Chapter 10

Operational Departments and Their Intranet Presence


CONTENTS

Every business is about something. Oil companies pump oil out of the ground, refine it into gasoline and other products, and sell it. Toy companies identify what kids want to play with, then design toys that match those tastes, manufacture them, and sell them. Pharmaceutical companies identify medical needs, conduct research to discover new medications, develop them into compounds, obtain approval to market them, and sell them. How companies go about doing these things is unique to each business and defines how the business is structured, what departments engage in which activities, and how the departments are staffed.

Applying an intranet to the operational side of any business is the subject of this chapter. We will look at two overriding aspects of these operational departments:

Every Company Sells Something

Whether it's wigits, food, expertise, time, or talent, every company ultimately sells something. That's where the revenues come from that keep the company in business! The company has to provide something that is desired by somebody out there in the marketplace-in fact, it has to be desired by enough somebodies to make the venture profitable-and they have to be willing to pay to get it.

As a result, every company has, in one fashion or another, departments that are responsible for:

Let's review the role of each department, and the kind of support an intranet can provide. Keep in mind that the notion of support is a two-way street: We're talking about how an intranet can support the particular function and how an intranet can be used by the function to communicate and meet objectives through the rest of the organization.

Marketing

There is a saying that finds its way into many organizations that sell products or services directly to the public: "Marketing is king." This means that the Marketing Department holds the most power, gets the most resources, and drives the rest of the business. There is good reason for this: If the market segment that is targeted to buy the product isn't aware of the product-or is unconvinced of its value-the product won't sell, the company won't make any money, and there won't be much of a company left. It doesn't matter how good or innovative the product is, or how much of any other department's blood, sweat, and tears go into it. Further, the Marketing Department often drives the development of specific products or services based on the feedback it gets from the marketplace, since it is the Marketing Department that is most closely in touch with the marketplace.

Marketing covers a lot of territory. The major components of a marketing operation generally include the following:

Many marketing departments have more functions based on the need for more specialized activities. Those specialized departments are driven by the nature of the business, the products, and the marketplace.

Within the Marketing Department, activities range from buying advertising time in the media that are most likely to target the right audience, to planning the company's participation in trade shows, to setting up tours in malls to develop product promotions, from getting the product some visibility on television talk shows to plotting major strategic campaigns to launch new products. It is a busy department.

A presence on an intranet can provide the marketing department with valuable input and help other employees throughout the organization play a part in Marketing's efforts.

Marketing on an Intranet

The most obvious place for Marketing to begin its presence on the intranet is with an overview of the company's products and the marketing programs in place to help sell them. Presenting this information is the ideal opportunity for the organization to take advantage of the intranet's ability to allow employees to view information from the perspective of their needs rather than from a traditional, linear point of view. A product home page, for example, can let employees view products in any combination (or all) of the following ways:

Ultimately, regardless of where they begin their exploration for data, they come to the same set of HTML pages; the question, though, is how did they get there? For example, Joe needs to find information on the best product in its category for under $100. Peggy, in the meantime, wants to see the best-selling product targeted at Widget Masters. They both end up looking at a product description for the Wonder Widget, but they both found information they were specifically looking for. Figures 10.1 through 10.5 show how an employee might drill through a series of product-oriented Web pages to get to a specific product example.

Figure 10.1 : The top level listing of product categories offers employees a place to begin looking for specific items.

Figure 10.2 : The second level of product categories represents the screen an employee would see if he selected Comic Books from the image in Figure 10.1. However, it also serves as a page to which links can be created from other areas, such as a product listing embedded within the Comic Book Development Team's home page.

Figure 10.3 : This screen again represents what an employee would see who continued drilling down from the listing that began in Figure 10.1 and continued in Figure 10.2. This image also could be found by sales reps who deal specifically with doctors linking in from a page that lists various medical education tools produced by the company.

Figure 10.4 : In addition to serving as the fourth level in a hierarchical list of product categories, links could be created to this list from other resources that address brain surgery.

