make it manageable so people can use it as a fast, effective business tool.

Pat: The political issues that need to be addressed. The successful intranet is one that is created with buy-in. It is not done off in the communication or the IT department. It's done in cooperation with the functional silos so that everyone can buy into it and everyone will feel that they are not threatened by it.

Jerry: Coordinating the chaos. On one hand, you've got to allow the people who create the information the shortest path to put it into the intranet. On the other, there has to be a common design and consistency across the intranet so that if you come in at one point, it makes sense when you jump to another point. So it's a balance between allowing an intranet to be something that a lot of people can contribute to and yet keep a sense of context around.

Mike: One of the things that we invested in was a lot of training. We taught everybody to write in press release style. We knew people were going to need to provide good quality information; we didn't want them producing tons of diatribe with the important information in the fifth paragraph.

David: I see a challenge in the technical abilities of employees. If you have a work force that is not comfortable using the technology, how does the intranet integrate with traditional communication vehicles? Does it integrate?

John: Access is an issue, particularly in the manufacturing environment. When you create a vital communication technology that doesn't reach 100 percent of the work force, you disenfranchise those who are not online. And that's something that has to be worked out in the strategy phase of design.

Mike: Access and usefulness for our blue-collar workers. When we put our intranet in, it went only to the "overheads" in the company, not our salesmen or blue-collar workers. And we heard a howl of pain from people who thought they were second-class communication citizens. We had to go back to the board and ask for universal suffrage. Now it's the information resource of the company. The blue-collar employees have embraced it. They have their own web sites.

John: Jerry calls it coordinating the chaos. We call it feeding the beast. This is a technology that is so immediate that there's an expectation among employees that anything they see on their screen is up to the minute and absolutely reliable. And if they find out otherwise, they get very upset, very disappointed. One of the ways we attack that problem is to convey to people that it's not my intranet, it's everyone's intranet. Everyone has a responsibility to feed it.

Charles: Who owns the intranet? Corporate communication? IT? HR? The people?

Pat: The owner is the person who is responsible for that content. There's the opportunity to spread ownership out to the areas of expertise where it resides.

Jerry: It's very much a collaborative effort of a few groups. It's the CIO, it's communication, and it's the IT department, although I think the communication side is really what drives an effective intranet more than anything else. No piece of software is going to give you a perfect intranet. The people who do the planning make the difference, and that's usually the communicators.

Katie: I really believe that the employees should own the intranet. And the more you can engage them, the more you can enable them to participate, the more ownership they take. How are you going to then reach out and really get down to the employee level and make it theirs? That's a challenge for all of us, an exciting challenge.

Mike: We have a very simple rule. If you're not responsible for the information, you don't put it on our web site. That way you don't have five telephone directories. So if we have gaps in our intranet, which we did when we first started three evolutions ago, we found that competitive peer pressure soon put those missing elements on. The whole thing is actually moderated and owned by our employees and staff who use feedback telling us what they want.

Charles: What is the evolving role of the intranet in communication?

Pat: The answer keeps changing. I had always felt that it would eliminate or at least reduce the need for face-to-face contact. But recently two organizations have said that their intranet is successful if it allows people with similar goals, interests and expertise to meet in person and start a dialogue to improve some part of their practice.

John: The intranet is a tool for the exchange of information and for conveying what the company is all about. But if we want people to collaborate with one another, particularly outside of their immediate geographic areas, we still recognize that there's a need to bring them together face to face.

Charles: So you're saying the role of the intranet is empowering every employee to become a communicator?

Jerry: Intranets bring out the communicator in every employee. An effective intranet is where a lot of people are working together and submitting content. People you never thought of as communicators suddenly have a strong role in the whole communication process. So now the guy who discovers the widget suddenly has the ability to get that out in front of a whole company. The intranet really makes us look at ourselves and reassess how we fit into the whole communication picture.

Pat: I would echo that. A couple of weeks ago I was speaking to a person responsible for managing her company's intranet. She spends all her time going all over the organization teaching people how to communicate online. So absolutely, part of our new role is teaching others how to communicate.

Mike: Our intranet starting point was to enhance team briefing. Face-to-face communication was very difficult with an office in London and staff in Glasgow and Wales. We have used the intranet to allow people to pull off select information rather than pushing it all out in a briefing form as we used to do. So the real driver for us is this culture change, from push to pull.

Katie: I think the intranet opens collaboration among employees who were previously not in touch with one another. That's really exciting. The intranet is a way to start tapping into the talents we have in this corporation that were stereotyped before. The intranet really allows us to be more than we were in the past.

