Gaining support for the move from old to new
Andy Caddy
These are turbulent times for the telecommunications industry but Cable & Wireless has committed itself to building a world class global intranet to assist its transition to a being a business provider of data and IP services. Cable & Wireless is starting 2002 with a single global intranet that brings together Content Management, Document Management and lays down the platform for future application integration.
So how have we achieved this at such a difficult time? There’s no text book answer, no "one size fits all" solution, but there are important lessons that can be learned from the experience at Cable & Wireless that may benefit anyone about to embark on a large intranet project.
1. Understand the requirement
Before rationalisation, Cable & Wireless had several global
intranets each comprising countless sub sites, multiple, web based applications
and 90,000 pages of content. Some of these sites were well established
with loyal users and a troop of willing authors. Others were Frontpage
follies updated once never to be touched again. We spent the first half
of our project just observing and documenting the use of these legacy
systems to understand what the business needs and then played it back
to the user community in a structured fashion. We wanted to get away from
armies of HTML authors free to create dancing penguins animated gifs and
web sites who's only brand guidance was a poorly scanned logo, but this
would not be easy if we didn't do the research first. Having established
what was required by the business the task became a validation exercise
of building information architectures and checking them against business
requirements. With a completed Information Architecture and a roadmap
of how we could develop this into a global site it became far easier to
convince business units to commit to the new intranet. Sure, we would
be moving away from highly skilled resource to a CMS-based solution, but
business managers embraced this because it empowered the content owners
and simplified the publication process.
2. Provide governance but make it light-of-touch
Moving away from technical staff authoring your content with
their personal copy of HomeSite and Dreamweaver to a business run CMS
solution can seem like a loss of autonomy to the end user, but with guidance
and sensible lightweight process in place a balance can be achieved. At
Cable & Wireless we have a relatively small central team who provide
governance and guidance in three key areas: Brand, Taxonomy and Navigation.
Brand is the most obvious to define in that we want our intranet to look fairly consistent throughout so that users know what to expect and do not have to re-learn the interface. We provide brand guidelines (themselves derived from the corporate guidelines) and we implement them via standard templates. We try to give some variety through the use of variation templates such that authors can at least choose between two or three interpretations of a presentational style, but the overall look is business focussed and content driven. We have also moved away from over-using graphics as we want authors to concentrate on the content and not on which metaphorical representation to use as the introductory picture!
Taxonomy is the standard way we classify our documents and our web pages and drives our search engine. Any Intranet that exceeds 1000 pages will require a good search solution and at Cable & Wireless with 25000 pages and hundreds of thousands of documents, it is essential that our users can get straight to the relevant information. Taxonomy takes some work and some planning and is an under-rated ingredient in a successful web strategy, so you will need to make sure you have the right people on board to make it successful, but establishing a winning search strategy underpins the whole Intranet. You will also need to sell the concept to your author community who will ultimately be responsible for their individual classifications, and if they don't get it they won't use it.
Finally, navigation is simply the number one priority for your end user. Finding your way around an intranet must be intuitive and straightforward. At Cable & Wireless we designed the raw navigation from the information architecture and then perfected it through usability tests, card sorts and mockups across our different regions. No solution will ever be perfect for every one of your users, but with a little bit of effort you can make it a much better fit.
3. Demonstrate through piloting
It's often very difficult to see the end solution when you start
out building a big intranet. If you are making a concerted effort away
from older legacy systems to something more user focused and productivity
driven then envisioning your final product may be even more difficult.
At Cable & Wireless we were fortunate to have an 'accidental'
pilot in the formation of a global portal some 6 months before the real
project began. The 'World' portal was our first attempt at using our CMS
and delivering content to a global audience. It allowed us to experiment
with devolved authorship, training strategies, look and feel elements
and user impact. Our knowledge of the CMS and its capabilities grew and
our internal processes to handle the paradigm shift were developed and
firmly established. Without this intermediate stage, it is very likely
that some huge mistakes could have been made in the global intranet.
Not everyone will have this luxury, but at the very least some sort of pilot would be needed especially if this is the first time you have used a CMS or are changing CMS. Experience in any CMS is useful, but experience in your CMS within your organisation is indispensable.
4. Pull initiatives together
In a small company it's fairly easy to see the whole playing
field when you start out on an Intranet project. You'll know what's
happening with your internet strategy, you probably have an idea where
the internal systems could benefit from being web-enabled and you will
have few problems keeping people abreast of the developments that your
project is about to embark on. In a large company, split across many sites
possibly many geographies the reality is very different.
At Cable & Wireless, there are initiatives launching weekly and understanding the impact and timeline of each one can be a full time job in itself. However, an essential part of any intranet strategy is providing a platform to deliver web enabled initiatives, so understanding their goals and making them understand your own is extremely important. Find out who approves projects and ask to be informed of web based initiatives or alternatively see if there is a development forum or group and become a regular attendee. At some point during the project when the scope has been established and work is underway, start meeting the players in the major works and advertise your goals. Where there are synergies, bring projects together, where there are overlaps, seek clear definitions of responsibilities to avoid further problems later on. If there are no central forums in place, consider starting one : it may seem like more effort than it's worth, but understanding different areas of the businesses viewpoint of what web technology (and that may be internal or external) is going to deliver is vitally important in managing expectations.
At Cable & Wireless we faced a myriad of projects that could have caused confusion for the end business user. We were piloting a document management solution whilst rolling out a content management system, so we combined them into a co-ordinated initiative. We were rolling out a global SAP implementation with web based access, so we shared brand guidelines and worked with SAP developers to give a better end user experience. We were choosing a search engine for our Internet site so we pooled resource to make a selection that was suitable for both internal and external use. And it didn't stop there. We involved ourselves in corporate forums and user groups and learned what was going on.
5. Leverage change
Change can be a mechanism for both good and bad. Just as an upturn
in the industry might make gaining budgets or project approvals easier,
a downturn can be just as effective in forcing some hard decisions and
moving your project forward. CMS based intranets are about centralising,
standardising and cost cutting and these are easy justifications in a
difficult market. Base your decision making on the reality of your business
and your board will back you. Base it on the woolly initiatives of the
late nineties such as "knowledge management", "corporate portals" and
"e-learning" and you will find yourself with an uphill struggle. Concentrate
on projects that add value, have demonstrable cost savings and are clear
to visualise. If you are lucky you might even be able to deliver e-enablement
as a fortunate by-product of your intranet strategy.
One of our primary drivers has been to ensure that our new Global Intranet offers a good return on the resources invested in it. We had to ensure that our approach, ourthinking and our strategies were well thought out and justified. Intranets have come of age and are finally fulfilling the promises so often heard in the nineties of corporate cost saving platforms capable of lowering cost whilst increasing productivity. A well thought out content management strategy is the core of a cost effective intranet and will be fundamental towards the success of your project. In today's business you don't get second chances, so make sure your strategy is well thought out, well researched, well planned and get it right first time.