Real World Intranets, Part 6 - SAIC Employee Owners Network: A Case Study

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The workers at your company might look to your intranet for information, they might find it a useful reference tool, but do they feel a personal connection to the site? Do they feel that they can get personalized information from it, and that they have a role to play in making it better? Crossing that boundary changes your intranet from a static resource to a living, essential part of your corporate culture.

All of the intranets we've looked at in this series offer ways that employees can personalize the information they see, but to really understand the tools and systems that create strong bonds with users, we went to the experts, the people behind SAIC's (Science Applications International Corporation's) intranet. SAIC is employee-owned; in fact, it's one of America's largest employee-owned companies, so it's people know a few things about employee empowerment.

If you've never heard of the 33-year-old, San Diego-based SAIC, that's not surprising. While it's a Fortune 500 company, SAIC keeps a low profile, rather than spending a bundle on advertising. It's employee-owners don't want to spend money on ads that could go to profits. SAIC is a research and development firm with interests in a variety of areas. Much of its work is with government defense contracts, which explains why many of its 40,000 employees work in the Washington D.C. area. Some of those government contracts relate to air marshals, counterterrorism efforts, disaster preparedness, and chemical and biological threat deduction. SAIC had revenues of $5.9 billion last year.

"Employee ownership is a key piece of SAIC culture," says Dave Rice, SAIC's CIO. "We push empowerment down to a fairly low level. That also implies that ownership of business results are held at a lower level than I've seen at most corporations."

The Birth of an Intranet
Like any corporate intranet, the SAIC intranet started small, explains Jeannine Jensen, SAIC's Web Strategist. In mid-1994, the intranet launched as one static page with five or six links on it. It grew by offering directories of office phone numbers and e-mail addresses, then office-wide manuals and other important documents.

The company's various departments had the option of participating, back at the start, by building their own department pages. Some accepted and some refused. Departments were allowed to control the way their intranet pages looked, says Jensen, and occasionally groups wanted to get too wild. The intranet support staff actually had to tell people to scale down their plans, to keep the design more low-key.

Growth and Changes
The SAIC intranet quickly grew from its small beginnings. One of concepts that helped it grow and continues to shape its development is the principle of employee-ownership and employee-involvement. It's important to SAIC that workers be able to shape the content they see online and contribute to it, in ways that go beyond what many intranets offer. As Rice notes, "All of the kinds of tools and resources and things that an employee needs are available on the intranet. Whenever people need to have information, they don't necessarily remember the information, but they remember where to get it."

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ISSAIC's homepage is sparse and to the point, offering quick links on a variety of topics.

SAIC's intranet experienced it's greatest overhaul in 1997, which is when it picked up the name ISSAIC (pronounced "Isaac," and meaning "Information Source for SAIC). For the first time, Jensen says, her group imposed a structure and a look on the various department pages. Of course, the look was still conservative, so that people would focus on content, instead of special effects.

The EON Era
The EON (Employee Ownership Network) area of the site is the heart of the effort to keep employees a part of the intranet. A combination of three physical departments- stock programs, retirement programs, and employee-owner relations-it offers a variety of interactive tools employees can use to monitor their stock performance, check on vesting options, and control stock purchasing and retirement options.

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ISSAIC's EON area lets employees access tools to see stock or retirement information, or request further training.

"It's a unique site," Jensen says, "because it's a combination of departments and each department deals with employee ownership in one way or another. The Employee Owner Relations program, for example, is promoting people's participation in employee ownership, purchasing of stock through first-time buyers programs."

Other online tools include a stock options calculator, a training tool (where people can learn about a given topic or request that a trainer comes and visits their area), and even a monthly quiz on topics like SAIC history. Informational forums let people contribute their own knowledge to the discussion. Forums are organized by department and by specialty. In the pipeline is a tool that will let people buy and sell their SAIC stock online.

What's Ahead for ISSAIC
In the future, SAIC's intranet will offer even more employee-serving tools, including the option to create personal homepages where people could post PowerPoint presentations or white papers they've created. Jensen says she's looking forward to a implementing a system that will let department owners know how old their pages are and when those pages were last updated. That should provide a way to clear out dated material, she notes.

However the intranet grows, one thing looks certain: SAIC will continue to find new ways to make the site useful to the employees, providing new tools that will shape the company's unique corporate culture.

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