Charles: Are news groups viable on an intranet?

John: News groups do present several problems. We found very often a lot of them weren't used that much. You need to push people towards them because the Internet is becoming so large, who knows a discussion is going on in this area?

Jerry: You have to have two things. You have to have one side of it that's very wide open. And some people really disagree with that, you know, and they cite e-mail messages that have gone into court cases from Netscape and Microsoft and various places. But aside from that risk, being able to tap into what's really going on in the heads of employees, learning what issues are making them angry, or frustrated - that's truly powerful for management. It allows them to tap into the grapevine.

The other side is you have to integrate them into what your intranet is about. If you've got a news article that's very controversial, right at the bottom of that article they should be able to jump right in and discuss it. When you try to separate news groups, or threaded discussion, and make them an application all onto themselves, they're less used.

The last thing I would say is, they don't have to stay forever. I think a discussion can come up and go away. You have to consider which ones you want to save so people could search on them later.

David: I agree they need to be themed or somehow tied into the context of the organization. Otherwise they may be irrelevant to communication goals and will not become self-sustaining.

Charles: You're talking about getting people to give Feedback instantly to news that's been transmitted to the work force. The question is, can the intranet be used to cultivate culture change?

Jerry: In very interactive intranets where a lot of discussion is going on, I absolutely believe that it can change a company from the bottom to the top or from the top to the bottom.

Pat: If the culture isn't collaborative to start with, then the intranet will never have that critical mass and become a venue for culture change and communication. On the flip side, if everyone participates, then it's much more likely that you could use the intranet as an agent for change. So it's really a catch-22 in that way.

Jerry: I think this really highlights the fact that intranets are not about technology. It's about whether that tool works inside of a company so when somebody puts out an idea, the rest of the company rallies around that and changes. No matter how good your intranet is, if that isn't there, it's not going to change your culture.

Charles: If you're putting so much information on the intranet, how do you manage information overload and make sure employees get the important core messages?

David: I think it comes down to understanding the experience of electronic communication. People do not necessarily read online. They skim for information; they hop around. So it's really understanding the way people gather information and communicate electronically. It's writing condensed content with the important information up front. And if you want more, click the link.

Katie: It is very much, how do you manage the beast? What we have discovered is that for us to deliver relevant information, we need to make some significant changes. We are just bringing in an enterprise search tool, for instance. And we'll need to implement something like a My Yahoo which would search all of the sites and servers around the world and bring relevant information back for easy viewing. Next, how do you build a search taxonomy that is relevant to the employee population worldwide who have diverse businesses and job functions? Our employees are also saying, "Talk to me in my native language." To address all of these issues we're looking at developing a customized My Frontier, which will allow the employees these capabilities. We believe it's very, very important to engage employees directly to "who they are" in the company.

The other thing we're looking at developing is knowledge centers as a method to group like information from across the multiple disciplines in the company and provide an "information hub" of relevant information. We'll have the search taxonomy more subject based and the knowledge centers customized for whether I am an office professional or a manufacturing employee. We hope to put in place owners of those knowledge centers. We're thinking we've probably been too closed-minded in thinking that the intranet is just internal information. The intranet should allow you to be more than you've ever been before. That means you have to think differently from the way you've thought before. The knowledge center should be internal information, globally represented. It's also competitor information and external links to key accounts. It's all of those things that allow you to think differently. We're looking at putting some of that in place this year.

Charles: In this "being all that you can be" mode, is management past worrying about employees wasting time surfing the web?

Katie: When I started at 3M 25 years ago, they were afraid that we would abuse the phone. Now phones are just part of the standard work environment. There are certainly issues. We have employees who abuse privileges of having access to the intranet and Internet. But the challenge we have is, do we establish rules of governance based on the abusers or do we build a trust environment and say we need to manage the abusers?

John: In a recent intranet conference, one of the panelists from a major company said that the way they solved that problem was by posting on a periodic basis the URLs that everybody had visited.

Mike: You have to look at people and their achievements rather than monitoring who's playing solitaire all day on the system. That's the old control culture, isn't it?

Jerry: It's not about the technology, it's about good management.

John: It occurs to me that we as communicators must as never before fully understand the way our people work. As never before, we have to become management consultants in our own right to determine how the intranet and other forms of online communication need to be organized so that they help rather than hinder employees.

Charles: A round robin question: Blue-collar access ... best practice, best solution?

