Benchmarking against other intranets

The most exciting aspect of this project is that it has given us the opportunity to upgrade the site in several ways. For example, the new version we are now building is fully Web Standards compliant (XHTML & CSS), accessible up to WCAG 1.0 Level-AA and features a number of design improvements.

Notwithstanding these enhancements, the real reason for buying the new software was to help improve our content. This applies not only to the quality of the language we use, but to the range and depth of services the intranet provides.

I am always interested to discover what sort of content is published on other intranets. This provides a means for benchmarking ourselves against industry practice. In this regard, the NNG reports provide many very valuable insights.

The four pillars of content

Having read several of these reports, I have come to the conclusion that almost all intranets contain exactly the same content. By this I mean that - although individual sites may differ in terms of specifics - the core themes are almost indistinguishable.

What I have found is that there are four major pillars of intranet content. These are:

1. Work Content

This encompasses all the information & applications that help staff do their day-to-day jobs. For example:

• Content relevant to a particular roles, e.g. updates to accounting rules relevant to financial staff.
• Content relevant to all roles, e.g. online phonebook.
• Office support, e.g. mail services, printing services, meeting rooms, couriers & taxis, stationery, building services, security, dining, etc.
• IT support, e.g. application support, IT security, remote access, etc.
• Procurement, e.g. office consumables, IT equipment, contract renewals, etc.
• Knowledge management, e.g. company library, journal subscriptions, etc.
• Business Travel and insurance.

2. HR Content

This includes information & applications that staff need to support their employment with the company and to manage their careers. For example:

• Pay, including pay scales, taxation, overtime, expenses, bonuses, etc.
• Attendance & Leave, including working hours, flexitime, job sharing, annual leave, parental leave, other leave, etc.
• Benefits, including medical benefits (insurance, free services), financial benefits (pension scheme, staff loans) and other benefits (discounted merchandise).
• Career, including training, career development, job switching, new jobs, etc.
• Union representation and membership.

3. Corporate Content

This encompasses information that tells staff what their business is about, what it is currently doing and any other relevant news. For example:

• Basic information, e.g. business overview, business lines, office addresses, etc.
• Corporate governance, e.g. mission statement and strategy, annual reports, organisation chart, senior management team, corporate policies, etc.
• Corporate communications, e.g. press releases, internal news, etc.

4. Social Content

Almost all intranets include some element of 'fun' content that allows staff to organise social activities. Some common elements include:

• Online discussion.
• Sports and Social committee.
• Social events.
• Charitable societies.
• Sports clubs.

The four pillars in practice

In summary, these four pillars comprise a framework for building intranet content. Indeed, it is obvious that many companies actually base the Information Architecture and/or navigation schemes for their intranets on this theme. Admittedly, a perfect one-to-one match rarely arises, but the basic pattern stands out.

Some clear examples of this from past NNG reports include:

• Merrill Lynch (2006 report, page 158). This site is divided into:
  • Employee Resources (HR)
  • Education & Career Development (HR)
  • Business Support (Work)
  • Technology (Work)
  • Local Office Services (Work)
  • A list of Merrill Lynch businesses, local sites and news is also provided

• Bank of Ireland (2006 report, page 75). This site is divided into:
  • About the Group (Corporate)
  • News (Corporate)
  • Employee Centre (HR)
  • Career Centre (HR)
  • Life & Leisure (Social)
  • Resource Centre (Work)
  • Products & Customers (Work)

• Cisco (2005 report, page 36). This site is divided into:
  • About Cisco (Corporate)
  • Learning and Development (HR)
  • Support and Tools (Work)
  • Products and Industry (Work)
  • Security (Work)
  • A list of Cisco businesses, news and locations is also provided

• IBM (2006 report, page 127). This site is divided into:
  • Work (Work)
  • Career & Life (HR)
  • Links to news and corporate information are also listed

I can also add the Microsoft intranet to this list. I recently had the opportunity to view this site and was not surprised to discover the same content themes emerging.

• Microsoft. The IA on their intranet is based around:
  • News (Corporate)
  • Campus (Work)
  • Employee Centre (HR)
  • Workplace Services (Work)
  • About Us (Corporate)
  • A list of news is also provided

The reason for commonality

So why are intranets so similar? After a little consideration the reason is clear. Almost all companies uses their intranets to solve the same problem - to support the presence of staff by giving them access to everything they need to do their job and manage their career. The inevitable result is commonality in content themes.