Figure 10.5 : This individual product description, like any other separate product description that appears at the end of the process of drilling through lists, also can be linked from any page that addresses lobotomies or related issues.

As noted above, however, there is more to the Marketing Department than responsibility for the definition of the product line. Following are intranet uses for each of the key marketing disciplines.

Advertising Advertising is the business of paying a medium for the use of its space in order to display sales-oriented information about your product. Advertising is common on television and radio, in newspapers and magazines, and billboards. Advertising space also is bought on the walls of stadiums, on the sides of race cars, on long signs that trail behind biplanes that fly over sporting events, and anywhere that might be visible to a target audience. Advertising is a few-to-many, top-down, demographically oriented type of communication. If the organization believes that many of the people who might buy its product or service watch a particular television show, they will buy advertising during that particular program. If the product's market attends demolition derbies, the product will show up on the walls of the track and in the race program.

Another element of advertising is that it is geographic- and culture-specific. The advertising that appeals to people in France may not effectively sell products in the United States.

In both instances, there are opportunities to enhance product knowledge throughout the organization on the company's intranet. In order to be well informed about their organization and how it positions its various products, employees should have access to information about the advertising the company is buying. Employees who know the company's approach to selling its products can support those efforts.

Everything from print ads to television commercials can be saved on a server and made accessible through links. As with anything else on the intranet, employees should be able to find the advertising through the channel that makes the most sense to them. An employee interested in seeing how the company is handling the advertising on a particular product-perhaps one on which the employee worked-should be able quickly to find the full spectrum of advertisements listed under the product. Conversely, an employee interested in seeing all of the company's magazine display ads should be able to find them just as quickly. Hyperlinks can lead to additional information, such as:

If the organization conducts business globally, ads from around the world should be available. In some companies-like Levi Strauss-U.S.-based advertising staffers can see ads in France, enabling them to decide whether or not to adopt a similar style. If they do, the ad already exists and needs only to be dubbed in English, saving the U.S. division the cost of producing a new ad. The intranet staff at Levi's believes the intranet has created this ability to view offshore commercials.

Promotional Activities While advertising is clearly the most visible marketing activity, advertising alone does not sell a product. Sales are achieved by a cumulative effort that comprises many disciplines. Promotion is the first of these to be discussed here. Companies promote products through any number of activities, often associated with the kind of business the organization is in. For example:

Each of these activities is designed to enhance the visibility and desirability of the products to the audiences to which they most likely will appeal. Here again, the intranet can serve a highly informational purpose, providing information on the various promotions and even links to other sites where the promotions are actualized. (For example, if your company has licensed a product to a company that makes bed sheets, and the bed sheet company has a Web site, you can create a link to the site where the bed sheets are promoted.)

The simple presentation of promotions can be supplemented with information about the value of promotional activities-and the value of each particular promotion. When a company does not inform employees of the rationale for various expenses, particularly during times of squeezed budgets and staff reductions, employees can resent expenses they do not understand. When a friend's job has been eliminated, a significant expenditure for a mall tour can seem frivolous and wasteful. Focusing on such issues can be demoralizing, demotivating, and ultimately result in reduced productivity. However, when employees understand and appreciate the return on such investments, these issues simply never arise.

Like advertising, different types of promotions are effective in different places and situations. Still, the ability for one division to see what another is doing, or what another country's Marketing Department is up to, can generate ideas and the ability to leverage organizational resources to maximum benefit.

Marketing Communication and Product Public Relations Advertising and promotion have one important element in common: money. Companies pay, one way or another, to advertise their products or to engage in promotional activities. Organizations have other ways to gain visibility for their products and services without paying. They achieve this by generating interest in the product or service in the media. The departments that do this are called Marketing Communications or Product Public Relations.

In this effort, the professionals responsible for the work use a variety of tactics to build that interest, hopefully resulting in requests from television and radio stations, along with newspapers and other media, to cover the story the company wants covered. For example, when I worked at Mattel Toys, the company introduced a new product called The Heart Family, a Barbie-sized mom and dad with two babies. To promote the value of children playing with such family-oriented dolls, Mattel contracted with a renowned child psychologist and planned a tour of the United States and Canada, making the psychologist available for appearances on dozens of morning television shows (like A.M. Los Angeles and A.M. Chicago). Many of the shows were interested in having the psychologist appear to discuss the relationship of family values and child play activities.

