From a quick scan of the blogosphere its become pretty apparent I’m not the only one questioning what exactly Microsoft have been up to with Sharepoint?!? Have their software architects been sitting completely siloed and at the last moment bolted together various ‘bits’ to make the overall “Sharepoint” product.

Don’t get me wrong – it’s a fantastic application, but when you see time and time again how people use it “out-the-box” you baulk! It can most definitely be twisted into something more than a very expensive semi-website-thing or ‘fancy’ collaborative shared drive – that is its power.

Though when dumped out as purely an “out-the-box” solution one really has to explain Sharepoint: “Please suspend your understanding of what a shared drive is and also please suspend how you understand you might navigate through a website – neither of these learned concepts are going to suffice here, sorry!”

Breadcrumbs for one thing. Eh? Breadcrumbs here and breadcrumbs there and they all point to different areas and change strangely depending on what you happen to be viewing at the time. Not that intuitive to the average joe punter especially when the screen jumps between lists and webpages.

At least thats where the SharePoint consultancy comes in I guess?! Maybe Microsoft do know what they’re doing ;)

Making nice graphs with such volume measures as “documents added, documents downloaded, community members etc.”, is all well and done, but the question that must resonate is “What real use are these to show how my business operates?!“.

Instead value drivers pushing forward action such as quality of information and process efficiency are the key to a successful and vibrant Intranet engaging employees.

“But how do I measure these intangible elements?”

Ensure a governance and architecture process around the information posted to your Intranet. Allowing a swaith of colleagues to upload anything and everything will soon clog your Intranet with information, firstly that doesn’t respond well to web technologies (think PowerPoint slides), and secondly creates an undefinable dumping ground and mess.

Then your job is to design value driven indicators assessing the performance of these intangible elements guiding your strategic decision making and learning; organisational value derived from indicators assisting day-to-day decision making processes and organisational learning! Not data volume!

You may find that colleagues, especailly senior colleagues are cautious over the implimentation of so-called community building or collaborative software. However, with the correct departmental governance and policing, and best practice of this area, community software can be utilised to its full benefit as a useful and integrated business tool.

Community building software can promote organic connections between colleagues. This will, as a by-product, act as a structured storage mechanism for unstructured corporate knowledge which otherwise would only be held between individuals in an un-retrievable unstructured manner.

These types of electronic storage mechanisms are used to great effect within industry leading technology companies such as IBM and Microsoft. Organically structured groups of colleagues are able to liaise from a single recordable point removing the obvious issues of geographical displacement. There is also an instant removal of cottage industries updating and managing phone lists, structure charts, etc. The community area can remove pressure from traditional means of business communication such as email.

Software such as Microsoft SharePoint MySite’s potential, for instance, can be realised if embedded within already established business processes. For the majority, people associate social networking with Internet based networks such as Facebook and MySpace; certainly at the opposite end of the spectrum and barely recognisable as productivity tools! The potential though to improve performance and cut costs is certainly possible should such an Intranet community be used productively and ring-fenced in a business setting.

The key to successfully utilising social media at work lies in comprehending it is very different in nature to its vaguely similar consumer cousins. With a different approach social networking can exploit the simple rationale pulling individuals into consumer resources: that of a simple purpose! Business social networking requires a defined business purpose with specific usage guidelines providing real leverage such as building teamwork, organisation around projects, and organically building a corporate knowledge base.

A community Wiki building a corporate knowledge base, for instance, categorising and built from what would otherwise be unobtainable unstructured data kept in varying hetrogeneous systems, paperwork, peoples heads, can be fashioned to store searchable data and information access to the entire organisation – of what would generally only be available to the few.

Historically, teamwork built through staff meetings, company team building workshops, team nights out, departmental parties, etc. are face-to-face interactions. The flip-side can be an electronically stored impressionistic sense of business activity formed around colleagues actively publishing activities around them. Largely self-organising and leaving a permanent organic record of communication around, say, a project otherwise not existing, can generate implicit awareness to colleague work groups.

Ultimately this can replace, but probably not in its entirety, traditional communication mediums such as the email list which lacks structure and is difficult to manage. An Intranet social network on the other hand provides many-to-many communication within a structured and collaborative environment.

I was passed a fantastic link to Joel Olesons’s blog post on the Microsoft Developer Network at:

http://blogs.msdn.com/joelo/archive/2007/03/16/information-architecture-and-the-information-architect.aspx

Though Joel’s post is essentially discussing the deployment of Microsoft Sharepoint in an Enterprise environment its essentially questioning the very core of what is an Intranet environment for any content management! Not only deloying technology but past/current Intranet structures too on whatever CMS!

Noted painfully is the central question missed time and time again of  “Who actually owns an Intranet?”. Large organisations inherently contain internal power struggles between various departments as a matter of course, but to miss the potential glue between these with a misconfigured and misunderstood “Intranet” is not only costly in technology itself, but also collaborative and  potential productivity that can be gained from having one in the first place. Siloed information architecture and strategy is the exact opposite of these key tenants.

