God bless the Scots. Scotland has unveiled plans for a national schools intranet digitally linking Scotland's 800,000 teachers and pupils. The intranet will feature virtual learning and collaboration tools that cut-across geographical distance and location.

The intranet plan is a five-year £37.5 million contract (that’s roughly US$80 million). Who said Scots are cheap!?

The intranet will be the first of its kind in the world and when it goes live will:  

·         Offer pupils and teachers access to a range of learning and teaching resources from their computers at school or home

·         Allow teachers to maximize the use of internet technology such as video clips and high-quality graphics, making lessons more exciting for their pupils

·         Enable every pupil and teacher to communicate and collaborate electronically with one another, sharing ideas and resources

"In schools across Scotland I have seen at first-hand how technology is transforming learning and teaching,” says Scotland’s Education Minister Peter Peacock. “I am determined to see that continue which means we must maintain our investment in technology as it advances and presents new and exciting opportunities.”

In western countries that can’t compete with wage prices of the developing nations and China, education and innovation becomes one of the last if not greatest competitive advantages. Clearly Scotland understands the value of networking students and schools as an investment in the country’s future.

"Linking every school, every teacher and every pupil via a single intranet accessible from any computer means learning will no longer end at the school gate,” adds Peacock. “Pupils will be able to do more meaningful work at home and parents will be able to take a much more active role in their children's learning.

The interconnect, in place for two years, is a large-scale broadband network that connects all 32 local authorities together, and includes links to Learning and Teaching Scotland and the Scottish Qualifications Authority. The interconnect is linked directly to the JANET network, the massive UK-wide broadband network that serves higher and further education across the country.

CDI is currently being implemented. This is a national network of specialised servers that, once fully implemented, will make it much easier for teachers and pupils to gain access to rich learning resources such as video and audio clips and graphics.).

The interconnect and CDI will be largely invisible to teachers and students across the country, but working in the background to carry out highly important tasks for the overall system.

The national intranet will be the final piece of the initiative. Following many months of detailed negotiation, the Executive decided to award the contract for the delivery and operation of the intranet to RM. The intranet will establish a highly secure online environment that will offer a range of applications and tools for teaching and learning in Scotland.

Within the intranet there will be a virtual teaching and learning environment which will allow teachers to set up lessons that use the power of internet technology to make the work more interesting, in a way that is difficult to achieve at the moment. In addition, there will be a range of communication and collaboration tools that allow teachers, pupils and others across Scottish education to share ideas and resources, to build online communities and to set up video and audio conferences between teachers and learners in different parts of the country (or across the world).

Who has the biggest? 

It’s the intranet for the US Navy and Marine Corps and you can access the home page (and some cursory areas) on the public Internet at www.nmci-isf.com.

For those not familiar with the project, EDS was hired on a multi-billion dollar contract (yes, that’s right, BILLION) to work with the Navy and Marine Corps to build a "comprehensive, enterprise-wide initiative that will make the full range of network-based information services available to Sailors and Marines for day-to-day activities and in war.”

Affectionately referred to by a user-friendly, common folk acronym, NMCI features more than your average run-of-the-mill secure access to US Armed Forces information and systems and “universal access to integrated voice, video and data communications. But you can get to it from the Internet...

While it is not complete the Navy Marine intranet will "afford pier-side connectivity to Navy vessels in port. And it will link more than 360,000 desktops across the United States as well as sites in Puerto Rico, Iceland and Cuba.”

The Navy and Marine Corps use the NMCI to achieve "a number of critical objectives:

• Enhanced network security
• Interoperability with CINCs and other Services
• Knowledge sharing across the globe
• Increased productivity
• Improved systems reliability and quality of service
• Reduced cost of voice, video and data services

Wow! The security of the free world is being influenced by major intranet activity... more to come on this one.

A great report from Ipsos-Reid reveals that Canada continues to be a world leader with a highly connected population – right up there with the Scandanavian countries, the United States, Korea and Hong Kong (did you know in a study of e-business readiness conducted by IBM and the Economist, Azerbaijan ranked 50^th out of all countries? Who knew?!?!).