On an intranet, the schedule for the appearances would allow employees all over the country to know when the appearance would be made in their town, to get a sense of how much coverage the effort is getting, and to understand how the company is generating free publicity for its product.

Additional uses of the intranet for marketing communications/product public relations efforts include:

Marketing Research Much of the information an organization gets is obtained through marketing research. It is this formal, scientific research effort that helps companies decide what products to develop, in what permutations (colors, sizes, functionality, etc.), and how to market them.

Marketing research is conducted through a variety of activities, including:

Traditionally, each division, product line, or operating unit in the organization conducts its own research, which is used to make its own decisions, after which the research is stored in some filing cabinet somewhere, where it is forgotten or, at best, available only to those who know it's there.

An intranet helps the company leverage the research it conducts by making all of it available-and easy to find-by all employees in the organization. Often, the information gleaned from one resource for a particular project can be of value to employees in other parts of the organization working on other projects. Access to research can be provided through a central research home page, and via links associated with the products or product lines for which the research was conducted.

Merchandising The marketing effort continues even after the product has hit the store shelves-at least, for those companies whose product goes on store shelves! Consider this very book. You probably bought it at a bookstore. Did you notice that some books were prominently displayed on special shelves made of cardboard that showed the title of the book or the name of the book series? How about toy stores? Do you notice the "Wall of Pink," Mattel's name for the shelf on which all the Barbie items are stocked? These displays, along with related materials and promotions, are the job of retail merchandisers. These individuals, often working out of their homes so they can be close to their territories, visit stores to make sure the products they represent get the best possible placement, and that retailers are taking advantage of all special promotional offers and the collateral materials the company has produced to draw attention to the product.

The intranet provides an additional function for retail merchandising besides the obvious storage of information about merchandising materials. Since retail merchandising employees are scattered across the country, they rarely have an opportunity to interact, to share advice or success stories. Providing them with access to a specialized discussion area can provide them with the same degree of interactivity shared by employees who see each other five days a week. The discussion can take place in a newsgroup or a Web-based conference area. Employees whose jobs inherently isolate them from their peers hunger for such interaction, and frustration can be high when they learn another employee has long had the solution to a problem that has plagued them for months.

However, providing this optional means configuring the intranet so employees outside of the LAN/WAN environment can gain access, generally by entering a login ID and a password. This level of security generally requires a firewall and a reasonable degree of comfort that the network's integrity is safe from potential violation.

Another alternative is to develop a Listserv-like mailing list for retail merchandisers. Providing an e-mail system that allows access from the outside without violating the integrity of the bulk of the intranet is a simpler process than building an effective firewall, and offers merchandisers the same kind of information-sharing vehicle. The only drawback is that while it's a part of the total intranet, a mailing list is nevertheless isolated from the Web-based interface; you won't be able to integrate information.

Discussion Groups A discussion group for retail merchandising department employees is only one use of this interactive component of an intranet. Particularly in large marketing departments, with their multiple sub-units (those listed above), each group functions autonomously, and the interaction between them occurs during staff meetings. Often, groups work at cross-purposes, or without the latest information from one another. ("What do you mean you've been working on a promotion with bookstores? We've decided not to license the product to the book publisher!")

A bulletin board-like system allows everybody in the marketing department to seek information from other employees, to offer insights, to make announcements, and to solve problems.

Sales

If the marketing department makes the products desirable, the sales group actually books the business. The sales function also represents the single greatest operational opportunity an intranet provides.

The job of the sales force is pretty straightforward: Carry the products directly to the customer, represent them, and sell them. Less obvious but just as important is the sales force's role as the front-line representative of the organization. All the corporate image development, public relations, and other efforts to establish a perception are secondary with most customers. Instead, their perceptions of the organization are based on their relationship with their salesperson, who is their routine point of contact, their source for information, and the person they call when problems arise.