The benefit of revealing this pattern is that anyone can now use the four pillars as a framework for evaluating the scope of their site's content.

http://www.diffily.com/articles/pillars.htm

Intranet: information technology for a limited universe

Scarcely a day goes by without significant media coverage of the information technology industry's newest communications creation - the Intranet. Small consulting firms and corporate titans alike are working to expand Intranet applications.

The word "Intranet" had little meaning and no media exposure as recently as a year ago. Even now, defining the term "Intranet" is a challenge because of the power and versatility of Internet-based software and connectivity.

In late 1995, the term "Intranet" was applied to closed or proprietary computer networks - either local area networks (LANs), or wide area networks (WANs) - running Internet-based software (TCP/IP and http for you techies). As Intranet technology began to allow remote access either through dial-up modems or through the Internet itself, the distinction between an Intranet system and a password- or security-protected Internet site began to blur.

The current working definition of Intranet is a limited-access network of/inked computers that uses a common Internet-based protocol to exchange data and information. The differentiating feature between an Intranet and the Internet is the limited access feature of the Intranet. Access limits can be created using any of a variety of firewall systems, password protection, browser-based security features, and other types of security technology. An Intranet could even be created by simply limiting the distribution of, and linking to, a given universal resource locator (URL) thereby producing an information-based security system. This level of security is tentative at best, however, since the effective password and the Internet address would be one in the same.

Intranet's Strengths

So what's the big deal regarding the Intranet? Moreover, how did it move from obscurity to the cover of Business Week in less' than one year?(a) The answer lies in three relatively simple concepts - standardization, capacity, and efficiency.

Standardization. A relatively open environment for software development has helped hundreds of companies and thousands of programmers create Internet-based languages, tools, and applications at an astonishing rate. The explosive growth of the Internet has been aided by adoption of standardized languages and protocols whose acceptance is increasing in part because they are platform-independent (ie, both IBM-compatible PCs and Macintosh computers can interpret and display information conveyed in standard languages).

Capacity. Internet-based protocols allow the transfer of images, sound, and even video online - a tremendous step beyond simple text-based transfer of information. The ability to transfer graphic content online can be compared to the advance in the evolution of personal computers when operating systems replaced text-based DOS languages with Macintosh and Windows systems that feature graphic user interfaces. This improvement was fueled by the knowledge that human beings comprehend and prefer images over simple text.

Efficiency. With the Intranet, an organization need only look in one place for key and/or frequently used data and information. Images, text, tables, directories, and other content is available in updated format at all times. Documents and projects under evaluation or development can be accessed and worked on by many individuals from remote locations.

Implications for Health Care

So what does all this mean to the healthcare industry? Should every healthcare delivery system have an Intranet? Despite the tremendous opportunities offered by such networks, Intranets are not for everyone, at least not yet. Exhibit 1 lists some of the advantages and disadvantages of Intranet development.

Of particular interest to healthcare financial managers are the matters of cost and return on investment. The costs of setting up an Intranet can be broken down into developmental cost, which typically runs from $25,000 to $100,000, and ongoing maintenance cost, which usually is about $25,000 per year. But costs are affected by the existing state of the information infrastructure within the institution.

If, for example, a healthcare system considering an Intranet already has a LAN or WAN in place, development cost will be significantly less because hard wiring can be kept to a minimum. On the other hand, if an organization has employees who need access to the Intranet network, but who are not currently linked to an existing network, hard wiring costs may be significantly higher.

To date, a number of organizations have elected to invest in Intranets. Information commonly provided on healthcare Intranets includes:

* Policy and procedure manuals;

* Directories - telephone, address, and e-mail;

* Human resource benefits information and forms;

* Answers to frequently asked questions;

* Schedules - daily, vacation, on call;

* Positions available;

* Forms; and

* Patient instructions.

The decision to implement, postpone, or forgo an Intranet involves complex issues and is, to some extent, enterprise-specific. Healthcare financial managers should carefully monitor developments in this rapidly expanding area and be willing to exploit the benefits an Intranet can offer to healthcare organizations.


http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m3257/is_n9_v50/ai_18702145

The Intranet was a Ghost Town

As in many companies a few years ago, our intranet was created and managed by a fine group of developers. These were all very technical folks with all sorts of Lotus training and certifications, and they could write scripts and create databases and make things happen with calendars and forms.

