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).

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?

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.

 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.