First up on our list is Advocate Health Care, based in Oak Brook, Illinois. As Janice Wurz, the Intranet Manager explains, the company intranet isn't all that old—but then neither is the company. Advocate was formed in 1995 from the merger of two Lutheran-affiliated health care companies. Advocate, which is also faith-based, owns eight area hospitals, 18 health centers, and one of the largest home healthcare systems in Illinois. The company has 25,000 employees and a whopping 4500 divisions. Try organizing all of that on an intranet.

The company's intranet initiative began in the spring of 1999, growing out of several Web projects already in place. The site was launched in the fall of that year. As Wurz explains, the intranet has always been "a three-way partnership between human resources, information systems, and public relations."

Human Resources IS

Since Human Resources was instrumental to the intranet's origins, it's easy to see why it's now the largest and most developed department on the site. Deserving much credit for that success is Dave Zapf, the HR IS director. With hard work and resourceful programming, Zapf has created site offerings and desktop applications that make the lives of Advocate's managers and other employees much easier.

Zapf started with Advocate five years ago, providing system support to the HR department. When the intranet became a reality, Zapf hopped on board. He worked closely with the business development and media center to create a graphics standard that would be used to give every page a consistent look and feel. The site started small, but was a hit from the beginning. "As you know," Zapf says, "any intranet you build, if you build it, they will come."

The first big project for Zapf was creating a desktop application for the managers to use. The app would show which employees were eligible for salary increases and would help calculate those increases. The tool was so well received, that Zapf later added the capability to record performance reviews.

That and other tools that run off the intranet have been successful ventures for Zapf. He and his team are now developing a desktop application that help's HR professionals find necessary data on nurses and other positions. Hospitals undergo periodic reviews by the Joint Commission, an oversight board. Nurses need to have records in their files stating that they've been observed performing certain key functions, such as drawing blood. If a Joint Commission overseer asks to see a record on a staff member and it isn't there, or is out of date, it could mean a fine—or worse. "They could actually shut down a unit within a hospital," Zapf says. The desktop application Zapf is developing makes it easier to locate electronic files for the staff.

He's also creating a wireless component to that tool which will allow managers to enter such data directly into the network, without going through their desktop PCs. But he still needs to perform rigorous testing before it's finished. "As you can imagine, if you put something in and there's ever data loss, it can be downplayed as far as 'it doesn't work,' and it's very hard to get someone back involved when they've had a bad experience," he says.

Key Issues

When it comes to managing the department intranet, Zapf and his team are faced with the same concerns as any other company. Integrating his efforts with those of other departments is a recurring challenge. At the moment, he's working with Wurz to create a central login system, so employees can log in once to see data from a variety of departments.

Collaboration is also central to improving the overall site. Advocate recently moved its online training courses to an outside vendor. HR and other departments worked together to ensure that the courses, hosted remotely, would work for every employee.

Knowledge management, Zapf says, is a "can of worms." When asked how his departments knowledge management efforts are going, he says, "We're trying to get there. How's that?"

The knowledge management problem he faces is that the analytic reports his team recently began generating for the managers may be too popular. The reports, which analyze such company-wide figures as employee turnover and retention, have already begun spawning requests for other, similar reports.

"That's going to be my challenge down the road," Zapf says, "to keep people in the right frame of mind that we can only do so much with the resources. We need either more resources or you can only give us so many data analysis projects per year."

That success should mean that his department staffing will increase. At least, that's what he's hoping. With more people, Advocate's HR IS should be able to continue it's run as the hub of the Advocate Health Care intranet.