Pat: Kiosks have become generally accepted and even endorsed by U.S. federal regulatory agencies. I think there are even standards for putting in kiosks. Another creative approach is giving people intranet access at home, web TV or something like that.

Katie: We're just starting to look at the issue now and we're going to be bringing kiosks into two of our locations. We're also trying to understand what would draw a manufacturing employee to use the intranet. It's not enough that we push the information out there and expect them to come. We don't want to deliver a "build it and they will come" solution. We need to understand what they want and need and then deliver it.

Mike: We're using a kiosk approach, but we're merging notice boards and PCs to provide a central information point. The main lever is manufacturing people having their own web sites, which have information that is targeted at them.

Charles: When you're managing these intranets serving employees with such diverse work styles and different information needs, how do you ensure information consistency?

Katie: 3M has taken a decentralized approach. We have 180 intranet sites around the world today that are hosted on approximately 40 servers, and every kind of technology that you could imagine. We've developed a three-tier web site model. Tier 3 is a personal web site where information is exchanged between an employee and manager rather than in a face-to-face meeting. Tier 2 is a work group site. Tier 1 comprises the enterprise web sites. Those may be a combination of private and public information - private meaning you need a password to get in the door. Only Tier 1 sites are linked under our corporate portal.

Jerry: Ours has been growing since '93. I think there's a real evolution of intranets, especially in large companies. It starts out as the Wild West - anything goes. You've got spinning, exploding, burning logos and pink pages, the full gamut. Then you start seeing some leadership develop inside of an intranet. The next step is figuring out a consistent architecture, at least at the corporate level. Somewhat like Katie, we have a tiered approach. You start at the top level and you have a very consistent look and feel and design. With information that's really relevant to all of EDS, we have very tight standards about how all that is going to look, regardless of what department it comes from. As you move down to work group sites, the control lightens up.

Pat: I think that it's very important to have a person evaluating the quality of content before it gets published to the world. It's also very important to have people evaluate content and push that which is in alignment with the organization and squelch that which undermines it.

Charles: How many resources does it take to get this done?

Jerry: We have 110,000 employees, with about 70,000 currently connected to the EDS intranet. If you count the number of people who coordinate the content on our main site, which provides information of relevance to all of EDS, there are probably 20 people, including the techies. Many other groups contribute their content to the site. It took our core team about eight months to develop the latest version of the main site and the procedures for other groups to contribute content. Some smart technology up front really helps you on the staffing side because the same people who were producing the content before are now producing it for another medium that gets to employees much more quickly and efficiently.

Katie: It's difficult for me to say on the infrastructure side how many new resources have been allocated to the intranet because we've leveraged them from our basic foundation of infrastructure. There are four of us who manage the corporate site and we do it part time - we all have other real jobs. We're still managing the corporate portal site part time.

Charles: If all the employees can post news, then how do you manage the intranet so that it Fairly represents the organization - in your case, a multinational corporation?

Katie: That's something that we're trying to address in our redesign for 1999. The first corporate site, which was actually a 3M Gopher hole, came up in about 1994. This year will be our fourth version. We have not delivered the intranet effectively down to our manufacturing employees. We do not have native language on the front page of the Frontier. We do have a commitment from both Germany and the Asia Pacific region to give us resources to post native language, news and events to the corporate site. It's all brand new, new, new for us.

Charles: So you're on your Fourth generation in five years. It's probably going to be reassuring for some readers of this report to find out that you're still trying to Figure it out.

Jerry: The writers who did what used to be our monthly employee publication are the ones who contribute to online news. And we also have some regional contributors. We have what we call "news by region" where particular people in those sites, not communicators typically, put in news about the blood drive in that area, etc. We also have some topical areas for people who are just really into a particular type of technology, Y2K being a good example.

Mike: Instead of running a small department of internal communicators, I suddenly found I had every employee in the company as a communicator, which is why we went to training people how to communicate in the new way. We trained them not only about writing to the point, but how to deal with the new business issues of a delayered company, of being separated, not seeing each other so often, and how to run effective team meetings and how to get the best out of team discussions.

John: We have one full-time person who is the managing editor of our intranet site, the corporate site, and she has one full-time assistant. So she is responsible for putting up all of the corporate information. But another big part of her job is to manage a network of correspondents from throughout the organization, each of whom is responsible for his or her own site. Those include six global practices, about 15 service areas, and about 15 offices around the world. She has to be part energizer and part disciplinarian, seeing to it that everybody keeps their respective sites fresh.

Charles: Our panelists are evenly split. Three people represent internal communication and three of you are consultants. What are the pros and cons of outsourcing the deployment of an intranet?

