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| Home » Archives » Corporate Intranets - Part 2 of 3 | Friday, July 30, 2010 |
 
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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 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). 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. 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 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: 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. 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: 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(at)pmiHRM.com and his home page is http://www.pmihrm.com/
COPYRIGHT - AL DORAN - May 16, 1997 Phenix Management Int'l
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