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The United Kingdom's National Health Service (NHS) was established in 1948 and is now the world's 4th largest employer. The World Health Organization recognizes NHS as one of the best health services in the world. The NHS Orkney branch in Scotland provides a comprehensive health service for the island communities with 600 staff.

In 2005, an unfavorable report was delivered on the state of internal communications at NHS' Orkney division. At roughly the same time, a senior executive was furious at being unable to retrieve his e-mail while on the train. The problem? A 9MB e-mail, loaded with personal photos, was sent to all staff. Faced with a long download to his PDA, the executive abandoned the download and was cut-off from office communication and rendered unresponsive during a long ride.

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These issues are typical problems faced by organizations which rely on a combination of paper, e-mail and well developed (but highly controlled) intranet portals to deliver internal communications. The NHS Orkney IT department was asked to "sort it out." This was an opportunity for a traditionally conservative organization to take a new approach, towards a "Web that Works," driven by blogs, wikis and feeds.

Looking Back -- The E-Mail and Intranet Mess

So what's the problem with using e-mail to disseminate information to your organization? Actually, there are many:

Corporate spam -- Everything from spare concert tickets to pictures of people's babies are sent to large groups of staff via e-mail, making it more difficult to filter for important, actionable messages.

E-mail -- like paper -- allows creation of lots of copies with limited formal control, so you've got no way of telling whether you're looking at the latest version of a document or not. Mistakes require the e-mail to be re-sent, another potential way of ending up with the wrong version.

Everything ends up in one bucket -- i.e. your inbox -- so you have to manually differentiate and prioritize all incoming information straight away, creating costly disruption that distracts you from the task at hand.

The recipient has little or no direct control over the sender's recipient list, making it more difficult to get what you need and avoid what you don't.

Replies to e-mails have the same weight as the original, not a good thing if, for example, the original is a press release which generates internal chatter.

Not every member of staff has an e-mail account.

From an IT point of view, excessive use of e-mail increases the load on network bandwidth and server storage.

One solution to these types of problems is to have an internal portal style website. NHS Orkney already had such a site, but it was rarely updated and difficult to navigate. Managing a traditional site requires considerable technical skill and effort. A good webmaster is a rare combination of techie, editor and manager: even if NHS Orkney had the resources to recruit a full-time webmaster, recruiting the right person would have been very difficult. Besides the simple matter of managing a site, anticipating and servicing the evolving needs of every department and group is an insurmountable task for one webmaster, much less an army of them. So the available technical skills were stretched too thin, the task too large, and the website became hopelessly out of date.

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