Jerry: I think it's going to be different for every company. The parts that you might want to outsource are the skill-based jobs such as building HTML pages or supporting a server. The person who determines brand and strategy needs to be in house. An intranet is so core to a business that you absolutely have to have that strategic thinking on the inside.

John: I'd add that it may be wise to engage a consultant at the outset to help in the planning process and also to share with you the best practices from other companies. It may make sense to outsource some of the technology, but I think ultimately you have to plan for an intranet that you are going to actively manage yourself.

Katie: We advise our internal clients that if you go out and have it built, make sure they teach you how to maintain it.

David: One of the industry trends that we've been seeing, at least in Canada, is that people are overworked. A consultant can come in and take some of the pain away by sharing best practices and linking the communication strategy with the intranet or Internet function.

Charles: When will the intranet replace print and face-to-face?

Jerry: I think that you'll see some decrease but print is always going to exist. The partnership is always going to exist. We're not going to see a paperless world anytime soon.

John: As long as lawyers are with us, we'll always have paper. Put it in writing.

David: I stress to clients that we really don't know the potential of Internet technology as a communication tool because it's constantly evolving. With the growth of elements like streaming video and audio, we're seeing the medium change before our eyes. We're using it against the old media standards right now.

Mike: I see the intranet supporting face-to-face communication and complementing print. You can use the intranet to brief people on the issues rapidly so the very scarce time you have for face-to-face is quality communication time now. Because of the intranet's immediacy, the print medium has changed and there is no need for a dedicated newspaper. The newspaper is now becoming a coffee table magazine that allows you to look at the organization in ways the intranet doesn't allow.

Pat: I hope face-to-face never goes away; I enjoy people. I think that the more interesting trend is this integration of voice, audio and video on intranets.

Charles: If you were advising someone who has not yet started on an intranet, what one piece of advice would you give him or her?

Jerry: The most important thing you can do up front is to take the time to understand the needs of the organization and what you hope to get back from an intranet. The technology is the easy part. The authoring software is the easy part. It's the planning up front that takes the most skill and focus. And I still believe there are companies that potentially don't need intranets. Different situations call for different measures.

Katie: Two things. First, develop partnerships early on and sustain them. By doing so you're not just focusing on your own group's needs, but rather the broader scope of what the corporation needs. And the second thing is always keep your site visitors in mind and stay flexible so you can respond to their needs.

John: I would advise getting the right development group together and keeping that group small. Give the members of that team the time and resources they need to do the work and make sure that they have a senior-level sponsor to support them and help them cut through all the bureaucratic red tape.

Pat: Clearly articulate the goals, both from the organization's perspective and the end user's perspective, establish success criteria, and then measure how well you're doing and periodically improve it.

Charles: How does the intranet change the role of the supervisor?

Mike: It removes some communication elements of the supervisor's role. It stops the information blocker. The role of the supervisor is now a little bit more managerial post-intranet because employees will knock on that person's door asking for information about what they've seen on the system.

Katie: I think the intranet challenges supervisors to rethink their roles. If supervisors truly have employees with access to collaborative environments and they're exchanging ideas, they may be drawn by their talents and ideas into other work groups that typically the supervisor wouldn't have thought to assign them to. And so there's a certain amount of having to let your employees migrate to those areas where they can be of most benefit to the company. That's a real shift and a real challenge.

Jerry: I think one thing supervisors have to accept is that the hierarchy of information is going away. The days of the CEO passing information down to his top execs who pass it down to their execs who pass it down to team leaders who explain it personally to their teams is not going to work in the electronic world. As soon as it hits the newsgroups, it's out there, everybody knows about it. And in fact, the news is elaborated on so you have to be prepared to come back and explain what's really going on.

David: Ultimately, it enables supervisors to become more proactive. It delivers a connection with their employees, enabling them to understand their employees' concerns before they become issues. It also enables them to think beyond the technology and really use it as a connection tool, a vehicle.

Charles: I have to tell you that I find your remarks to be a little bit controversial, maybe even cutting edge, in the face of research that IABC has done with William H. Mercer that says that employees prefer to receive information From their frontline supervisor directly. And from information that just came out from a new study that the Research Foundation has undertaken on best practices of supervisory communication, which says that important issues need to be communicated face to Face, not electronically or in print.

Jerry: But I think the important part here is that yes, employees do want to be able to talk directly to their leaders about what they heard, and get elaboration. And what leaders have to do is take it down to what that information means to that team. It's the responsibility of the person at that lower level to really say, "This is what this means to us."