For such an important position, salespeople tend to be among the most neglected individuals in the organizational hierarchy. They are detached from corporate headquarters, getting their information through the filters of district and regional sales managers and vice presidents. They tend to get together about once a year for the annual sales meeting, at which time the year's sales incentive programs are unveiled and new sales tools are presented, and salespeople are trained in their use. New products are introduced. Ideas and success stories are shared. Once a year, the most critical link between the company and its customers gather together for this ritual event, then go back to their sales territories, essentially on their own until the next annual sales meeting.

Providing the sales force with access to the intranet can solve a variety of problems and improve a number of processes which I will note shortly. But the single most important benefit of bringing the dispersed sales force into the intranet is making them feel more connected to the organization they represent.

Surveys of salespeople and their attitudes toward their organizations routinely reveal a sense of disconnectedness. Despite being the first to hear of problems from customers, they are the last to hear of decisions made by the organization. They are unable to contribute to discussions that directly affect the customers they represent, or provide input into planning that will have an impact on the customer base. By establishing the direct link between salespeople wherever they are in the field and the intranet, the organization is providing them with access to the same information everybody else has, the news at the same time it is distributed to everyone else, the ability to contribute in the same dialogues.

As with field-based retail merchandising personnel, access to the intranet for field sales representatives means inaugurating an authentication scheme through a firewall that allows only those into the intranet that you want to allow in. The risks should be ameliorated by a robust security system, but the risks should not prevent companies from taking advantage of the power of an intranet as a tool to enable the sales force to achieve results that were never possible before. The benefits of sales force access to the intranet far outweigh the risks. Let's review some of the key benefits.

Product Information

All employees can take advantage of product information provided by the Marketing Department as described above. Sales representatives need even deeper levels of information in order to address the questions customers ask or to point out product advantages that may meet a specific customer's needs. While this information can be attached to the basic product links above, the sales staff should be able to visit a single sales location that provides quick access to information they need, which includes:

Additionally, the sales force should be able to link directly to the catalog and to an up-to-date inventory database. Ideally, then, the sales rep should be able to log the order and track the shipment. Finally, the sales rep should have access to troubleshooting information on every product. (In some larger companies and organizations that sell highly technical equipment, field service personnel assume this task, although for purposes of this book, we're assuming field sales covers the field service responsibilities. If your organization has a field sales staff, just add this functionality to their space on the intranet.)

Sales Discussion Area

In addition to providing access to information about products, the intranet can provide the sales staff with access to each other. A discussion area-either a newsgroup or a Web-based conference area-enables field sales personnel from all over the country to share ideas and information. Often, the experience of a salesperson in one territory could be invaluable to a salesperson in another-if they had it. But the nature of field sales makes the sharing of such information nearly impossible.

The most obvious way to set up such a group is to allow employees throughout the country to engage in their own discussions. At Aetna, the insurance company, it works a bit differently. A salesperson with a particular need advises the head of the discussion area, who posts the query: "John in the Southwest is about to meet with Company X's purchasing agent, Mike Jones. Does anybody have any information on Jones?" Those with insight on Jones send the information to the section head, who then forwards it to John, who uses it to close the deal.

A discussion area also can speed up the implementation of innovative practices among the sales force. There is a story that's well known in marketing circles about Genentech, the biomedical company based in South San Francisco. Each Genentech sales rep carried a laptop computer where information on customers in their territories was stored. The great challenge for any pharmaceutical sales rep is to get face-to-face with the doctor. Doctors are notoriously busy and many sales reps call on them. Usually they only get to see a receptionist and drop off samples and literature. One Genentech sales rep became aware that he was receiving an inordinate number of questions from doctors about Medicare. He loaded the questions and answers on his laptop and developed a reputation as the man with the answers to Medicare questions. That database made him popular, and he got in to see far more doctors than before-and more than other competing reps. As a result, his sales volume increased. It took some time before the company became aware of his innovation and adopted it across the entire sales force. Through a discussion group online, the sales reps could have developed the system without the corporation making it a standard in far less time.