73% of Canadians are now connected to the Internet; 62% of households have high-speed access. Similar numbers are reported from the other leading countries.

What does this have to do with the intranet? Glad you asked...

A vast majority of organizations still only extend intranet access to a percentage of their employees. It often ranges from 33% to 75% of employees have access. With some exceptions (Cisco, IBM, Xerox and some other financially strong, leading-edge appreciators of technology), this is largely due to the fact that many, many employees, in most industries, do not have or work with a computer. In most organizations, no computer = no intranet access.

While some companies, particularly in the manufacturing sector, have established intranet stations or kiosks for employees without computers, the success of joint or shared workstations and kiosks have largely been lackluster. (One exception is Dutch Railway company NedTrain with an employee workforce of 4,000, the majority of which do not have dedicated computers. Despite the limited computer access, the company encourages employees to use centrally located touch-screen kiosks to access the intranet. The result: an astounding 2.5 million quarterly visits – or 200 intranet visits per employee per month).

Given the cost and cultural challenges of extending access to employees who don’t have computers some companies are extending intranet access to the employee at home (many companies offer home intranet access via a VPN or dedicated or password protected connection but often this privilege is only extended to executives and middle managers).

Others like Alaska Airlines have put their intranet on the public Internet – that’s right, a .com site on the Internet! Knowing that most of their employees work ‘on the road’ they got smart and put it on the public Internet (of course, secure areas are password protected and reside behind their firewall). It’s also a great way to tell the world, “We have nothing to hide! Come check us out.”

Check them out at AlaskasWorld.com.

Now why didn’t you think of that? What’s stopping you now?

There’s an adage that is old for the intranet age (since they came to be mainstream in the early 90s) that says you shouldn’t put anything on the intranet that you wouldn’t put in print. It relates to the older adage that you shouldn’t print anything that you wouldn’t want anyone outside the company to read.

Your content is valuable. You wouldn’t want to share most of it with the outside world – especially the competition or media. However, if you are making content available via the intranet then it is possible it can be leaked externally. The number one leaking culprit, of course, is the employee.

There are three general positions or models to adopt vis a vis content protection:

• Open market – publish just about anything you can on the corporate intranet.
• Closed market – put sever constraints on what can be published.
• Asynchronous market – a hybrid model that entrusts employees with a certain level of responsibility to maintain confidentiality.

My own personal opinion is that if you’ve hired and trusted an individual to do a job that the organization deems crucial enough to justify the pay then most individuals are trustworthy and not likely to leak confidential information to outside sources. On the other hand, I wouldn’t publish any corporate top secrets either. As such I recommend most companies adopt an asynchronous model that assumes a certain level of responsibility and trustworthiness of employees but does not make widely available all information and data to all employees.

Regardless, intranet and corporate information managers do have a responsibility to inform employees of their responsibility and to limit the organization’s liability. Such action includes the development of several policies:

• Editorial policy
• Terms of use
• Acceptable use

Editorial policy

Your editorial policy is less of a legal security blanket and more of a definition of roles and responsibilities of those developing and maintaining online content. The editorial policy should include details on...

• content types
• style acceptability
• news determinants (e.g. currency, impact, etc.)
• formatting
• archiving
• photo treatments and bylines
• content management system rules and directions
• copyright and legal
• privacy and security
• governance including roles and responsibilities
• taxonomy (classification)
• site registration and indexing

Terms of use

Terms of use is a standard legal disclaimer. It says who owns it and declares the copyright, disclaims accuracy of content, etc.

Acceptable use

Acceptable use spells out the rules. Thall shall not...

• Email content outside of the company.
• Print and distribute content outside of the company.
• Release content to any media outlet.
• Rewrite or reproduce content for personal purposes or profit without the expressed written consent of the company (legal department).

Page footers

If you’re not already doing so make sure you have coded into your style sheets or CMS templates a footer that always includes the following:

• A legal disclaimer
• Terms of use
• Copyright stamp
• Name and email address of author
• Date of publish

While clients have hired me to develop these policies and standards the work is not really rocket science. It just takes a little time and thought that could save your organization some headaches in the future.