John: The individual employee wants to know whether he or she is doing a good job and no intranet is going to tell them that.

Charles: This new buzzword, knowledge management ... what is the role of the intranet when it comes to knowledge management?

John: It depends on how we define knowledge. The content of our intranet fits into one of three categories. One is news, that is, what's going on in the company. The second area is information that you need to do your job every day. And the third category is what we call knowledge. Knowledge helps make you better at what you do. How you serve your clients. How you do your work. And I think the challenge that we were facing is giving people enough time and motivation to take advantage of the ever-increasing amount of knowledge content that is building on our site. We're finding that use of the intranet for knowledge is much lower than the first two primarily because of time.

Katie: Knowledge management may determine who will be the next professional communicator. To date, much of our communication has been done internally within our own organizations. We are all very good professional communicators in the space we feel very safe in...HR, marketing, etc. I think knowledge management is really challenging the next generation of professional communicators to take that a level beyond and say, what is it that's outside of my area ...key clients, competitors, etc. It's bringing that together into one environment and saying, this is relevant, this matters. And to date, I don't think any of us have really stepped up to that. And I think that's knowledge management.

Mike: Knowledge management and the intranet can help with the growing issue of "churn," where staff no longer stay with a company for a long period in their career path, moving on, taking their expertise with them. We are now considering the issue of offering an incentive for people to put their experience and extensive knowledge onto the system.

Pat: Two thoughts. One is the distinction between knowledge sharing and knowledge management. Knowledge management is often viewed as a big search engine that anybody can use to find something and get 45 references to a specific term. We all know that doesn't always work well. The other is about capturing tacit knowledge, the experience of people who have been doing a task for many years. How do you capture that digitally so that it captures the nuances and is useful and meaningful to the next person? So it's not only a question of evaluating the quality of the knowledge, but also technically how do we really achieve knowledge management.

Jerry: You don't have knowledge management unless it's part of the culture, unless you're part of an organization that really is willing to share. That has to be a part of your company first.

Charles: Are there any good knowledge management tools yet?

Pat: Storytelling is one that I've been hearing more and more about. To the degree that we can take storytelling, and then use the intranet to propagate those stories, that becomes a very powerful tool.

Jerry: I have yet to see one tool that does everything. I think there is a big fallacy that you can just have a search engine and that no matter how anybody puts content out there - whether it's a Word document, or Power Point presentation, or Excel spreadsheet, you're going to get what you want in your search. You don't. You pick several tools. The collaborative piece could be Lotus Notes, or Microsoft Exchange, or simply newsgroups. You have to have the ability to put some content out there, and maybe structuring a system around storytelling approaches could be one answer. One size does not fit all.

Katie: We're just beginning to try to figure out how to archive simple data originating from within our own organizations. It's all too new for all of us. We need a lot of input from our clients. What is relevant to you? What is relevant to this market? What builds this knowledge management environment to be a valuable tool for cooperation? I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned.

Pat: One of the groups we're working with is exploring the idea of rules-based questions and answers. The system is programmed to understand certain word patterns so it could provide appropriate answers. It would kick up more difficult questions to human beings.

Charles: How do you motivate people to use the intranet? To find established knowledge?

John: I think it's a question for the highest reaches of the corporation. Are you going to build time into people's schedules for training and knowledge development? Will you give credit to people not only for attending training courses, but also for spending an hour or two reading the knowledge content on the intranet?

Mike: Competitions are very simple carrot motivators. We occasionally offer prizes if you can answer questions about the Year 2000 problem, for instance. It means you have to go into the site to look at it.

Jerry: What turns people on is when they start realizing that by going to the intranet, they don't have to spend time calling a million people or doing all those things. It all comes back to just folding into the way you work. And if somebody goes to a site and tries to find something and can't and finally gives up ... then we're not designing it the way it needs to be designed. On that, my boss used to say, "You have to think like a dog." Meaning that you shouldn't assume that you know what a user wants - any more than you can understand how your dog thinks. You have to use tools like focus groups and questionnaires to understand their needs... at least in the case of your users.

Charles: How do you measure success of an intranet?

Mike: I found an intranet in its start-up time can be damaged by anecdotal comments, especially by senior people who don't use it, and say to their colleagues or other managers, "You know, I don't think this thing really works." It's amazing how powerful that builds up as a communication message. Empirical evidence as simple as number of hits, visible all the time, just cuts the legs from that negative spin.