Customer Profiles

While sales reps can offer advice based on their own experience, the cumulative experience of the entire sales organization can be captured in pages on which major accounts (existing customers) and prospects (prospective customers) are kept fresh. These pages can offer details about the organization, including:

The benefit of such a customer profile can exceed the benefit the sales staff accrues. Many organizations believe employees could be more attuned to the work they do if they understood the customer better. A listing of customer profiles is an outstanding way to provide this information to employees who do not routinely deal with customers.

Customer Service

Many organizations employ people to answer phones to deal with questions and problems presented by customers who have issues with the organization's product or service. These are Customer Service Representatives. The intranet brings two advantages to Customer Service. First, information is much more readily available to representatives, which means they can address customer issues faster, increasing customer satisfaction. Second, Customer Service Representatives hear first-hand how customers feel about the company and its products or services; the intranet allows them to forward information about that feedback to appropriate departments or to make them available for everybody to see.

Access to Information

Customer Service Representatives never know what the subject of their next call will be. It could be technical difficulties, it could be an information request about upcoming product releases, it could be a question or dispute over a clause in a contract. Whether the customer leaves the call feeling satisfied or less than satisfied is a function of how well and how quickly the customer feels his or her problem was addressed.

Any information the Customer Service Rep uses to handle the call that resides in any database can be made accessible through the intranet. The Reps, logged into the Customer Service site on the system, can use hyperlinks and search engines to get to the information they need quickly. That can resolve the customer's problem, leaving him or her with a favorable impression of the company, and free up the rep to handle the next call and avoid leaving a customer on hold for an inordinate and frustrating length of time.

One healthcare company in the Pacific Northwest offers an excellent example of using the intranet for customer service. The organization provided benefits to hundreds of employers. While the benefits packages were very similar, each one was administered under a separate contract that could include small differences. The contracts were produced in Microsoft Word and the company's copies were kept in files. Using an application-InfoAccess Transit-to convert the Word files to HTML allowed the company to quickly assemble a Web-based archive of contracts that could be searched using the contract number of the client name as the key word in a search. Thus, if a customer's benefits representative calls with a question about how a particular issue is handled under the contract, the customer service rep-rather than putting the caller on hold to go find a copy of the contract-simply calls the document up onto his or her screen. The company was able to decide whether to include hyperlinks to various parts of each contract or instruct the Customer Service Representative to use the browser's "find" function to jump to the section about which the customer is inquiring.

Sharing Customer Feedback

One of my favorite consulting stories involves a company that made household appliances. Within the company, there existed a notorious rift between the Engineering Department and the Customer Service Department. Nobody could pinpoint the cause of the disagreement, but the chasm between the departments was growing so wide as to disrupt operations. The organization called in a consultant who listened to positions on both sides. Then he sent the Customer Service Department's employees home for the day and instructed the Engineering Department employees to spend the day answering the phones in the Customer Service Department. That single day of listening to the complaints from customers that Customer Service took for granted was enough to open the engineers' eyes and help them understand the reasons Customer Service was constantly on their back.

It doesn't have to come to near blows for the Customer Service Department to make a point-or several points, for that matter-about the issues customers raise when they call. After all, most of the problems customers have are related to anything but the Customer Service Department itself! The product does not work right, a part never arrived, something broke, something happened that should not have happened. The issues customers raise can and should be addressed by the departments in which the problems originated, if for no other reason than to make sure that the next version of the product does not incorporate the same flaws. But those messages are rarely heard, because it is not the customer talking, after all; it is the Customer Service Rep.

An intranet can solve that problem. Customer Service Reps can log specific complaints and problems into sections of the intranet that are visited routinely by the offending department. Is the problem an engineering issue? A short description of the problem-and the name and affiliation of the individual calling with the problem-goes directly into the Engineering Reports section, which is there for all the company to see. Additionally, each time one of these reports is logged, an e-mail message could be generated to the appropriate individual or department. (Alternatively, a weekly e-mail could be distributed summarizing the number of engineering-related calls received in the last week.)

