Although the California franchisees are more wired than most other Children's Orchards, the majority of the state's stores are still low- or no-tech. More than half of Spehn's franchisees use the intranet and use it often, but many do so from home, either because they are too busy during the day or--in many cases--because they don't have computers at their stores. "I'm hoping that as getting a computer gets easier and cheaper, they'll be less reluctant," says Spehn. "We're moving the process along by making it almost impossible to stay off the computer."
One franchisee who already finds it impossible to stay off is Nancy Rigoglioso, owner of a store in San Diego. Rigoglioso is one of Spehn's most active E-mail correspondents. On this day she'd sent him a tip about a supplier of preemie clothes, which Spehn added to the Vendor News page.
Rigoglioso contributes frequently to the intranet, something she's happy to do in consideration of all she gets from it. On a recent visit, for example, she found a hot-off-the-presses announcement that Kuda, a children's dress supplier located only a few miles north of her store, had an overstock of fall clothing. She called the company immediately and arranged to visit the warehouse the next day; within 24 hours she had ordered the dresses and was hard at work on her back-to-school promotion. "In the past I used to have to call Michael every week to ask about deals," Rigoglioso says. "Now I just log on."
The Electronic Watercooler
Employees at The Widmeyer-Baker Group (TWBG) were not surprised when Melinda Love called a staffwide meeting last spring. For two months the vice-president of creative services at the 75-person media-relations and public-affairs firm had been peppering them with questions about their jobs while remaining noticeably coy about the reasons for her interest. So when Love marched into the conference room with its view of the Hilton Washington & Towers, she was greeted by eager anticipation. It was exactly the reaction she had been hoping for.
Love flipped off the lights. She flipped on a projector. Then, for the next 20 minutes, she led the group on a tour of TWBG's brand-spanking-new intranet.
The previous night, the company's creative-services staff had scurried from cubicle to cubicle, changing everyone's browsers so they would default to the internal home page. When employees returned to their desks, jazzed by Love's description of the network, they found it literally staring them in the face. "We created buzz," Love says of her user-adoption strategy. "Then we wanted to get everyone to try it right away."
Love's role as an intranet evangelist had begun the previous winter, when Michael Baker, TWBG's chief operating officer and managing partner, barged into her office with both a problem and a solution. The company had grown about 300% over five years, changing in the process from a close-knit family to an extended family to one of those families with a bunch of great aunts whose names no one can remember. Baker wanted to promote a sense of unity without staging endless face-to-face meetings. He thought an intranet might be the answer.
Nostalgic for the days of impromptu gossip sessions around the watercooler, Love enthusiastically agreed. Since joining TWBG, in 1993, she had watched the company expand and fragment into five discrete practices. Once housed in a single small office, the company today occupies an entire floor of a Connecticut Avenue skyscraper, and Love can go weeks without running into some of her colleagues. "Sometimes we feel like we operate different businesses," she says.
Baker turned to Love after a failed attempt to launch the intranet in the information-systems group. Over the course of the winter, network administrator Anthony Banks worked with a consultant to assemble the infrastructure (a Windows NT platform running Microsoft Exchange and connecting to the Internet with a T1 line). But it soon became clear that while IS understood the technical underpinnings of an intranet, creating a look, a feel, and a spirit that reflected TWBG's culture was beyond them. Love, on the other hand, was something of a culture expert, having developed corporate-identity programs for numerous D.C. companies. A self-described Internet junkie and the firm's institutional memory, she was the obvious choice for the project's leader.
So in March, Love and Internet specialist Leah Sandman (manager of the company's external site) embarked on a six-week research odyssey to figure out what TWBG's intranet should do. Love spoke with employees at MCI, which is known for its sophisticated intranet, and did considerable research on the Web. She also interviewed some of TWBG's clients about their intranets: what information they post and why, and what applications they find most useful.
Love then turned her attention inward, forming a focus group composed of representatives from every department. "We didn't want to create a product from the top down," she says. As she expected, everyone had his or her own wish list. The creative-services representative wanted to publish guidelines for ad submissions. The account executive asked that clients' billing codes be posted. Even the COO chimed in: Baker requested contact information for TWBG's courier service and one-click access to PR Newswire, a business-news service.
One issue that affected practically everyone was the problem of training interns. Every three months TWBG hired half a dozen college interns, and for weeks following their arrival, staff members were bombarded with questions about how to fill out media-buy forms and where to find the latest copy of Advertising Age. Database manager Shannon Devlin found that period particularly trying. "Some research questions I answer time and time again for every round of interns," she says. If TWBG's policies and procedures lived on-line, the focus group agreed, the pain of orientation would ease considerably.
Love also interviewed all of the other 74 staff members--without telling them why--about the publications they read, the mailing lists they belonged to, and their Web use. It soon became clear that every day TWBG employees drew information from an avalanche of sources--clip packets, trade journals, wire services, Web sites, newspapers--and that their lives would be infinitely easier if they could get all that information distilled into a single repository. The idea of the intranet as universal reference tool was born.