Jerry: It's really important, before you build the intranet, to answer the question, "Where are we starting from?" We did a lot of focus group testing, really asking users, "What would you look to an intranet for?" "What would you want to find there?" Then we started capturing those things and then we'd come back and bring a focus group together and again ask, "Okay, are you finding these things that you asked for?" "Are you being more effective in your job?" And you can take a lot of information like that and bring it back to management and say, "This is why what we're doing is so important."

Charles: How can you tie the intranet to improving the bottom line?

Jerry: Sometimes the most powerful things you can bring back to management are employee stories like "A" had this problem, went to the intranet, found this, did this for a customer, and such and such happened. Statistics are great, but stories make them come to life. David: I think companies almost need to think inversely. The question is not how much money we are making through the intranet, but how are we saving money? Ultimately, this is a tool of convenience and efficiency. It makes jobs easier.

Pat: One company that quantified the cost of people not using approved vendors to book travel that was adding costs in six figures each year. By creating an intranet site that became the only way you could book your travel, it automatically brought people into compliance and saved a huge amount of money.

Charles: What is the role of communicators in all of this? Do they lead it or collaborate it? How do they partner with IT?

Mike: I used to do all the internal communication work; I don't any longer. As the intranet has mobilized our work force as communicators, I am now responsible for information flow architecture. What I'm doing is managing the top-level communication mainly through the intranet. I've stopped being a gateway and have become a consultant and manager.

Jerry: It comes down to moving from the producing-collateral mode to the thinking-strategically mode. It's saying, "Okay, whether I like it or not, all these people are going to be communicating; now how do I turn all of those voices into a chorus?" How do you turn the chaos into something that makes sense and that really makes the company more effective? I think the theme in all of this is the walls are disappearing, and you've got to reach outside of what you were before. If you're not growing beyond what the old role was, you're going to wither on the vine.

Mike: If communicators don't grasp the intranet, they're not going to be communicators in the future.

Pat: I don't see the issue as IT vs. communication. I see it as IT and communication being very closely aligned with the goals and the executive leadership of the organization. If IT and communicators understand what it is the company needs to do to survive, then the intranet will be a success. It will be vital. If neither IT nor the communicators get it, then it's never going to happen.

Charles: I'll tell you frankly, in my travels I run up against a lot of communicators who tell me that they're losing their jobs to IT people who are taking over because of the intranet. How can communicators best partner with IT?

Katie: What we really need from communicators is to show leadership. They need to rethink their roles. They need to reach out to the rest of the communicators in the company, most not professionally trained, and say, "How could we help you?" "What is the service that we could provide you?" They need to think of us as their clients. And they need to develop a train-the-trainer program where they can put that training online and deliver it worldwide to the rest of us. We're going to continue to communicate, with or without the professional communicator.

David: I think a lot of it depends on the function of the intranet as it is defined by the organization. Is it primarily a communication tool or is it a business tool? And that almost helps to define the role of the communicator. I think the value of the communication department, if it's working well, is that it understands the company and therefore can build the connections necessary to make the intranet an effective tool. It's almost the role of the film director and producer.

Jerry: Just to explain how things have kind of evolved where I am, there's actually a partnership between the CIO, the IT department and communication. Our piece is information architecture. It's trying to serve that role of creating the design and the brand identity and how all the pieces go together. My point is that communication needs to be at the table. If you're not, you're not developing as a communicator the way you need to be, and you're not doing your job the way you should. If you want to keep on making brochures and putting out newsletters, God help you. In five years I don't know where you're going to be. You need to be a player.

Mike: The three functions that have really driven our intranet forward have been communication, IT and HR. If you're going to start up an intranet from scratch, those are the three elements that you need to work together in partnership. We had some friction at the start, especially with IT, because we had a vision of what we wanted and IT was trying to provide us a system they wanted, but the two plans didn't meet. But teamwork surmounted that and we eventually came up with something that met all our needs. Because IT and communication worked together in partnership, we're doing far more techy things than IT would have allowed us to do if we hadn't gone down the partnership route together. It is important to recognize publicly IT's role in any communication briefing.

Charles: What does the future hold for intranets?

Jerry: Personalization of information delivered has to be a big area. Some messages need to go to everybody and other messages really belong to certain people; they're noise to other people. The other piece of it is the knowledge management/collaboration piece that's still being figured out.