Operational Departments

Marketing, Sales, and Customer Service are functional departments, related directly to the business the company is in, that are common to nearly all organizations. There also are operational departments that are not common to all companies; the kinds of departments the company has depends on the business the company is in.

An oil company, for example, has a department dedicated to geological exploration, another to refinery operations. A financial services company needs neither of these, but an oil company does not require a title operation or a real estate tax service. Many companies have engineering departments, but pipeline engineering, toy manufacturing engineering, and microprocessor engineering are all dramatically different one from the other, as are the configurations of the departments.

With the vast number of operational department permutations within companies, it is all but impossible to develop a section of a book that suggests, "Here's how to set up an intranet site for every possible operational department." I can, however, offer some basic approaches for any operational department's site on the intranet.

Follow the Guidelines

Earlier in the book, we explored the notion of guidelines for navigation and graphical application of departmental intranet sites. This is one of the key areas where adherence to the guidelines comes into play. While departments should have absolute autonomy over the content they produce, they should nevertheless be required to clear their sites with the central authority to ensure consistent application of navigation tools (or, alternatively, advise the central authority that the site has been posted so it can be reviewed to ensure that it complies with navigational guidelines).

Publish for the Department's Employees

Information of value to members of the operational department itself is one of the key categories of information to include in a departmental intranet site. Of particular interest is information of use to employees who are part of the same department but are in different locations.

The type of information that can be of significant value within a department includes:

One effective method for identifying the critical information each department should publish for its own employees is to engage the services of the Employee Communications Department to conduct an audit within the department. Such an audit can identify elements of information that employees have difficulty getting that affects their ability to do their jobs. The list that results from the audit can serve as a priority implementation list, since it will start with the most important information to the greatest number of employees and work its way down.

For each type or category of information built into the site, the principles of interactivity and access that have been discussed at length in prior chapters should apply. Remember, the intranet is not a linear, hierarchical communication vehicle. It is most effective when it is configured so employees can find the information they need quickly and easily, without being burdened with a lot of irrelevant details.

Publish for Other Departments

The same kind of audit that identifies key information needs for employees within the department can uncover the information most needed from the department by employees who work in other areas of the company. Of course, an audit is not always necessary. If departments spend some time focusing on the subject, they can probably come up with a fairly comprehensive list of complaints, problems, and issues other departments have had and the information they can publish that would prevent such problems from arising in the future.

It is particularly important that departments that publish information specifically designed for external consumption (that is, consumption by employees from outside the department) identify their site to the intranet coordinator or committee so that appropriate links can be established and the server on which the information resides can be included in any future indexing efforts for use with search engines.

Discussion Groups

Each operational department can opt to establish a Web-based discussion group or a newsgroup-or more than one-depending on the needs of the department. Consideration should be given to whether a discussion group should be restricted to members of the department (for department-specific dialogues) or open to all employees. Some departments may consider establishing more than one if they see a real need for both scenarios.

For example, let's look at a Research and Development (R&D) department. This group could have a restricted discussion group in which specific experiments and findings are discussed, but also could maintain an open discussion group in which input can be offered by the Marketing Department on potential markets for new products and other issues in which the two groups share common ground.

The Intranet on the Factory Floor

So far, all the discussion about intranets in this book has focused on employees who routinely work with computers. What about those companies that employ people to work in factory or assembly environments where computers are the exception rather than the norm? In this type of workplace, productivity is measured in units produced in a given amount of time. Many organizations fear that introducing an intranet to such an environment will invite employees to play rather than work and, as a result, suffer productivity dips.

The fact is, an intranet can be a powerful force for productivity enhancement on the factory floor, provided the tool is introduced to that environment strategically, with enhanced productivity as the objective. Strategic deployment of the intranet on the factory floor means engaging in:

The nurses at the Mayo Clinic are not factory workers, but they provide an effective analogy. These caregivers are engaged in physical labor, they work on the "floor" insofar as their environment is one of producing physical results working with physical materials, and they do not have individual computer workstations. Yet they do have access to the intranet via kiosk workstations, and can retrieve the latest approved nursing procedures within seconds by accessing the Procedures portion of the intranet. Earlier in the book, I used this example to point out the cost savings accrued by the company. But consider as well the productivity enhancement: No nurse spends time trying to track down a copy of the manual, then determining whether the manual is the most current, then finding the right section, then finding the specific procedure. The most up-to-date information is available almost immediately.

