Vibrant MCSE BOOT Camp Notes :

Getting Started

The way in which an organization starts up an intranet initiative can powerfully influence its success or failure. Because a primary goal of most intranets is to encourage and facilitate collaboration across organizational boundaries, it makes sense to start from a collaborative foundation. An intranet project provides a natural opportunity for bringing together a range of relevant disciplines to focus on a single goal, and the finished product almost certainly will be all the better for it.

Impetus for creating an intranet can arise from almost anywhere within an organization: executive row, a regional sales office, a volunteer recruitment center, a research lab, the law department, or the secretarial pool. Regardless of where it begins, like any other broad organizational initiative, constructing an intranet requires leadership, direction, and resources.

In other words, a successful intranet project needs

• The input and endorsement of top management
• A designated project leader with an explicit mandate
• The tools and money necessary to do the job

In addition, so long as leadership and accountability are clear, such a project greatly benefits from a multidisciplinary team approach, which helps assure that the organization as a whole reaps maximum value from its investment. A common mistake is to assign intranet development exclusively to an MIS department. While this choice may make sense on the surface, because of the intranet's technological underpinnings, the results will be disappointing if the technical experts operate in a vacuum.

A better approach is to form a project team that comprises a full range of potential users within the organization so that software engineers have the benefit of user input as they develop the intranet's specifications. One industrial concern used this kind of approach: A division president formed a six-member intranet team under the direct leadership of his vice president of operations. Members included senior representatives of the division's MIS, corporate communications, R&D, environmental affairs, law, and product marketing departments.

Working together over a two-month period, this group developed a detailed work plan for the intranet, including explicit project goals, a user needs assessment, technical specifications, training curriculum, and implementation schedule. Team members called on staff within their own organizations to provide input, conduct surveys, and act as beta testers for a prototype intranet site; the MIS department designated a task group to design the underlying architecture and direct the efforts of a software contractor.

The design of this intranet included not only its technical specifications but also a detailed staffing plan for traffic and content management and for incremental roll-out to expand the site to include the full range of users, in this case, all 350 division employees at five locations. Full roll-out, originally projected over a nine-month period, has occurred faster than anticipated-in part because of the site's popularity with users and the project team's responsiveness to their comments. The original project team remains in place to provide oversight and quality assurance, evaluating new features and functions suggested by users and staying abreast of technological advances.

This division's intranet began with an idea, the designation of a leader to carry it forward, and the creation of a team to make it real. Along the way, success required planning, time, money, and, perhaps most important, a consistent commitment to the project as a business priority. As a result of this division's efforts, its intranet has been adopted as a model for replication throughout the corporation, which within the next 12 months expects to be fully online-well ahead of its competition.

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