Katie: We're certainly going to be consumed with the customization-personalization aspects of delivering relevant information across our worldwide sites. And I can see us being consumed in figuring out knowledge management. Beyond that, I wonder what it is that we aren't even discussing yet. Do we expand our intranet sites to see things beyond our walls? Do we extend links to city hall? Do we link to local signups for baseball? How holistic do we become at our intranet entry point? Do we have people at home logging in and using the portal as a way to get to other resources? How do you really capture your employee beyond the eight hours of the workday? I don't know the answers to any of these questions, but I wonder what it is that we're not talking about...

John: An interesting area is this whole idea of organizational or intellectual capital. It's the idea that the collective brain-power of the employee population is the true value of the corporation and you should factor that to the bottom line. I think intranets are going to play a big role in assessing and engaging the collective brainpower, the organizational IQ, and somehow fixing a value on that and reporting it to the shareholders.

Pat: I'm doing work with a company that values organizational assets for spin-offs, mergers and acquisitions. And they are now beginning to attach significant values to an organization's URL's - external and intranet sites.

Mike: Suppliers and customers have become more integral business partners and we see sharing our intranet with these critical partners as a powerful way of getting more synergies and efficiencies. That's very much in the future I think.

David: I think it's just a matter of time before your Palm Pilot is wired all the time, like your pager or cell phone. I think those are going to be core tools for accessing the intranet. If you're in the middle of Saudi Arabia, you can still access corporate information to close a sale and communicate an issue. So the delivery will change, but the data remains the core, and that's where communicators come in. The key is managing that information in such a way that people can efficiently access and use it.

Charles: Roger D'Aprix says that electronic communication doesn't speed up anything, it still takes the same amount of time to read a page of e-mail as it took to read a page during the ReFormation. What other types of trends or issues for intranet growth, functionality or employee communication do our panelists see on the horizon? What's your year 2000 intranet dream?

Katie: My year 2000 dream would be to get everybody engaged. We need to get everybody connected. We need to make sure that everybody is an active participant. I would be content with that.

John: My dream would be to have on one screen everything that is important to me at any given moment in my personal life, my home life, and my work life. And everything that I should know about what's going on in the world around us.

Jerry: For me, it would be eliminating Internet authoring tools and allowing people to contribute directly from their web browsers. It keeps people focused on content - not cool spinning logos. If I could have that with a snap of my fingers, I'd be pretty happy.

David: The ability to effectively deliver audio, video and interactive communication via video links, audio connections. The communication value of intranet technology still has not been defined because we don't have the full capacity of the bandwidths yet.

Pat: Someone made the comment that the printing press has disappeared from our consciousness, and I think that that's a really nice analogy. I think to the degree that all of this technology disappears from our consciousness, that's good.

Charles: We have a wrap question which is now what? What do I do next?

John: I would say that if you have not built or are about ready to start building an intranet, take it one step at a time. It can be absolutely overwhelming when you look at the whole job before you. If you have already built it and you're maintaining it, operate with the philosophy that it's a work in progress. Second, be open-minded. Be willing to explore new technologies, new options, learn from what you read and by talking to colleagues. And finally, be passionate. Really believe in it, because if you don't, you're not going to be able to convince the organization.

David: Solicit feedback, develop your strategy and make it come to life.

Katie: I would suggest just doing two things differently this year from what you've done in the past. It could be adopting a business unit and sitting in on their communication plans, you're going to offer yourself to them for 15 percent of your time, and you're going to speak their language and be an asset to their team. It's doing something that you haven't done before. Believe me, we really do believe that professional communicators have great skills and talents to bring to the table. We want you at the table. And yet, if you don't come, everybody is so busy, we will just do it ourselves.

Jerry: Become a little bit of a technologist and designer. Step outside of your box. And don't worry, because other people are scared too. The technology guys are scared because the tools are making it so easy for people who are not technologists to make these things happen. And for them to be effective, they've got to start picking up some of these communication skills from people like you. So step up to the bat and have fun.

John J. Gerstner, ABC, is manager of electronic communications for Deere & Company, Illinois. In 1996, Gerstner was named to lead the launch of John Deere's web site (www.deere.com) and create an enterprise-wide strategy for Deere's intranet, JD Online, now a key communication and HR tool for 20,000 employees representing eight divisions in 10 countries. Gerstner was previously manager of internal communication, where he was responsible for Deere's internal corporate magazine, employee video program, and annual communicators' conference. Gerstner has received more than 50 communication awards during his career, including 13 IABC Gold Quills.

Gerstner is serving his second term as a board member of IABC and is the new vice-chairman of IABC's Research Foundation. He is a frequent speaker on the Internet, intranets, organizational writing, photography and editing, and contributes articles to Communication World magazine, including a series of interviews on"The Civilization of Cyberspace." He is also launching a new web site for intranet information sharing at www.intranetinsider.com.