Why do companies have an Intranet? Mostly because someone somewhere managed to convince those with the purse strings that it would increase these key tenants of collaboration and productivity or simply just in having a centralised communicative point. “Rhetorically” … why then are these points in their entirety lost and never fulfilled?

Organisations anticipate a return on the investment involved in implementing Intranets expressed in financial terms or intangible benefits; an expectation their Intranet will either save money, enhance efficiency or both.

Organisations however, are not cohesive bodies with unified needs or interests; instead they are formed by individuals, each with their own intrinsic self-interest and motivations for working within the framework of an organisation. Organisational expectations when broadly defined conflict with the behaviour of users. Users’ expectations are practical, organisations expectations strategic ultimately providing an inherent tension between these different formulations of expectation.

The expectations then that organisations have of Intranets introduce inherent conflicts in their function. Intranets are expected to do several things simultaneously under the umbrella of a single resource: to merge the communicative function and the informative function; to do things cheaper and do things better; to disseminate new information and store old information.

Organisations often expect Intranets to take over existing functions, such as the dissemination of information without affecting the nature of those functions. For example, paper resources migrated to Intranets with little or no modification.

Ensuing Information Wasteland

Strategic expectations of organisations then create conflict in the implementation of Intranets from the tension between the qualities of information; a confusion between the communicative function and an informative function.

This single platform for all information needs becomes a confusing aggregate of differing types of information with different functions and different characteristics, all presented to the user as if they are of the same value – confusing end user expectations of information retrieval and in turn deflating the original assumption that an Intranet will “either save money, enhance efficiency or both”!

An examination of these “end-user” expectations are required to enable alignment with organisational expectations.

Information Architecture and Information Retrieval

Intranet information retrieval requires more often than not implicit end-user understanding to the nature and location of information sought since architecturally information organically mirrors organisational layout rather than information ‘typing’. Semantic linkage and intelligible meta data unfortunately take a back seat. As a result it is commonplace for “Intranet” users to consider Intranets an unresponsive technology in respect to finding and utilising information in their day to day jobs. One of the tenants to having an organisational Intranet in the first place!

For the majority, Intranet information retrieval issues are born from how individuals have learned ‘web technology interaction’ from the Internet. Bringing learned behaviours with them, end-users directly influence the effectiveness of organisational Intranets. For developers, Intranets should then be considered essentially as “socio-technical” devices requiring understanding of end-user interaction in the dissemination and retrieval of information.

It must be said that Internet users have a humungous resource from which they can narrow down something of interest or a link to a site of value in their quest. Within an Intranet environment this same search strategy fails due to the need for a defined information nugget rather as a rough guestimate.

Intranet Strategy – An holistic approach

Varying academic studies detail the extent of which Intranet implementation and use within individual organisations has significant implications for organisational performance. A key component in that performance is “technology adoption in the workplace [and its acceptance being directly] influenced [...] individual differences, social influences, beliefs, attitudes, and situational influences.” (Lee, S., & Kim, B.).

Evidence that organisations are “cultures, tribes, political battlegrounds, networks, [...]” (Checkland & Scholes, 1990); non-deterministic open systems, directly refutes the traditional deterministic approach to information systems development.

Organisations generally are viewed as “unitary systems with coherent purposes and goals rather than collections of people with many (sometimes conflicting) concerns”, (Clarke & Lehaney, 1997), in turn influencing the traditional approach that systems are – “autonomous purpose-directed systems […] with predetermined goals or sets of goals”, (Introna, 1996). These “hard systems” define objectives, modelled and measured against declared criteria, in an attempt to fulfil information needs and organisational goals.

“Soft systems” thinking, in comparison, gives credence to user perceptions and interaction, allowing us to understand underlying causal factors in Intranet complexity and their use. Examining and understanding these factors and their impact assists movement towards effective distribution and retrieval of information.

The intrinsic qualities of organisations generate a complex relationship between information creation, dissemination and use by end users – expectations of success of business strategies, information systems and people themselves disseminating and retrieving information impact on the implementation and use of an Intranet.

Important Intranet Considerations

Information systems are socio-technical systems requiring an understanding not only of technical/information infrastructure, but in the case of an Intranet, the end-user and how they inherently interact with the interface that is an Intranet.

Taking a view of “human computer interaction” in not only technology but also the overlying information, the process of Intranet information systems development and their inherent issues can much more readily be appreciated.

The predominant influence on Intranet use is learnt a priori from “outside-of-organisation” use of the Internet. When users come to Intranets, they do not usually experience the whole resource, but sub-sections of it, the parts they frequent regularly. It is therefore, imperitive that Intranets be designed with these factors in mind, limiting the scope of the resource as it is presented to each individual user, yet bringing those parts to the fore that are required habitually.

Significantly, a causal factor of Intranet failure is a distinct lack of process governance in content handling with the accuracy and relevance of information often going unchecked. Consequently content structuring ends up disparate across sub-sections leading to contrasting navigation systems independent from content types which in turn compounds retrieval issues.

The inability then to find information directly impacts “carrying out tasks and activities” and ultimately reduces productivity around the use of information disseminated through an Intranet. Addressing user expectations in their use of an organisational Intranet will aid in their alignment with any overall organisational strategy.