But they weren't graphic artists. Not a trained designer in the group.

PLEASE don't misunderstand me: They knew the difference between a GIF and a JPEG, but they couldn't work PhotoShop to save their lives, and they tended to use whatever clip art was readily available. Sometimes their choice of color or font was, well, unusual, and most of the site lacked consistency. This is certainly not an insult to them; they got the project off to a good start, but they knew the intranet they had created needed some help.

So, what was really wrong with the intranet? After all, it worked, for the most part. You could find information, eventually. There were rarely error messages or broken links. In other words, it functioned…oh, but it was plain, and it was boring. The navigation was quite poor. The menu required expanding with multiple clicks just to see if what you were looking for was even available. Once you found what you wanted, you usually had to click the Back button on your browser several times to return to a main menu or screen. In fact, the Back button became the main way to navigate in some cases. Getting lost was an everyday occurrence.

The site itself was developed using frames. I believe there were six or more frames making up the set. The two top frames were used for information such as our stock quote or links to an industry calendar, and were displayed as part of most pages. Because of this, there was very little screen real estate left for content, so you had to scroll a great deal, especially on smaller monitors. Also, some of this information wasn't really necessary on every page—or even important to some users.

Finally, the intranet had very few features or tools. The only departments represented were human resources and IS, but neither one had much in the way of content. And we didn't offer any external links to frequently used sites, although many departments maintained their own lists. The claims department, for example, had a multiple-page Microsoft Word document with links to hundreds of sites they used regularly. But the intranet didn't let users access that list or others like it. This information was typically kept within departments on shared network drives, since few people used the intranet and there was no fast and easy way to publish to it anyway.

Not surprisingly, nobody used the intranet…including me. Communication was done either by paper or a broadcast email or voicemail. Since all users could send broadcast email, they often sent messages about lost earrings in the fitness center or free kittens for a nice home. Important messages were kept on users' systems for days, weeks, even months. Some users had literally hundreds of email messages saved. Part of our plan in developing the new intranet was to shut off the broadcast email ability for most users, thus forcing people to rely more heavily on the intranet to stay informed. This solution would also eliminate some of the burdens placed on the network. We could only accomplish this by designing an intranet that people would want to use.


http://www.phptr.com/articles/article.asp?p=21282&rl=1

A simple intranet model

This article sets out a process for putting in place a ‘baseline’ intranet – one that serves the twin needs of facilitating corporate communication and supporting staff in their work activities, and that is based on established knowledge management and usability principles.

The article provides a model for how the intranet should function, how it should be organised and what it should contain. While it may be only the starting point for additional functions and layers of complexity , it nevertheless provides for a comprehensive address of basic corporate internal communications needs.

The model answers to the following principles:

Navigation should be easy

There should be clear identification of links to content areas, an ‘uncrowded’ interface and consistency in look and feel and operation.

Structure should reflect the company structure

The company structure – its primary organisation into divisions or units – is the readiest-to-hand organisational principle for intranet information. Each company division will have its own main section – with an ‘overarching’ section that unifies the content and speaks for the whole company (a ‘corporate’ section).

For each division there are ‘internal’ and ‘external’ audiences

Intranets are for communication within an organisation – but each employee is both ‘internal’ to their own area of the organisation – and ‘external’ to the other areas of the organisation.

This means, for example, that for a Payroll section of the intranet, there will be information that 'faces out' to the rest of the company, such as "How to enquire about your pay" and information that ‘faces in’, and supports the work done within the department, eg "Running the payroll".

Navigation should be clear so that users know which type of information they are accessing.

Quick access to key information

All information about a company is owned somewhere within the various functional areas of the company – and as such, will belong in the section of the intranet belonging to that area. Some information, however, is key and frequently called on, eg the company phone list – additional, direct access needs to be provided to this information in the form of a ‘hot’ or quick link on the main page.

Currency

Information on the intranet – all of it – needs to be kept current. Regular, fresh information will provoke ongoing interest and recourse to the intranet. Currency is part of managing the intranet, and needs to be formally considered with appropriate processes being set out. Fresh information should be published to ensure a continuing connection to the user audience – company news and company staff and social information are key types of information that can be regularly updated.