Charles Pizzo Jr. is principal of the New Orleans-based public relations agency P.R. PR, Inc. (www.prprnet.com) and a former assistant system operator of the PR & Marketing Forum for CompuServe. P.R. PR, Inc. is the Louisiana affiliate of Edelman Public Relations Worldwide and a member of the Phoenix Network of independent PR agencies.

Pizzo is chairman of the IABC Research Foundation. He is serving his second term as director-at-large on the IABC executive board and is past president of IABC/New Orleans and a member of PRSA. He frequently speaks on such topics as strategies for online communicators, media relations online, technology for entrepreneurs, and labor relations. Pizzo has written for PRSA's national magazine, Tactics, and served as a member of the editorial board and columnist for Interactive PR, a national U.S. technology publication for communicators. He is a graduate of the Culinary Institute of America.

David Bradfield works at Toronto-based NATIONAL Public Relations where he manages the Electronic Communication Group, one of Canada's premier Internet communication strategy groups. David helps clients develop electronic communication strategies and integrate interactive media within traditional campaigns.

Bradfield combines experience at some of Canada's leading public relations and interactive agencies with a unique understanding of technology as a communication tool. He has also served on the IABC/Toronto executive board since 1996 and will be chapter president in 2000-2001.

John Kessling is senior vice president, director of knowledge strategies for Ketchum, a worldwide public relations firm. Kessling works with Ketchum offices to create and deliver knowledge-based services for clients and to enhance knowledge acquisition and sharing within the agency. He played a central role in the development of the Ketchum Global Network, the company's intranet, which delivers comprehensive news, information and knowledge to Ketchum employees around the world. KGN has received widespread attention within the public relations industry and beyond.

Kessling has more than 25 years of experience in the communication field, the last 10 at Ketchum. He has counseled a wide range of clients, primarily in the areas of corporate, business-to-business and technology communication.

Mike Maryon is internal communications manager at Bass Brewers, England. During his tenure, he has radically revised the communication process, procedures and practices for the business, using an intranet.

He is a member of the British Association of Communicators (BACB) and the U.K.'s Institute of Public Relations (IPR), as well as the chairman of the IPR's internal communication group. Maryon is also a member of the Institute of Incorporated Engineers (IIE).

Maryon speaks regularly on technology and communication and has received many awards during his career, including the IPR Sword of Excellence for internal communication."Bass Brewers Electronic News," part of the company's "Brewnet" intranet system, received the 1997 BACB award for "the best electronic publication." Maryon is also the editorial board director for the "Intranet Communicator" journal and a member of the executive board of"The Intranet Group," the U.K.'s corporate intranet forum.

Katie McGaffigan has 25 years' experience with 3M's information technology division. She is the project manager for the 3M Intranet Technology Team that manages the corporate intranet web site. She also manages the centralized IT intranet publishing environment and is responsible for developing and executing the planning strategies to use 3M's intranet as a strategic corporate communication tool.

In 1994 McGaffigan began a grass-roots effort to form an intranet team that would build a corporate intranet site and to begin discussion on how to manage the intranet that was evolving throughout the company. The intranet team is a partnership between IT and corporate marketing. The corporate site is a portal that links to 200 web sites located around the world for 70,000 employees.

Pat Shafer is senior vice president, e-Business, at Bell and Partners in Connecticut. He works with clients to identify strategic goals and objectives and support them with intranet and extranet applications. His areas of practice encompass knowledge management, prioritization and ROI, performance metrics, and design of user-centric systems.

Before joining Bell and Partners, Shafer was a strategic consultant at Cognitive Communications. He co-developed intranet solutions with the prestigious Juran Institute. In addition, Shafer has consulted for Global 200 organizations such as General Motors, Ciba Specialty Chemicals Corporation, MasterCard international, Pearson Education, McGraw-Hill and Andersen Consulting. Before his move to the online environment, Sharer was a senior vice president of sales and new media development for Video Education/New Light Productions.

Jerry Stevenson manages technology strategy for EDS Communications in Texas. His position includes the oversight of web, newsgroup, chat, online video and other electronic media that support communication within the company. Stevenson has a unique background in communication, public relations and systems engineering. In more than six years with the company, he has worked with diverse clients including Xerox, Bell South, Chevron,World Cup and AT&T in a variety of roles. Crossing the lines between technologist and communication professional, Jerry is a frequent speaker and author on topics that involve intranet, Internet, knowledge management, and the changing role of communication in the online world.