The intranet that emerged from the four-month process is, in essence, a community where citizens work, play, and educate themselves. To make the site inviting, Love and Sandman created an irreverent design (the gossip page, called the Buzz, is represented by a bee icon) and a section where employees can post personal news like recent engagements or the scores for TWBG's softball team. To foster a sense of intimacy among people who see one another less and less all the time, the intranet also includes a page of interesting trivia about employees ("coached high school football" and "knows sign language").
And that's just the fun stuff. On the "can't live without it" side is the virtual library, including links to news services (PR Newswire, Business Wire), periodicals (the New York Times), and a dictionary. Love even plans to put the company's clipping service--formerly a retired librarian with a pair of scissors--on the intranet. Toward that end she is collaborating with Devlin, Sandman, and the IS group on a "spider"--or intelligent agent--that will search for mentions of TWBG and its clients on the Web and automatically create links between those sites and the intranet. That move should also substantially reduce the company's paper costs--TWBG spends around $1,500 a month compiling packages of articles that may lie ignored for weeks in managers' mailboxes.
The other section of the intranet carrying a heavy organizational load is New Biz. Designed to break down departmental barriers, New Biz is the place where employees go to ask for help on a request for a quote or to post new-business leads that don't fit their particular practices. It is also a mechanism for bringing dispersed expertise to bear on specific problems. In another section, called Portfolio Updates, managers of the five practices describe current projects and throw out broad requests for input. Both sections have greatly increased interaction among employees--particularly junior employees, who are among the heaviest and most visible contributors. "We used to be a layer cake," says senior associate John Taylor, "and now we're a marble cake."
The intranet is also helping TWBG improve customer service. In the past a client asking the price of a customized brochure might have to wait two or three days while the request passed through the usually overburdened hands of TWBG's estimator. Now the account rep simply consults TWBG's On the Run Estimator, an application developed for the intranet. A few minutes later, the rep has a price. The tool also works for advertising quotes. If a client calls about the price of a quarter-page ad in USA Today, the rep can provide an estimate even if it's 8 p.m. and everyone else has gone home.
As for that intern problem, the Office Wise section of the site, which includes information on subjects as mundane as filling out a Federal Express form and as complex as researching a policy issue--has it just about licked. Baker estimates that since the intranet's debut, the number of interns' questions fielded by time-strapped employees has dropped by 75%.
Love still misses the old watercooler days. But she knows there's a price to be paid for success, and in her mind the intranet makes that cost easier to bear. "We want to maintain the small, family mentality across a larger group," she says. "So as the company grows, the intranet will grow with it."
Emily Esterson is an associate editor at Inc. Technology.
Package Deals
A new category of packaged software offers relatively inexpensive "instant intranets" to small and midsize companies. But don't be fooled by the low price tags. "The costs are in training employees and identifying someone to manage the intranet," says Anita Rosen, author of Looking into Intranets and the Internet: Advice for Managers. The following are just a few of the available offerings:
IntraNetics 97
from IntraNetics Inc.
www.intranetics.com
Applications include an employee directory, organizational charts, a document library, newsletters, discussions, expense reporting, and job postings.
Involv Intranet from
Changepoint International Corp.
www.changepoint.com
This product contains a customizable library of self-service groupware applications for corporate networks and the Internet.
e:Folders
from IntraBlocks
www.intrablocks.com
This package, which can be used as an instant intranet or as an extension for an existing intranet, provides a single place for users to create, organize, share, browse, and find structured information.
HotOffice from
HotOffice Technologies Inc.
www.hotoffice.com
This Internet-based intranet, of all things, allows companies to subscribe to an array of applications including E-mail, real-time conferencing, electronic forums, one-step document publishing and sharing, personal stock portfolios, on-line directory assistance, package tracking, travel planning, corporate research, and more.
Ready for an Intranet?
Obviously, not every small business needs an intranet. But if you answer yes to the following questions, then it's probably time to start thinking about it.
1. Is your company using a client/server, Lotus Notes, Novell, or NT network?
2. Do employees share information stored on computers?
3. Do employees use E-mail frequently? Do they have access to the Internet?
4. Do you have employees at different locations?
Source: Anita Rosen, author of Looking into Intranets and the Internet: Advice for Managers.
