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.
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
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.