Ownership and controls

All information worth publishing needs to be ‘controlled’ to some degree. Where compliance, regulatory and safety issues are at stake, the controls need to be more formal and rigid – but even low risk information needs to be managed so that it doesn’t proliferate or lie around, out of date, cluttering things up. Ownership – whereby a nominated person is responsible for an element or category of information – is the key to effectively managing information, and keeping it current and relevant.

What might it look like?

Below is an example that illustrates the home page for the ‘model’ proposed for fictitious company "Frobisher Foods". The design is illustrative only. Frobisher has a number of sectors of operation that they term Stores, Buying, Factory, Admin, Transport and R&D – these are Frobisher’s organisational divisions.

Frobisher’s ‘quicklinks’ break out the following information items and areas: News, Phonelist, Leave, IT Support, Social Club, Noticeboard and Staff Specials. A link to collect feedback is also located under this head.

Click on the above image to see a full-size readable version

The ‘corporate’ element

The ‘corporate’ presence within the intranet site may be overt – and a separate division button be added to take users to a formal sub-area of the site. Or it may simply consist of the ‘home’ page text with links, as in the example above, where Quicklinks point to items like News, Noticeboard, Social Club etc, that have a corporate wide audience and function.

Division pages

Within each division page, a menu should offer clearly distinct access to each of the ‘internal’ and ‘external’ information areas.

Each division page may in fact lead to a ‘sub-site’ that replicates the model for the whole intranet – with a unifying element covering all audiences for division-related information, division quicklinks and a button set for component elements of internal and external information. The model is scalable in this way – and the depth to which it is deployed is dependent on the size and complexity of an organisation and the volume and variety of information appropriate for the intranet.

Extending beyond the baseline

Applying the baseline intranet model to a living example of an organisation will almost certainly result in the discovery of good reasons to vary it – for example, some divisions of an organisation may simply not have a need for either an internal or external type of information – for a variety or reasons. Subjecting each element of information to the model as a ‘test’ however is a useful exercise, as it draws out a conscious awareness within the organisation about how it chooses to communicate internally and how it supports its personnel.

What a simple, practical model offers in evaluating the information needs that are in view when an intranet is being considered is a structure to permit effective planning, evaluation and ongoing development.

http://www.realisation.com.au/site1/Articles/A%20simple%20intranet%20model.htm

Facilitate searching, not just navigation

An important part of an information architect’s job is to make it easier for users of a Web site or intranet to find the information they want. Usually the focus is on site navigation—the site’s structural design, hierarchy, page titles and labels, menu design, site map, and so on.

Another way to address making information on a Web site easy to find is through search functionality. What’s the difference? Navigation means finding one’s way around and learning the layout of the site. Searching means finding a desired bit of information as efficiently as possible. A good site should support the search needs of users, not just the navigation needs.

When we think of searching in the context of the Web, the idea of search engines immediately comes to mind. Search engines, a practical way to find information on the entire World Wide Web, are increasingly being added to individual Web sites to allow users to search a site. However, results tend to be less than satisfactory.

Drawbacks of search engines

Search engines only pick up exact words or phrases. If a user enters a synonym, singular instead of plural, a spelled-out form instead of an acronym, a misspelled word, or merely a concept with words that never appear in the text, appropriate pages may be missed. Searching the entire Web, missed pages are usually not a problem since so many results are retrieved. But on an individual Web site, it is essential that all relevant pages be returned.

Search engines pick up pages that contain a specific search phrase, even if just in passing or out of context. The page could be about an entirely different subject. This isn’t a huge problem when searching the entire Internet because major commercial search engines have developed complicated ranking systems based on meta tags, keyword frequency, links, etc.

Of course, a site search engine can be customized to search only keyword meta tags as long as keywords are carefully created for each page. If you are going to go to the trouble of creating keywords for each page, you may was well create a manual index for the Web site. This option has several distinct advantages.

What is an A-Z index?

As an “index” can have different meanings, as can “site index.” According to the National Information Standards Organization TR-02-1997 standard, an index is “A systematic guide designed to indicate topics or features of documents in order to facilitate retrieval of documents or parts of documents.” NISO classifies indexes as displayed and non-displayed, and further explains that a displayed index has syntax for combining terms in headings and a systematic ordering of headings. The most common systematic ordering is alphabetical, and being displayed means that it can be browsed. For Web sites or intranets, this type of index, to distinguish it from other indexes, is often called an A-Z index.

