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.

Everyone has content, but how well is it written?

An Information Mapping (IMI) survey shows that about 65% of the respondents spend from 1 to 3 hours per day reading and writing emails.

·         40% "waste" thirty minutes to three hours per day reading poorly written emails.

·         80% of respondents deem email writing skills as 'extremely' or 'very' important to their jobs.

Not surprisingly, the respondents don’t represent chicken little companies. Nearly 50% of the respondent companies had 5,000 or more employees or more. More than 80% of the respondents were management or had a “professional” function. Key jobs included:  

·         general management

·         operations

·         human resources & training

·         information technology

The study (Information Mapping Survey Reveals Email Writing Skills Vital to Job Effectiveness)identified the biggest email problems as:

• Disorganized content
• Missing critical information
• Unclear action or request
• Content is too wordy, long and difficult to read

"It is evident that organizations can greatly improve productivity and performance by helping employees write more effective email communications," said Deborah Kenny, IMI's Vice President and General Manager of Learning Solutions. "Email writing is a critical competency for today's business professionals, but too few email messages are organized clearly or effectively. Poorly written emails translate into substantial inefficiencies and costs that have a significant impact on an organization's bottom line."

The bottom line: poor content costs money. Employees should be trained how to write effective email and content on the intranet. Furthermore, there should be an effective use policy for e-mail which also dictates what belongs on e-mail and what belongs on the intranet.

Wiping-out 15 minutes of wasted employee time on average for each of your company’s 5,000+ employees would save or earn back millions of dollars in productivity gains.

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.

Can anyone set-up an intranet site in your company? However they want, whenever they want?

Yes, yes and yes is the standard answer at most companies. Believe it or not.

A couple of weeks ago I talked a little about IBM’s intranet and how they had nearly 10,000 intranets a couple of years ago. They now have about 5,000...

What is the cost of managing all those renegade sites in your organization?

Cost considerations aside, why should we reign in intranet sprawl? Well technical and security reasons are also top of mind.

Paul Chin recently wrote on IntranetJournal.com....

-  “Renegade applications (including intranet sites) raise many concerns for IT teams responsible for maintaining overall IT integrity because they:

-  Are not included in IT's official security model — internal and external security, user and group access control, and authentication method.

-  Are not included in IT's overall application integrity plan — system architecture, maintenance and backup procedures, and disaster recovery and business continuity.

-  May have been built with non-corporate standard development tools, language, and platform of which only the developer (and no one from the official IT development teams) is familiar with.

-  Are at risk of being abandoned should the developer leave the company.

Another good reason to halt intranet sprawl before it advances: your users. Having dozens, if not hundreds or thousands of intranet sites will confuse and irritate your users. Theirs one universal complaint: “I can’t find anything."

If you’re looking to do a redesign and don’t have budget to do an inventory of the sites on your intranet. Then go to your CFO and tell him how much this is costing the company and how much you can save the company if you reign in that intranet sprawl... you could be a hero!

One of the keys to success for retailers such as Dell and Wal-Mart is inventory control. Knowing what inventory or products they have, how much of it, and how it relates to customer demand (e.g. what are they buys, when will it run out, how much do we need to order).

Your intranet or website offers a product: content (either static, dynamic or in the form of a tool or application). And content remains king. It is the most valuable thing you offer your employees or readers. But do you know the state of your content? Is it up to date? Who owns it? How much do you have?

Dell and Wal-Mart offer a practical lesson for the world of intranet: success is partly predicated on knowing what you have.

The challenge is volume. If your intranet is like most, then your intranet portal and/or sites have a lot of content. It’s rare that I work with a client intranet that has less than 100 – 500 pages of intranet content per employee. IBM has more than 10 million known pages (more than 300 pages per employee).

While knowing what you have is important it can be time consuming but highly worthwhile for a number of reasons:

• business continuity – ensuring employees have the right information to do their job
• cost efficiency – stale or wrong information or data can be eliminated
• employee productivity – maintaining and prioritizing information so that the most valued and used information is easily retrieved
• business priorities – determine what content and information is needed to drive an effective business

“Intranets grow and become more content heavy, ownership moves from one department to another, and business processes as well as their user base will change throughout content's lifecycle,” writes Paul Chin, an intranet consultant and writer, in Taking Stock: Intranet Content Audits. “Over time, content that goes unchecked can be lost, forgotten, or even become a burden on the system. It can be relegated to the darkest recesses of the system never to be seen again.”

Undertaking the audit is the most time-consuming task. We often recommend that a client use a web analytics tool such as WebTrends to identify all the pages and content on the various intranet servers and then visit each one-by-one to identify:

• content type
• content relevancy
• date of publish
• owner/author
• status: save it, update it, or delete it 

One client of ours at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditer per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.

Content is king therefore it needs care and pampering.

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.