What are these? Well … email to find out! Taking stock of HCI: Human Computer Interaction against human interfaces is key to any ‘application’! – Hmm? What’s an Intranet or Internet interface? …… Hmm..!!?

Checkland, P. & Scholes, J. (1990). “Soft systems methodology in action“. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons.

Clarke, S. & Lehaney, B. (1997). “Critical approaches to information systems development: Some practical implications“. In Stowell, F., Ison, R., Holloway, R., Jackson, S. & McRobb, S., (Eds.), “Systems for sustainability: People, organisations and environments“, 333–337. New York: Plenum.

Introna, L. D. (1996). “Notes on ateological information systems development“. Information Technology & People, 9, 20–39.

Lee, S., & Kim, B. (2009, January). “Factors affecting the usage of intranet: A confirmatory study. Computers in Human Behavior”, 25(1), 191-201. Retrieved January 13, 2009, doi:10.1016/j.chb.2008.08.007

“What exactly is the business benefit of doing that?”, a cry oft heard.

Well, what exact business benefit is there for not ensuring the presentation layer is ‘fit for purpose’? To build a “web” based application meeting all specific requirements and policies in regards scalability and the like – then ignoring its output “just because” it does what it does and appears on the surface to render as it should …. ?

Folllowing modern techniques, ensuring your presentation layer is split against semantic markup and seperate styling gives the ability to alter the way an applications output looks and feels merely through editing CSS stylesheets in the presentation layer. Business benefit? You don’t have to raise the same level of change requests and prioritise development work to back-end developers nor do you have to ensure you’re within a release schedule several months away – where the focus will be on ensuring business layer upgrades requested by the business take first priority! Nor is there a need to edit deep down in the business layer at what are most likely multiple points to alter inline styling.

A benefical frontend development strategy creating real cost savings

Why? Because, it can be done by front-end developers and can be done in a fast turnaround with next to no cost leaving backend developers prioritising and developing workstreams providing “real” long term business benefit without wasting precious effort and time! User interfaces can be improved/tweaked adhoc providing end-user centric benefits when required without conflicting with underlying business logic or data storage.

For instance, improving end-user input without additional requirements of backend error-checking and processing by simply altering the user interface can pay dividends further downstream! Improved data quality and removing the need to re-key information or use generally poor scrub & match automation delivers on-the-ground business benefits through no cost. The only definite requirement is to ensure alignment of a presentation level release schedule that fits with the programmatic release.

Making certain frontend web industry standards are applied is a forward planning strategy producing real cost and time savings!

This was a continuation of previous contract from November last year again involving many differing Information System (IS) processes to achieve final products.

Projects included Lead Developer role to new-build database driven Business Intelligence & Management Information reporting tools; Corporate Intranet sub-websites;

• Intranet based be-spoke interactive Intranet Mangement Information Dashboard fed from business accessible MS Access database driven backend fed to Intranet SQL Server XML driven Flash/JavaScript frontend;
• Intranet Leadership Commitment web portal;
• Web enabled risk data integrity checker;
• MS Access based reporting tool for IFRS7 data display of entire Corporate balance sheet;
• Basel II compliance reporting application with full Corporate balance sheet drill down;
• Be-spoke Corporate Cost Allocation model for entire Corporate book and associated reporting built in MS Excel;
• First Corporate web enabled Debt Instrument drilling tool;
• Ad-hoc Business Objects Reports;

Tools used included:

HTML, CSS, JavaScript, MS Access, MS Excel, XML, VBA, Business Objects

The Intranet site was upgraded to adhere to XHTML Strict markup and to use CSS purely for its styling. Upgrade was inclusive of several self-built dynamic web-based applications.
Employed by HBOS: Vehicle Finance as Systems Analyst,  I took over the role of Lead Intranet Developer: inclusive of server management, and moved towards upgrading their flat HTML based Intranet site into a dynamic ASP: VBScript based portal to pull in the three distinct geographical areas making up Vehicle Finance: Edinburgh, Chester, Bushey.

Due to server restrictions, and cross domain users, I was unable to use a standard database format such as MS Access or MS SQL for a backend. Instead I opted for my own built flatfile XML based relational database.

As part of the upgrade an XML/JavaScript/ASP, based dynamic phonebook was produced to aide communication between the three geographical sites. A standalone MS Access “phonebook repository” exports XML for the Intranet when an entry is added/updated. This database extended to be the central Vehicle Finance Human Resources Repository, and again upgraded to also incorporate all Financial Services Authority details.

Other own built web applications to streamline business processes included a News CMS, and a Systems self-help tool (SOS) as well as an Online Systems Status tool.

Further projects integrated into the Intranet included business areas KPI (Key Performance Indicators) being updated direct to the Intranet from each core system / department through the use of Business Objects reporting software and MS Acess databases to export pertinant data into XML schema to be fed into Macromedia Flash graphic reporting .swf files.

XHTML, JavaScript, CSS, XML, ASP:VBScript, Flash, BusinessObjects, MS Windows IIS
Intranet Logo Design