On a Web site or intranet each of the alphabetically arranged entries or subentries is hyperlinked to the page or to an anchor within a page to where the topic is discussed. Since an alphabetical index can be quite long, it is often divided into pages for each letter of the alphabet. Typically, each letter is linked at the top of the page allow a jump to the start of that letter’s section of the index.

http://www.digital-web.com/articles/a_z_indexes_site_searching/

Legality and the International Intranet

Data Privacy
There is a fundamental difference in the approach to data privacy law in the U.S. and Europe, which has some major implications on the transfer of personal data between the two using a corporate intranet. The legal position in the EU (strictly speaking, the European Economic Area, which includes Norway and Iceland) is set out in the Directive on Protection of Personal Data. The Directive is not in itself "law." It sets the minimum requirements that have to be complied with by the national legislation of member states, and the date (October 25, 1998-three years after adoption in October 1995) that this compliance has to be implemented. Personal data is any data about an individual person, such as his or her date of birth, job position, home address, and just about anything else you can think of. In addition, there is a further category of Sensitive Personal Information, which includes information about race, health, religion, and political affiliation.

The Directive, and the legislation enacted in individual countries, does not prohibit the transfer of personal information across country boundaries. Indeed, the main purpose of the legislation is to ensure that this information can be passed across these boundaries, but only under conditions that ensure that the rights of the citizen to control the use of this information are consistent across Europe. When setting up the legislation, the EU was concerned about what might happen if personal information was passed onto a country that did not have equivalent controls over the use of the information. As a result, any transfer of information between the EU and the U.S. requires companies to inform employees about any possible transfers, and to gain their explicit consent.

The problem for intranet managers is that intranets often provide information about the activities of the staff, and exchange information on staff with specific expertise and knowledge. Adding photographs of employees to their profile on the intranet is usually regarded as very useful. However, a photograph reveals all sorts of personal information and, according to the Directive, a photo should only be posted with the explicit consent of the individual.

Safe Harbor Under Siege
As a way of getting around the lack of equivalent data privacy legislation in America, the EU and U.S. authorities have come up with the Safe Harbor protocols, which effectively provide a similar measure of protection for personal information in the USA as in Europe (http://www.export.gov/safeharbor). U.S. companies have been slow to sign up for the protocols, and there is a feeling in the U.S. government, and among many lobbying groups, that this is an unfair barrier to trade. The topic came back into prominence in May, because the Safe Harbor protocols did snot apply to the financial services industry since the Gramm-Leitch-Bliley consumer protection law had just been enacted in mid-2000, when the Safe Harbor issues were being discussed. The EU proposed to hold further talks about financial services within the framework of this law, but no talks have yet taken place, and the EU is getting restless, since the temporary exemption on these particular issues ends in October 2001.

The danger for intranet managers is that the entire question of the Safe Harbor protocols may be put back on the table, especially since so few U.S. companies have signed up for the provisions. As a result, it is of very considerable importance that intranet managers of multinational companies ensure that they have all the appropriate approvals and audit trails for any personal information stored on, or traversing, their intranets-and that includes email communications as well. The Data Privacy regulators in all the European countries (especially Germany, the Netherlands, and the U.K.) are keen to test how far their powers actually extend, and to date there have been no prosecutions. One would be well advised not to be a test case. [For more on this topic, see the article I wrote in EContent, August/September 2000, pp 45-47.]

Disabled Access to Intranets
One area where there is broadly similar legislation in the U.S. and in Europe relates to the provision of access to an intranet by employees with disabilities.

The most obvious area is visual disability, but it is important not to overlook physical disabilities. It is quite possible to navigate around Microsoft applications using the arrow keys for staff who do not have adequate motor control for a mouse. Intranets often depend entirely on precise control of a mouse for drop-down menus or for mouse roll-overs on index terms. This may require either a substantial redesign of the intranet or the provision of special areas of the intranet for disabled access. If using the latter approach, it is vital to ensure that the content available to someone using a specialized area is equivalent to the main site.

http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=1011&ContextSubtypeID=10

A Successful Intranet Move to the Extranet

e-Business Connection was a small idea that became a LotusNotes database and then took off to become an extranet. When the Information Center at MasterCard International was established in 1997, LotusNotes was leveraged to promote library services. In 1997 and 1998, e-mail was used as an alerting service to employees that covered important articles in the secondary press. In the beginning of 1999, the service had grown to the point where e-mail was inadequate. Given employee needs, the Information Center Exchange (ICE) was launched in July 1999.

