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The Intranet How does your garden, ...er I mean intranet grow? Do you have a Topà Down sell in place where there is at least 1 "champion" of the intranet at the top of the organization? Or, do you have no full-blown support from those with all the political clout at the top, but more mediocre support to lip service, and therefore, have built your intranet from the ground up with grassroots support? Does your reality lie somewhere in between these two? Ideally, an intranet would have a "champion" -- a truly active participant and supporter at the top of the organization. In a decentralized business, topà down support in each of the businesses along with a "champion" that oversees consistency and application across the groups would be just what the "web handbook" ordered. The intranet would be built, launched to the masses, and in a very short period of time, it. d be one of the key tools employees used each and every day to do their job and to stay abreast of company information, announcements, and the like. Poof....back to a more likely reality... Unless you are in a high-tech company, or just plain got lucky, there is a reasonable chance that upper management is not quite as active in their support as you might like. So, maybe its not quite the picture that your mind conjures up when you hear the word, "grassroots" . that somewhat radical or offbeat but most definitely fiery and passionate effort for or against a cause . but if you. re building the success of your intranet one "worker bee" at a time, then you. ve got some degree of grassroots effort at play. Can you truly grow an intranet organization-wide one person at a time? Maybe not quite that slowly, but you can increase usage and usefulness one niche at a time. If you. ve read this far, by now you. ve gathered that I have at least some of what I. d call a grassroots effort going on with my Intranet. Yes, there is topà down support, but nowhere near the topà down sell and active support that I envisioned at the start. Some forthcoming organizational changes should bend that curve of support upwards, but only time will tell. When I say grassroots, I mean that the people such as the everyday users and middle managers have driven the change that has occurred to date. Little by little, as small to medium segments of the user population have job-specific content and functionality on the Intranet, they use it. The more cross-functionality that can be built in to reach a wider audience, the better things become. And sometimes it take a real long time, but as one group starts to use a feature of the intranet (say virtual teams), little by little, other groups start to request similar functionality. Most importantly, if the leaders on these projects make the intranet the only way to accomplish a given task, even users that are reluctant to change are forced to do so. How quickly can you grow your intranet if your situation forces you to do it more piecemeal than you'd like? Well, don. t expect whopping growth overnight, but I can say that my experience has been a steady growth of "user sessions" of about 30-35% each quarter over the last 6 quarters or so. Not earth shattering, but a respectable rate of steady and sustained growth. However, you must keep plugging away, soliciting key supervisors and managers, and most importantly, don. t give up. Have you had more of the topà down sell approach or a grassroots effort? How has that contributed or detracted from your intranet. s success? As always, your experiences are welcomed at paulag@enter.net Thanks to those of you who so overwhelmingly responded to my content creation and management articles. I have plans to share some of your experiences in this column very shortly.
The AuthorP.G. Daly is Webmaster for the intranet of a large durable goods manufacturing company. In addition, P.G. writes for several online publications and does freelance web design and consulting. P.G. welcomes your feedback at paulag@enter.net .
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