Intranet Corner

"Patient is a four-year-old Microsoft NT/IIS intranet Web server. Users complained of erratic response over the last week. All ODBC connections are severed. There are signs of serious malnutrition. Patient also has secondary trauma with approximately 2,500 out-of-date HTML pages."

"What's its MDAC version?"

"Patient's MDAC is 1.1 using ASP."

"Alright, I'm going to need some suction on these HTML pages. Nurse, get me a DBA consult. We're going to need to perform an MS-MDAC v2.5 upgrade procedure to update all the DLLs, OCXs, and ActiveX objects for the ODBC DSNs. STAT!!!"

The Symptoms

The preceding scenario can happen to anyone with an intranet implementation. It can happen to you. In fact, it may already have happened and you do not even know it (cue shocking music, zoom camera in on worried Project Manager).

It has taken over a year to plan, design, develop, and populate an intranet site in order to maintain your corporation's intellectual property. The intranet team managed to cut down on all the paper-based manuals lying around office floors and cubicles. Your intranet had also reduced the migratory patterns of those wandering stragglers who bobbed and weaved through the beehive in search of these manuals.

The end-user community extolled the system's convenience and ease of use. High praise came from every corner of the company in the weeks to follow and the usage log spiked wildly upward as more and more employees began to log onto the Web site. Your intranet was a complete success. The only problem was that you did not do anything with it once it was rolled out. As the months went by, users got fed up that nothing new was being posted and the information that was there seemed ridiculously out-of-date. Your once popular intranet site began to atrophy and interest waned to the point where you were only getting a fraction of your initial traffic.

It will only be a matter of time before your intranet begins to cry out like the Wicked Witch of the West, "I'm melting! Meeeeeellllltiiiiiinnnngg!!!"

Diagnosis

The single most important thing to realize about an intranet is that it is a growing entity. If you wipe your brow in relief after rolling out your intranet and think that that was all there was to it, you are going to be in for a surprise. You should not leave your intranet locked away in some room and hope that it will run itself. Just look at the havoc and mayhem Macaulay Culkin created when he was left home alone. An intranet is no different when left to neglect and mismanagement—only no one will be laughing. An intranet must constantly be updated with new and relevant information so that it does not turn into a pile of yesterday's newspapers.

You do not have to feel helpless in this situation nor should you watch passively as your intranet begins its downward spiral. There are measures you can take in order to keep your shiny intranet from turning into a gangrenous mass subject to user indifference and the occasional lamentation peppered with creative expletives.

• Monitor your Web server's usage logs. This will give you a good indication of what your users are looking for as well as any major decreases in usage. The results of these usage reports will enable you to take the necessary measures to keep your site alive.
  
  
• Take the time to review your users' feedback. They are your audience and will provide you with valuable insight as to their needs, what is lacking, and what they would like to see in the future to improve the site.
  
  
• Make sure that those assigned to update the intranet content are doing so regularly and in a timely manner. The more they put it off, the bigger the hole you are digging. Assign at least one person to act as a site "coordinator." This person will be responsible for overseeing the site and ensuring that everything is up-to-date.
  
  
• Hold occasional follow-up meetings with the intranet team. These "where- are-we-now" type meetings will help in reviewing your site after it has been introduced to the user community. You can discuss any new requirements, enhancements, and whether or not the intranet is still fulfilling your users' needs. The frequency of these follow-up meetings is up to you and will depend on the size of your site and the amount of traffic you receive.
  
  
• Make necessary modifications to accommodate changing business requirements. As companies change, so do their tools. An intranet is no different. Your intranet may fit your needs now but this may not be the case a few months down the road.

Damn it, Jim, I'm a Doctor Not a Miracle Worker!!!

"Okay, it's great that you offer all this advice to prevent your intranet from going stale but what if it already has?"

If you have built an intranet and it has gone south, the first thing to do is not to harp on what should have been done and start thinking about what needs to be done. It is no use spending hours behind closed-door meetings discussing who should have done what and why so-and-so did not properly update the pages he or she was supposed to. This is counter-productive. If you would like to review what went wrong with your intranet site, do it AFTER you have fixed it. Actually, it may be a very good idea to go through a review. This would be a step towards preventing the same thing from happening again a few months down the road.

Once you come to that eureka realization that something about your intranet is not copus mentus, you should act quickly. The longer a defunct intranet site remains in that state, the more your user community will lose interest and the more marketing and convincing it will take to win them back. Sooner or later the problem is going to snowball and may even get to the point where rebuilding from scratch would be better than retooling what is already there.

There are many ways an intranet can go sour but do not panic if it does. It is a good idea to analyze what has happened to yours and what needs to be done in order to repair it. Do you have to rebuild the whole navigational structure because it no longer reflects your organizational business processes or is it only the content that needs to be revised?

Make a list of what you need to do in order to bring your intranet back to life and prioritize each task. If you are under the time constraints of a firm deadline, you will have to compromise between what needs to be done and what you would like to have done. You may be tempted to add all sorts of bells and whistles but if this detracts from the task at hand, put them lower in the list of priorities unless you have the time and manpower required to implement these changes concurrently.

There are a number of standard "housekeeping" activities that you may encounter or wish to consider as you work toward resurrecting your site:

• Before you start to retrofit your site, backup everything!!!
• Create a mirrored version of your Web site and work off of this "development site" rather than the live, production site.
• If you do not need it, do not keep it! Do not turn your site into an attic! Remember, you built an intranet site to house your company's intellectual property. If the information is no longer necessary, it will end up clogging your site's arteries.
• If you need to maintain old information, create an "archive" section on your site so that your users will not have to sift through a lot of old information in order to get to the new stuff.
• On the flip side, create a "What's New" section so that users will be able to find the newest and most relevant information quickly.

Being Discharged from the ICU

If you are planning to revamp your intranet site in hopes of resurrecting it from some unforgiving underworld you have two choices when it comes to rolling out these changes. You can either roll them out as you complete them or you can accumulate them and re-release your new site like a gallery unveiling. I personally favour the latter over the former. However, it really depends on the amount of work that is required to retool your site. If it will take too long to do, your users may simply lose faith in the site and no amount of coaxing will bring them back. On the other hand, if the site does not require too much work, you may wish to hold off on the grand unveiling until a significant amount of work has been done. Keep this in mind, though. If you do decide to re-release your site in one shot, you should set up a release date and stick to it so that users will know that the site is being reworked and when they can expect to see it.

If you only take one thing away from this article, remember this: An intranet is a journey, not a destination. Come on, you knew I was bound to get philosophical sooner or later…

Want to know more?

The following books are available at Amazon.com: (We are a registered Amazon associate, and the reference fee we receive is reinvested in Competia to help make it a better product).

• Intranet Performance Management by Kornel Terplan, Saba Zamir
  
  
• Managing Internet and Intranet Technologies in Organizations : Challenges and Opportunities by Subhasish Dasgupta
  
  
• Intranets : Strategies and Technologies for Building Effective Enterprisewide Intranet Systems by Jerry Cashin
  
  
• Managing the Corporate Intranet by Mitra Miller