ICE is not only a database; it also broadcasts e-mail alerts to clients, targeted at their areas of interest. Today there are almost 550 clients, and on an average day the database is accessed about 900 times. Survey results are always spectacular.

The third annual ICE survey revealed that:
• Ninety-nine percent of respondents were very likely or likely to recommend ICE to a colleague.
• Ninety-seven percent agreed that ICE provides information that helps them do their jobs better.
• Ninety-one percent agreed that ICE adds business value to MasterCard.

Client quotes from the survey focus on how ICE helps them do their jobs better:

"The news on ICE keeps me informed and helps me do my job better."
"Quick, easy, convenient, and powerful."
"It provides me access to the very information that I need. It saves me time by not having to go through extraneous news items."

Since 1999, several MasterCard International employees have requested ICE-like services for MasterCard member institutions. After carefully explaining copyright and contracts, the costs involved became very clear. However, one employee would not take "no" for an answer and realized that targeting and disseminating information was a necessary and sellable commodity.

In April 2000, the concept of the intranet services on an extranet, called E.C. Central, was a PowerPoint presentation. At its conception, it was visualized as an information hub for key members: an e-commerce news and information extranet. An external consulting company was hired to interview the target market and consult with the MasterCard librarian regarding vendors that could provide the extranet.

Extranet Requirements
Market expectations gathered from the interviews focused on some core elements. The extranet needed to provide the following:

• A password-protected site to e-commerce news and information resources
• Both internal and external MasterCard data and resources
• The ability to do refined searches in selected categories as well as access current news feed
• Links to other pertinent industry and trade organizations

There were "need to have" items and "wouldn't it be nice to have" items. The following items were on the "need to have" list:

• E-mail alerts
• Single-click searches
• News feed

Some of the "wouldn't it be nice to have" items included the following:

• Personalization of the headlines and queries
• MasterCard branding on each page

Building the Team
The nature of the project made it necessary to build an internal project team and a vendor team with a wide range of expertise. For example, the legal department approved the contracts, branding standards reviewed the logo and colors, and the sales force ensured that the product met customer needs. The internal project team included e-business representatives, the information professional, marketing representatives, sales force members, technical experts, and legal representatives, each not only providing assistance in their areas of specialization but also providing a unique perspective and added dimension to the input of the other participants.

The MasterCard team chose Northern Light Technology as the extranet vendor. The vendor team consisted of librarians to hand-pick the information to be included on the site, a team leader to help keep the project on track and within budget, design professionals to make the site look attractive, usability experts to make the site easy to use, and technical people to make all the great ideas feasible on the chosen platform.

Key Issues that Changed What Could or Could Not Be Done

Technical Issues
The biggest technical issue was site access. Since MasterCard already had an extranet for members called MOL (MasterCard Online), it seemed obvious that access to the new e-Business News service should be through MOL. While initially this made sense, on closer examination, it was not possible since MOL is accessed by members using a SecurID card that not all members nor most MasterCard staff (including the sales force) had. This left the challenge of restricting access to the site to only those members who were subscribers. The solution to this was to require site usernames and passwords. Unfortunately this presented another challenge—managing the registration process and administering usernames and passwords. Since subscriptions were limited to member banks and MasterCard employees, this required checking each registration request to verify the applicant's eligibility. Once approved, the applicant's username and password could then be entered into the Northern Light database, either individually or as part of a bulk load.

Branding Issues
One of the biggest branding challenges was trying to strike a balance between having sufficient MasterCard branding to make the site easily identifiable as a MasterCard service, without having so much MasterCard branding that the site appeared to only offer MasterCard-sanctioned information. This was accomplished by designing a banner containing the name of the service and the MasterCard logo to be used on each page of the site. The banner also provided a space to put the "powered by Northern Light" line while helping to unify the site by having one consistent element at the top of each page. To further project an image of impartiality, all advertising was banned from the site.

