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I do a little, you do a little, and together we do a lot. This is a concept that's deeply embedded in the business model for IKEA, the global home furnishing giant with over 270 stores in 36 countries. The strong sense of teamwork, community, and collaboration expressed in this simple principle forms the basis of IKEA's organizational and operational culture. It means as much to those working in HR, Sales, and Marketing as it does to consumers who buy the company's flat packed furniture that they assemble themselves.

A strong corporate culture, however, doesn't always translate into effective information systems. In fact, when done poorly, the latter can be a detriment to the former. There's always been an unfortunate disconnect between technology-based systems and the people they're meant to support. But IKEA's humanistic, people-focused approach to its business naturally carried over to the development of its intranet.

Rather than forcing its corporate culture to bend to accommodate a technology-based system, IKEA used its firmly established culture as the foundation for its IT solutions. It's an approach that garnered IKEA North America's intranet, IKEA Inside, much praise when it was recognized as one of the world's ten best intranets of 2008 by the user-experience research firm Nielsen Norman Group (NNG). It's an approach that enables IKEA to keep all its employees up-to-date with everything going on within the company. And it's an approach that defines the true purpose and spirit of an intranet: To bring people and information together.

Connecting people with technology

Since their inception, intranets have been used to manage large repositories of content and to share this centralized information with a company-wide user community. This goal hasn't changed much since intranets first came onto the corporate scene, but an intranet is worth more than the sum of the bits and bytes that make up the system. Although the technology has gotten much more elaborate, a clear shift in focus has emerged.

The results of NNG's eighth annual intranet design competition highlights a development shift in today's top intranets, emphasizing access to people rather than data. It's a trend that corresponds with IKEA's business model: A perfect marriage of corporate culture, business imperatives, and the technology that supports the two. For IKEA, the implementation of technology-based tools was a natural progression of its already strong sense of corporate community and teamwork.

"In the past decade, I believe we have seen our American workers adopt technology at an amazing rate in their personal lives," says Beth Gleba, Internal Information Manager for IKEA North America. "Of course this has an impact on how people come to expect similar tools in their workplace."

But IKEA's adoption and integration of technology wasn't done at the expense of the human experience. All too often information systems fail within organizations when technology itself becomes the sole focus and reason for development. This type of technology-driven development perpetuates and widens the gap between the tool and the user. It's an unnecessary gap that prevents users from accepting a technology-based solution as a true business tool.

"We are a people-based company," explains Gleba. "Face-to-face time is very important. We've built our intranet to complement this. We don't want people to feel technology replaces but enhances our connection to one another. Working with our culture, not against it, has been key."

Technology is a means, not an end

The importance of using technology to strengthen and support an established corporate culture was not lost at IKEA. The company understood that information systems are meant to support people not technology. IKEA realized that it can't allow technology to define, or redefine, its culture. A technology-based tool should never negatively impact an already strong organizational culture, or force users to make concessions to tools that aren't elaborate enough to support the finer nuances of the human experience.

"Before, during, and after [intranet implementation], our culture is our culture," says Gleba. "We like our culture and don't want to change it. Instead, we recognize the power of what we can do together when we use our culture to guide how we act, make decisions, and work with one another. Our culture gives us a framework as we implement new things like technology."

Creating the right tools for the right job

A strong culture alone, however, doesn't guarantee success. Digital solutions can sometimes become a hindrance to activities people are accustomed to doing in an analog world -- especially to those who aren't very tech savvy.

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