Home » Archives » Corporate Intranets - Part 2 of 3 Friday, November 21, 2008




Corporate Intranets - Part 2 of 3

- by Al Doran

(This article is one in a series of articles on how to set up an HR Corporate Home Page. This article concentrates on managing an Internet project).

Picking up where we had left off on the topic of corporate internets/intranets and quotes from Edward Yourdon, a leading expert in the filed of information technology who had been in town talking about "Implementing Intranet/Internet Across the Enterprise".

Edward Yourdon's Home Page: http://www.yourdon.com We had talked about the compelling arguments for having corporate internets/intranets and the obvious links to work done on re-engineering the business; selling the concept to management; the development life cycle; and best practices.

Today we will talk about the remainder of the process and some of the things an organization can do to ensure the success of their corporate internet/intranet project.

Checklist for an Internet/Intranet Project:

Identify goals and objectives
Identify potential users of the applications
Identify needs that these applications will fill
Identify benefits with Return on Investment (ROI) analysis
Launch a pilot project
Develop formal plans (e.g. information publishing policies). It is at this stage that we must question why we are developing the new system. Are we doing this to keep up with the Jones's (its "cool" to have a corporate internet/intranet) or to keep up with our competition? Will this project provide our customers with better service? Are we linking the system to simple reengineering and improving efficiency or are we going all the way with major reengineering and reinventing the business?

Key to the project will be identifying the users of the system. How many of them are there? How are interested are they? Have they been beating your door down asking for help, improvements? Will they make good subjects to participate in the pilot project? What will the users do with the information they will get from the web? All of this requires that you actually talk to your users and that you ensure that they have some understanding of what the Internet is all about. Ed Yourdon suggests to "avoid the typical IT assumption that it would be "really cool" to give WWW access to all of the users".

As in any HR information technology project, we must identify the benefits.

Benefits like "better information" are hard to quantify and deal with objectively.
But some Internet benefits are easy to quantify, for example:
the cost of servicing a benefit inquiry is $25-$50
one call usually leads to another
but with the web there is more chance of the customer getting all the information they need with no calls One of the more difficult tasks in managing a project of this nature is in the estimating, scheduling, and budgeting but it _must_ be done. Many of the standard estimating tools/products do not yet include Internet projects and equally challenging is the fact that most companies do not enough Internet past history on which to base estimates. But "runaway" projects costing into the millions and taking more than a year are now legend, so steps must be taken to estimate, schedule and budget. What has been successful in some cases is the prototyping approach where costs, progress can be observed. Even more importantly, dividing requirements into "must-do", "should-do", and "could-do" will greatly assist in the process.

In building your internet project team, a number of skills are required, some of which may be available in limited supply, in which case some team members may be doing double duty. In a larger organization, on a large project, here are some of the typical roles:

user representatives - employees who will eventually use the system, people who know the business - they will identify
requirements - provide input at all phases - test the new system.
systems analyst - for carrying out "user requirements" study
Project Manager - scope out the project - to estimate the work to be done - to develop and track the resources and schedule - to budget and keep the project on budget - to lead the team - to report to senior management.
database manager - for organizing storage of Web pages, as well as storage/retrieval of tables/files to which Web pages are linked.
graphics artists/designer - for design of visual content of Web - note software people are not graphic artists
HTML language lawyer - someone who actually knows the hyper text markup language
Application programmers - for the advanced work, such as Java, PERL, ActiveX, and CGI work.
Networking Specialist - to deal with the non-trivial aspects of connecting it all together
Testing/QA specialist - to develop test scripts, apply testing tools, develop testing strategy.
Security Specialist, documentation specialist, performance tuner. Pilot projects are very important when doing internet work as the "hype" associated with this kind of work is incredible and the technology is changing so rapidly. This is new technology we are dealing with and pilot projects have always been regarded as a good way to experiment with new tools. Most pilot projects are kept to 3-6 months so that results and costs are seen in a relatively short time period. The pilot project should have obvious business benefit but not bankrupt the company if it fails. This is an area where investing in consulting expertise has potential immediate and high pay back. Share the successes, problems, lessons learned on the project.

A final note on the involvement of IT (Information Technology). Ed Yourdon cautions to avoid the mistakes made 10 years ago by IT shops when PC's first came on the market (IT tried to control the purchase and use of all PC's). Today the PC is a common user tool just like the telephone, and the message to IT today is, treat the Internet in the same way. On a positive IT note, recognize that old mainframe skills such as Business and Systems Analysis skills are back in and greatly needed with Internet applications. IT can also look for ways to integrate the Internet with existing legacy applications (example, old mainframe HRMS) and tie it into newer ideas such as data warehousing.

To come in future articles on developing a corporate Internet:

training
policies/plans
electronic commerce
future trends -Al Doran is President of Phenix Management Int'l, a Richmond Hill, Ont. management consulting firm specializing in HRMS issues. He is co-author of a new book published by Nelson Canada, Human Resource Management Systems. He may be reached at: aldoran@pmiHRM.com and his home page is http://www.pmihrm.com/

COPYRIGHT - AL DORAN - May 16, 1997

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