Abstract
The purpose an organisation attaches to its intranet should be the starting point for justifying an intranet project, defining use cases and ultimately being able to measure its success. An intranet's prospects for success are best when it is perceived as a tool for operations management. This is one of the core findings of the “KlinikNet 2.0” project chosen by hospital directors as one of five “IT Key Topics” in 2014.
1 A wallflower in organisational structure
One of the key challenges for initiators of an intranet1[1] project, as well as for the team that will be executing it later on, is internal project marketing: Funding and staff must be attracted by credibly demonstrating the project's future profitability – a challenge by itself since an intranet project typically does not contribute to the company's core business.
Deterred by this challenge, potential intranet projects often fail to materialise (“We have more pressing problems to deal with”), are underfunded (“It won't earn us any money anyway”) or delegated to people who don't really have time or skills to handle them (“This is something you can do on the side”). All things considered, these are rather dim prospects for developing a successful intranet – and more often than not, user adoption of the old or new intranet continues to be poor. “Nobody needs this... Worthless... Just costs money, q. e. d.” The intranet continues its wallflower life.
One core issue common to many intranets or intranet projects is a lacking sense of purpose. All discussions, decisions and design work occur in peripheral areas, such as system features, layout or presentation of business units. But the actual role of the company's intranet and its purpose as a service to the employees remain unclear.
This may be attributable to the fact that an “intranet” as such is not a well-defined tool: Depending on its design, it may serve as a repository, an information portal, a collaboration platform, a self-service centre or a combination of the above (Goodman & Lehmuskallio, 2008). Therefore every organisation must decide for itself about the role and purpose it wishes to assign to its intranet – even if such an approach is often incompatible with established decision processes.
2 Supporting organisations Management
For designing a successful intranet, the organisation needs to reflect on their conception of organisations management and the role the intranet is supposed to take on in the organisational structure. This is a key finding from intranet projects implemented over the past few years, and especially from the project “KlinikNet 2.0” which was selected by hospital directors and CIOs as one of five “IT Key Topics 2014” (Gumm et al., 2014). In the following I will illustrate this finding by first discussing the term success in the context of intranet projects, and, second, explaining the benefits of an organisations management perspective.
2.1 Evaluate Success
“Success” is generally understood to denote a positive result of a person's actions according to that same person's judgment criteria; or, in other words, it means that the defined objectives have been achieved, or challenges have been mastered. In the case of an intranet, and its related project respectively, this means that success must be judged in the context of the organisation’s overall values and objectives.
This assessment of success – or any general agreement about objectives or criteria – is a challenge in and by itself since the perspectives of the individual stakeholders are quite different (an essential challenge for requirements management, refer to e. g. Funken 2000, Robertson&Robertson 2002). Furthermore, the software application’s benefits can be measured only partially on the deployed system, by assessing the required features and their usability. What is much more important in this context, however, is the question whether the designers were fully aware what features were needed for what purposes, and whether the intranet would be able to satisfy these needs and be fit for purpose in terms of serviceablity (Böttcher & Nüttgens, 2013). As far as the specific requirements are concerned, this may be developed and implemented based on use cases (Wendland et al., 2014). Whether or not specific use cases are actually relevant enough to justify implementation, and wether these use cases will be successfully adopted, depends on the role the intranet is to play within the given organisational context.
2.2 Tool for organisations management
Considering the aforementioned different styles an intranet can have, typical use cases developed and refined for several intranets are e. g., internal news, telephone directory, order management, document management, committee work etc. What these use cases have in common is that they are neither concerned with building a community nor with business processes generating sales for the company. Rather, their mission is to contribute to keeping the organisation running. An intranet serving such a purpose can thus be considered as an operations management tool.
Taking this view can help the designers in the early stages by making them contemplate the business processes the intranet is supposed to support, rather than worrying about technical features the software should have. Putting the business processes first means that these same processes can ultimately be used to measure the success of the intranet.
This perspective also helps to consider the intranet as a flexible platform that continously can be adatped to changing and new organisational conditions. As such, success can be measured by means of supporting organisational change processes, be them small process improvements or coming along with certification processes or new organisational structures within the intercompany network or following a merger.
The goal of developing a tool for operations management also turns the spotlight away from profitability. Rather, its success could be measured by determining whether it has been adopted by the employees as a useful tool in their daily work.
2.3 From wallflower to rambler rose
The requirements explicated for the intranet must be met anyway – whether the intranet has been explicitly defined as an operations management tool or not. However, if such perspective is taken from the beginning, this will make it easier to defend the project as a whole, determine key use cases, understand the demanding task the project team is entrusted with, and provide the right set of conditions for a thriving project.
With this perspective, the intranet may leave its wallflower's life – with its development potential being overlooked by the occasional (virtual) strolling employees – and becoming a rambler rose: an intranet that is not only well designed but is an integral part of the company's operations management and that will continually grow, stimulated by new functional and organisational challenges.
3 Conclusions
For designing an intranet with a high value of benefit, the overall intranet’s purpose for the organisation must be defined in advance. If such a purpose is missing, the evaluation of success remains piecemeal on a feature level. Considering the intranet’s purpose being a tool for organisations management implies multiple advantages: It helps selecting the proper use cases and designing them right, and along with this it helps evaluating the success of the intranet. Thereby the internal project marketing can be supported.
To operationalise this perspective, further research work should fokus on the following questions: How can the intranet, within this functional framework, be a mediator between the structures of the intercompany network and the internal institutional structures? Should operations management be supported by a monolithic intranet system or by individual process tools (apps)? What skills and general conditions do the internal project team and the external provider need? How exactly can its success be measured, and how can this measuring system be established permanently?
From our guided intranet projects, new ideas and concepts have emerged and are evolving. They deserve to be developed further in future projects and studies, ideally in collaboration with companies, service providers and universities.
About the author
Dorina Gumm is Professor for Web Information Systems at Fachhochschule Lübeck, University of Applied Sience. In earlier position she worked as Senior Consultant for Web applications in the area of requirements engineering, conceptual design and project management. Dorina Gumm received her Ph. D. from the University of Hamburg with a dissertation about requirements engineering in distributed software development projects. Before, she studied Computer Science and Systematic musicology.
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