Vibrant MCSE BOOT Camp Notes :

Level Three: Interactive Communications

At their most dynamic, intranets offer a medium for real-time collaboration, creating secure platforms for interactive intraorganizational communications. An intranet functions independently of traditional boundaries. In effect, the intranet creates a community, and the only rules governing it are those of the sponsoring organization.

One aerospace company engaged in extensive research and development uses its intranet to encourage cooperation among technical experts in different divisions. Historically, these specialists have worked in isolation, each focusing on a single component of a prototype commercial aircraft. Over time, senior management recognized that this work pattern created barriers to productivity and promoted fighting among divisions and department heads, as opposed to healthy competition. Management needed a way to break down these barriers, establish a common vision, and restore a functioning sense of the common goal-in this case, building a new airplane.

This company's intranet provided a means to this end. But first, top management had to make it clear that the company meant business about changing its ways, and not only supported but required tangible collaboration among its divisions. They realized that simply making the intranet available wasn't enough; making it vital and dynamic required laying groundwork in advance, with division leaders as well as with the technical experts reporting to them.

The company's level three intranet is divided into sectors, each of which represents an individual project, but each of which easily links to its counterparts. Each project has an R&D team whose members are in a defined intranet user group with access to all project information. The initial reaction among users was cautious and skeptical-old habits die hard-and division leaders were often called upon to stimulate usage of the site by calling online meetings and posting current information, as shown in Figure 2.7.

Figure 2.7: An online meeting brought to you by an intranet.

In this case, technical curiosity won out, led by the company's software engineers. Their interest in the intranet's underlying technology and its potential applications prompted them to explore and use it. As more and more users have come onboard, the site itself has become increasingly sophisticated, reflecting their usage and ideas. Interactive software lets users view and modify technical drawings, conduct real-time conferences (see Figure 2.8), and generate animated simulations of various aircraft features currently under development. Senior management credits the intranet not only for improving productivity, but also with enhancing the company's ability to attract and motivate high-end technical talent.

Figure 2.8: Intranet users can choose from a menu of audio and video options.

A company in the consumer healthcare products industry routinely brings together multidisciplinary teams to focus on the launch of new products. Traditionally, the process had been linear: Research and Development comes up with the idea, Product Development makes and tests a prototype, Marketing tests the product, Manufacturing produces the product, Advertising promotes the product, and Sales sells the product.

Today, thanks to its intranet, this company has adopted a more dynamic approach-one that takes better advantage of a broad range of in-house and contractor expertise. Each product category has a project team, consisting of members from each of the relevant disciplines. Although the level of a given individual's involvement varies significantly over the product life cycle, the intranet allows the full team to keep abreast of developments and bring in additional expertise as needed.

Under this new approach, planning for the product launch begins early-during research and development instead of after the fact. This lets marketing experts have input into the product before the prototype is manufactured, saving time and money. The Marketing staff in this company uses the intranet to distribute consumer preference surveys and other research to the full project team as well as to solicit their input into market research.

The company's advertising agency (which is in another city) is also part of the intranet team and uses the site to display its work in progress, in both graphical and video form. Once the core team has signed off, the company's attorneys log on to review all materials prior to production.

As the launch date approaches, other contractors come online, including the company's public relations firm, media buyers, and event planners. Using customized project-management software, the group can create a detailed work plan, assign tasks, display budget estimates, and eliminate scheduling conflicts, in a format that can be constantly updated to reflect changing events or new information.

The same site also is used to track results-in this case, media coverage, information requests, and customer orders. Once the launch is complete, all work products are cached into a searchable archive so that the next product team can draw on them as needed. Documenting the process from start to finish lets the company learn from experience and also, in some cases, respond affirmatively to challenges from competitors.

In the social services arena, one U.S. organization hopes to use a level three intranet to form a coalition with counterparts in a related field to develop a cohesive fundraising strategy and launch a national campaign. In this case, multiple organizations serve a single target population-inner-city youth-by means of many different programs, including job readiness, peer counseling, remedial education, and emergency family intervention. Rather than compete for increasingly scarce corporate and individual contributions, this organization hopes to forge alliances with others that have similar, but not competing, goals.

The intranet medium offers this organization the opportunity to reach out to potential partners-quickly and privately-and to assess the viability of a collaborative effort at the peer level. By conducting a moderated controlled-access conference of executive directors, the agency can make its case, elicit comments, and respond to input in real time, enabling a faster and sounder decision than would have been possible through conventional means. At the same time, the intranet lays the groundwork for future collaboration and information exchange among different organizations that share a common goal.

In contrast, intranets have allowed a major industry association to bring its members together to support an international regulatory initiative. In this instance, the alliance already existed, but focus was lacking. This association has a relatively mature intranet, in the sense that some 200 users access and post to it daily. Numerous task-specific conferences reside on the site, and users regularly suggest new links, information sources, and automation features.

Thus, when the opportunity arose to act in concert, members of this association were well prepared. Users quickly established an intranet-based task group comprising government affairs representatives from each of nine countries and a counterpart user group of technical experts to define the association's position from a scientific point of view. The site sponsor established two-way linkages from a restricted-access sector to the appropriate oversight agency in each affected country, allowing the task groups to download breaking news about the initiative and to organize online briefing sessions for agency officials.

In all of these cases, intranet applications helped facilitate the necessary collaboration by dramatically streamlining the process. Currently available technology lets intranet users exchange, store, and modify information in text, audio, and video form. This means that a user group can review, edit, and create a full range of materials online, as opposed to the more conventional collaborative methods such as meetings and conference calls. In addition, an intranet makes it possible to preserve and archive group deliberations.

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