Before we go any further, I should say a word or two about kiosks. The very word strikes fear into the hearts of some purchasing agents, since it conjures visions of sleek, aerodynamically designed multimedia units with interactive touch screens and video laser disks built in. True, you can find kiosks like these in many catalogs. They are not, however, what I'm talking about here. Rather, when I say "kiosk," I mean a single computer workstation in a high-traffic area; perhaps it is surrounded by cubicle panels to provide the user some privacy, but beyond that, it is no different than the workstation any average employee has in his or her office. It comprises a CPU, a monitor, a keyboard, and a mouse. It is connected to the same network as other employees are connected to. It enables those without access to their own computer to sit down and access common areas of the intranet (obtaining the same information as those who do have their own workstation). It also allows them to enter a login ID and password in order to access restricted parts of the intranet to which they have access. Based on this definition, a kiosk can cost the organization as little as $2,000 to $3,000.

What kind of information and interactivity can be of value to employees on the factory floor? Two kinds:

Information available to all employees includes such material as benefits enrollment and internal job applications. Factory employees currently are rifling through job listings posted on bulletin boards and submitting applications that need to be completed with pen and paper. Providing them with access to online information at a factory-based kiosk can only serve to shorten the amount of time they spend with the process.

Information they need to do their jobs depends on the work they do. Let's take an example from my experience at Mattel Toys. Here, the process engineers would develop a new twist on a manufacturing process to accommodate a change to Barbie for the new year's line. The process would be outlined in blueprints and diagrams that would be rolled up in tubes and shipped to the factory. When I worked for Allergan, the pharmaceutical company, these types of diagrams could be digitized and stored on a network accessible by an authorized individual at the factory level. On an intranet, however, the diagrams and process charts could be archived in an appropriate, clearly marked section of the Web for any employee to see when he or she needed it.

Again, the best way to determine the information and data that would best serve factory employees can be through a professional audit. Following the assessment of the information needs, the company will need to establish the appropriate site on the intranet and develop a process by which information is routinely updated.

The communication element of the factory-based intranet should focus on the reason the intranet is being introduced and what the company hopes can be achieved through the intranet's presence on the factory floor. The training element introduces the intranet to employees on the floor and shows them what is available, but focuses on the application of the intranet to the work that is conducted at the factory level.

Ultimately, the factory floor is no different than any other part of the organization. Factory workers in particular count on production incentives as an expected part of their pay, and they will not jeopardize those incentives in order to play around on the intranet. There may be a short-term productivity dip as they learn to use the system, but the training should help keep this to a minimum as they recognize the intranet is to be used only for specified business purposes.

This rule should be fairly relaxed, since factory workers are like other employees in that nobody can predict what their information needs might actually be. Additionally, they should have access to news and information about the company at the same levels as other employees. Their need to understand how the marketplace is affecting the company's direction and management's decision-making process is just as pronounced as any other employee's, since those forces could have a direct impact on their own livelihoods. Still, the organization needs to make its numbers and produce a given amount of product in a given amount of time; thus, some limitations on intranet use can be expected. (One approach is to limit intranet use for anything other than direct work-related activities to the times before work begins, during breaks and lunch, and after a shift ends.)

Ultimately, though, the intranet can bring just as many advantages to the organization through the factory floor as it can through any other application.

Summary

Intranets can serve the operational activities of an organization regardless of whether the department is a common function-such as Sales or Marketing-or one that is unique to the nature of the company.

In addition to individual departments, though, the intranet can aid an organization in its cross-departmental communication and the management of projects, team efforts, and other multi-functional activities. These applications of the intranet are the focus of the next chapter.