A web user or reader has one overarching priority: speed. Speed may kill on the streets but on the web “the faster the better.”

The challenge with giving your user quick unfettered access to the information they desire is striking a balance between the need for speed and an overly cluttered home page. If you provide lots of content, buttons and links on the home page then you may provide your users with faster access to content with less clicks. The risk of course is too much home page information that is overwhelming to the user. The tradeoff is clicks for speed.

Some websites like Amazon.com have had enormous success despite a busy home page. There is no denying Jeff Bezo’s success: Amazon.com is the most successful e-commerce site on the Internet. Period. But Amazon’s home page is scary and completely overwhelming. Amazon.com is not a model for site design, layout and usability. In these areas, it fails many tests.

When I told this to the audience of some 300 at last month’s IABC International Conference in Washington, D.C., (see The Site Is Right 2005) I was not surprised when I was challenged.

“How can you say that?” exclaimed one woman. “You can’t argue with Amazon’s success!”

Amazon.com’s success is largely due to its first mover status, unparalleled selection, innovative technology and entrepreneurial approach (strategy), and last but not least, it’s brand.

The Amazon home page contains about four screens of extremely busy and crowded content.

Amazon.com’s outrageously busy and crowded home page.

Perhaps Amazon will learn the lesson that Yahoo! now knows: there is a fine line between too busy and not enough speed. Traditionally Yahoo! has suffered from the same problem as Amazon: an overwhelmingly cluttered home page (mind you they have improved in recent years).

The Yahoo! home page

The Yahoo! home page has been reduced to only two screens versus the four of Amazon – but it’s still a massive amount of content and links (more than 150 in all). However Yahoo! has learned a lesson or two and is listening to their users. It recently hired a usability whiz and is currently in the process of redesigning the home page with a less cluttered look and layout.

Yahoo! hired Larry Tessler, a 60-year-old technology veteran and a former Xerox Parc innovator who invented ‘cutting and pasting’ to spearhead the redesign process. It’s huge job for the world’s most visited website that garners 15 million visits per day.

Tessler and team have been quiet about the process so far but has provided some hints in an article Carefully Clearing Yahoo's Clutter in Business Week. “One thing I've been pushing hard since I got here is that using Yahoo! should be a delightful experience," Tessler told Business Week.

Business Week also took an educated stab at estimating some of Yahoo!’s design tactics: “Expect him (Tessler) to take advantage of more advanced Web browsers, and he may reduce clutter by "hiding" material so users can opt to see more news, for instance, by rolling their mice over a topic. That would be a big improvement (sic). But he has a long way to go before Yahoo is a delight.”

MSN knows this lesson too. It recently redesigned its home page and eliminated 25% of the links that were on the previous version. The same lesson should also be learned and applied to your corporate intranet.

As I’ve written before, one of the great rewards of being a traveling intranet consultant is the opportunity to learn from many organizations, clients and colleagues about their intranet success and failures.

I’ve had the privilege to come to know and learn why Xerox continues to be an intellectual leader which is well exemplified by their intranet portal, WebBoard.

WebBoard is actually a series of internal websites but they are held accountable to defined governance, style and standards. The governance model is what I consider text-book ideal for most organizations (though what is good for one is not necessarily good for another). The intranet is owned by corporate communications but ultimately governed by a small senior executive team. Policy includes effective use and intranet development – with guidelines on content, technology, etc.

This policy and the accompanying standards create a unified, seamless user experience that is a hallmark of most successful intranets.

“It brings people to one seamless experience from an intranet perspective for broader employee access to tools and information,” says Karen Allen, Manager of Employee Communications and the Xerox WebBoard. “There’s a sense that it is familiar, you’re not jumping to different sites or experiences – we’re trying to create a simple, seamless experience so users know what to expect.”

The home page features true portal functionality including individual personalization and role-based customization (e.g. human resources professional, marketing communications, internal information, technology support, etc.). Customization options include stock market ticker, news sources (still working on external news feeds), organization news, weather, and formatting options.

All 58,100 Xerox employees have intranet access and the site enjoys 3-4 million page views per month – roughly two page views per employee per day. Not bad at all. That’s an engaged user population.