Legal Issues
The contract was finalized on August 29, 2000—2 months before the initial soft launch on October 2. The contract provided several challenges, given issues like the terms of the hosting agreement, the level of service expected, the content that would and would not be included on the site, how the ongoing maintenance of and enhancements to the site would be handled and priced, customer service, usage reporting, and confidentiality.

Another key legal challenge was the development of a comprehensive privacy policy that users had to accept before registering. It detailed exactly what subscriber information would be collected, which information would be known to MasterCard and which to Northern Light, as well as why this information was necessary and how it would be used. The privacy policy had to explain that cookies would be used so that the Northern Light server would be able to recognize the user when the user returned to the site. This allowed the service to eliminate the need to continually log in. (As a security precaution, if more than 24-hours have elapsed since the user's last visit they will be asked to log in again). In addition to the disclosure that cookies would be employed and the details of their use, the privacy policy had to provide detailed instructions for setting a browser to block cookies, if the user so desired.

The First Production Model
The first production model provided the users with the following abilities:

• Research all e-business topics using Northern Light's search engine technology.
• Choose their own searches or take advantage of pre-constructed searches designed by experts at MasterCard and Northern Light Technology. In each case, the results were organized into topical folders for easy use.
• Be alerted, via e-mail, when new articles on the search topic were published. The e-mails had hotlinks directly to the article. • Access special pre-selected articles with links to relevant Web sites, through the MasterCard e-Business news.
• Access business headlines that are refreshed every 5 minutes.
• Be free of advertisements, pop-up ads, and banner ads.

Launching the Extranet
The first production model went live on October 1, 2000. The next day the service was launched internally to all current ICE users (approximately 300 users). The ICE users were sent a letter containing their username, password, and the site's URL, along with an explanation of how the extranet service was intended to be complementary to ICE rather than a replacement or competitor. At the same time, the service was launched to 10-25 users from each of MasterCard's top four members through the key account member reps who had helped in the development of the site. In November, the service was formally launched at the Global Sales Meeting, demonstrated to St. Louis employees at their local Technology Fair, and announced to members worldwide through a Global Marketing Bulletin. In early December, the service was promoted to Purchase employees through a demonstration and registration drive that added 400 internal users. By the end of 2000, the service had approximately 700 subscribers.

More Marketing … Changing the Subscription Model
Despite the initial success of the service, there was still a need to market the site more aggressively, particularly since a business decision had been made to charge member subscribers for the service. Initial efforts focused on the top member banks and U.S. MasterCard employees. A wide range of media was used to reach a dispersed audience. Some of the tactics included mailing an invitation to all U.S. member relations staff to try the service, an article in the employee newsletter, articles in member magazines, demonstrations to key account representatives and promotion of the service on MOL and mas tercardintl.com. The result was a threefold increase in staff subscriptions and a sevenfold increase in member subscriptions.

Redesigning and Relaunching
In July 2001, user interviews were conducted to solicit feedback on how best to redesign the site for the official global expansion of the service. The goal was to increase both its appeal and usability in anticipation of a relaunch in September, 1 year after the original site launch. The most useful features the users found were the live queries, e-mail search alerts, and the ability to access and search the Special Collection archives. Other suggestions included adding extra instructions and easier navigation (for example, making the live query category names hyperlinks), as well as rearranging the home page elements so users could more easily find their way. Surprisingly, the only feature deemed not useful was the business headlines feature.

Several changes were made to the site. The site was renamed. To the users, MasterCard e-Business News sounded as though the site was a newsletter providing only information about what MasterCard was doing in e-business, rather than representing a one-stop e-business information resource. A list of potential new names was developed based on the interviews, and ultimately a new name was chosen—MasterCard e-Business Connection. Another key change was the ability to limit search results to those documents written in one of five languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German, or French). The regional offices were asked to review the publication list from Northern Light to determine relevance to their local client base. On October 3, 2001, the site was relaunched globally, preceded by an announcement of the improvements and name change to existing users, followed by smaller, specially targeted launches to the Asia Pacific region, the Latin American region, and Europe. Currently over 2,000 subscribers in more than 65 countries use the site worldwide. The next focus of the team is on increasing awareness of the site around the world, particularly among MasterCard's smaller member banks that have the least access to current, reliable information. In third quarter 2002, another distribution channel will be available through MOL in an effort to increase the usefulness to this target audience.


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