I believe however the key to Xerox’s intranet success has been their strategy. They developed a plan with defined objectives and goals and they engaged and involved both employees and senior executives in developing their strategy.

 Did you know that IBM had about 10,000 intranet sites and it has taken years to reduce this to about 6,000 intranet sites?

“Slow and steady wins the race.”  There are dozens of fables about how the underdog or the “little guy” came out ahead in the long run, and these lessons can give you food for thought when approaching your intranet launch and how your organization achieves success afterwards.

It’s not the best idea to break into a sprint as soon as the starting gun goes off.  Providing your departments with access to a robust content management system and some web space without first implementing a site governance model can be akin to handing gunpowder to a baby.  Unfortunately, this is what many organizations do when releasing an intranet, to “just get it out there”.  A little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and before you know it--boom!--you have unmanageable site sprawl.

And you don’t have to be a company the size of IBM to have intranet sprawl. It’s not uncommon for most medium size companies to have hundreds of intranets (I’ve seen ratios of 1 intranet site per 10 employees). Just imagine the wasted money and resources by not pooling those costs together....

Often the most successful intranets start off in a very humble way (especially in smaller organizations), with not much more content than employee classifieds or the company phone list or even a cafeteria lunch menu.

Some organizations grow their intranets organically, with a department or an employee quietly taking charge, perhaps as a pet project, occasionally enhancing it with features that specific departments ask for.  The intranet can sit collecting cobwebs for months before more staff become aware of its presence and usefulness.  Managers begin to ask for more and more additions, until suddenly the site captures the interest and imagination of employees, and the intranet becomes well liked and indispensable. 

These “organic” sites may not be pretty to look at, but tend to iteratively improve over time.  It’s the distribution of easy-wins and low-hanging fruits that allow an intranet to gain “traction” and acceptance and drive more employees to the site.  Growth comes slowly over a long period of time, but the site becomes indispensable in the process.

Planning out your site deployment, placing some structure around how it’s managed, launching tools and content that will engage staff and listening to feedback, will make it the “go to” site when they start their work day. 

And in the end a little preparation, practice, and thought is going to allow you to gain the traction your site needs to make it to the finish line.

A clever and obviously well funded high school in Price Hill, Ohio is demonstrating some clever innovation. According to The Price Hill Times (Elder's digital studio allows endless creativity), Elder High School is using a state-of-the-art production studio to produce and stream full news broadcasts including live sporting events via the school intranet:

PRICE HILL - ElderHigh School's new state-of-the-art digital production studio is allowing students to endlessly explore their creative capabilities.

This past summer a room in the SchaeperCenter was transformed into the studio, which doubles as a workspace and classroom complete with the latest digital production computer equipment.

"Our boys' creativity is unbounded," said Jerry Hamburg, Elder's technology director. "Anything they can think of, they can do right here in this studio.”

Students began using laptop computers last year to complete class projects and produce video broadcasts of sporting events and school activities for their Web site, www.elderhs.tv. But the new studio provides them with the resources to take learning to the next level, he said.

The room is stocked with two high definition camcorders, studio-quality lighting, a green screen, news anchor desk, several laptop and desktop computers, scanners and a high-powered computer with the newest digital production software, he said.

"We are the first school in the state to have high definition camcorders, we're exactly on the leading edge," Hamburg said. "We can replicate what any professional studio does.”

Elder students will use the studio when producing video for the Web site and creating broadcasts for the streaming Web cast on the school's Intranet, he said.

Students in the video club will also use the technology to make videos for their peers and community organizations, and students in courses such as history, film study and digital production will use it as an innovative approach to learning, he said.

"One of the great ways to learn is by doing hands-on projects and learning visually," he said.

Last year Elder students worked with the Price Hill Historical Society to make a video about Price Hill history, and this year students will make a documentary featuring the first-hand accounts of World War II from local war veterans.

Students can film a teacher conducting a science experiment, post it on the Intranet site and then other students can view it before class so they know exactly what they have to do, he said.

Hamburg said, "It is unbelievable what we can do here."