Feature

posted 27 Aug 2003 in Volume 6 Issue 4

Making the intranet the “place to be”

What do you do when your intranet is out-of-date, under-utilised and doesn’t meet the needs of your organisation? You redesign it, says the Law Society’s head of knowledge management Fiona Parkinson, and knowledge architect Sarah Benfield. They explain how the introduction of a common information system and a crystal-clear taxonomy is finally making the Society’s intranet a crucial resource.

The current Law Society intranet was launched four years ago primarily to replace the paper telephone directory. However, technical issues, a lack of training, awareness of the potentially difficult navigational structure and a huge amount of out-of-date information meant that the intranet inherited a poor reputation among staff. Although the current intranet contains valuable information that is not available in paper format, such as our staff handbook of employment policies and procedures, the intranet is not seen as an integrated part of our business and day-to-day activities.

Each of the Society’s three main sites and regional offices has their own distinctive culture and business objectives. Much of the work undertaken at the Law Society is highly specialised; as a result, people tend to work in small silos. Collaborative working is difficult not just because our staff are based across various locations, but because it is not universally understood within the Law Society what each directorate does and how they relate to each other. This often results in duplication of work and is exacerbated by our slow, committee-based, decision-making process.

Our regulatory and representative objectives sometimes come into conflict and there are increasing external pressures to improve our customer services.

The Society has no central repository for storing and sharing electronic information, and a reliance on hardcopy information makes sharing information and knowledge difficult. Each site has its own servers and rules for storing and naming documents, which are not necessarily clear to other members of the Society. There is, therefore, a huge amount of untapped knowledge.

But it is not all bad news. The redesign of our intranet has allowed us to address some of these issues and reposition it as a tool for the business to support business activities. Strategically, it is a major component of the common information system (CIS).

One of the Law Society’s objectives is to create an environment that maximises the knowledge and information-sharing potential of the entire the organisation. The aim is to have the right information available when the customer contacts the Society.

To help meet these objectives, the Society needs to be able to capture, organise, store and retrieve its information using a common framework. Moving towards this objective, there are a number of projects underway that address the information architecture of the Society, the development of a CIS, redesign of the intranet and the implementation of a CRM system.

At the Law Society, we have a vast reservoir of expertise. We envisage a CIS made up of our intellectual assets that are available for everyone to view and make use of. The CIS will provide us with access to the information we hold in common. In many cases much of the knowledge held by our staff is not documented, yet it is key to many of our business processes. This could be data held in structured databases or information in a policy document. It can also be the knowledge and experience held in someone’s head.

It is vital to describe the CIS in terms of its content rather than its physical nature. The CIS is not a single physical store of our intellectual assets but a single access point and search mechanism across all constituent information stores. An evolving, proactive intranet is at the heart of the CIS.

The behaviours and best practices demanded by the CIS are as equally important as the technology surrounding it. This includes the acceptance and willingness to share information and the sense of collective and individual responsibility to maintain the information contributed.

The CIS will help the Law Society realise its corporate objectives. We hope it will also go a long way towards protecting the Society’s intellectual assets and our standards and reputation. It will help us to improve information compliance, allowing us to find and provide information quickly in response to data-protection subject access and requests under our freedom-of-information code.

On a day-to-day basis, the CIS will support many of our business processes at the point of contact with external customers: finding documents, locating experts, sharing best practice and working collaboratively to formulate policy. The CIS is a tool for everyone, not just a selected few. Everyone should be able to derive benefit.

A common set of information and a single place to find information will end some of the confusion and frustration that currently exists.

Using the corporate intranet as an electronic tool for enabling internal knowledge and information sharing is a key component in achieving the Society’s vision of a common information system.

We want the intranet to become the place for all staff to share information with the rest of the organisation and learn more about the business and its activities, the place where we share and use the information we commonly hold. The intranet will provide an organisation-wide platform enabling better access to core information held within the Society. The redesigned intranet will enable:

Information sharing – connecting people to the information they need;
Knowledge sharing – a forum for identifying and sharing expertise and best practice;
Participation in discussion and collaboration areas – fostering Law Society communities.

The intranet will be a primary tool within the CIS for exchanging knowledge and information, and communicating internally. Our objectives for the redesigned intranet are for it to:

Be available to all employees regardless of location;
Include comprehensive information on the business and its activities and processes;
Open up communication channels and showcase best practices to encourage sharing of good quality information and knowledge across the Society;
Make individual learning easier by providing access to the collective learning of the Society.

Practical steps to facilitate knowledge sharing

In redesigning our intranet, we want to make information and knowledge more widely available; effective information management and quick retrieval of information, while avoiding information overload, is vital. The redesign of our intranet has allowed us to implement a content-management system and a taxonomy that will play key roles in supporting our business processes, giving the Society a common structure for categorising and finding its information.

Our content-management system provides a framework to manage and publish all types of content for delivery to our websites, including the intranet. Standard templates mean we can easily apply corporate branding to content. In addition, it enables us to keep a copy of each amendment made to a document, initiate automatic archiving and deletion of content from the websites, with each version of a document stored indefinitely.

We have replicated the standard template on the intranet, which will enable everyone in the Society to publish content mainly to the intranet but also to our internet, extranet and Gazette sites, and to deploy content to multi-sites simultaneously.

Creating a taxonomy

A number of workshops have been held to build our taxonomy, creating a subject index that describes our day-to-day business activities and areas of expertise. The taxonomy will provide a standard set of subject terms using the Society’s terminology, helping to avoid confusion over the definition of terms and cope with potential misspellings.

Assigning a subject term from the taxonomy allows a document to be categorised in the same way, no matter who within the Law Society is publishing the information. It also enables both structured and unstructured information to be categorised in the same way, using the same tool and terms across the common information system, for example on our CRM system. Our objectives for the taxonomy are to:

Provide a faster route to searching and finding information so that the user will be able to select a subject area and view all related documents at once;
Help users to navigate and find information quickly without having to think of the search terms themselves;
Supplement other search tools such as free-text searching;
Ensure delivery of only relevant documents about a particular subject.

A really useful “how do I?” section has also been created that answers a whole range of FAQs about human resources, finance and accommodation. These are intended to free-up human resources’ time to concentrate on matters that require attention. The “how do I?”s will be extended after launch to other areas of the Society.

We are also working with the CRM team to develop an A to Z of knowledge on how to deal with customer enquiries via our internet and switchboard.

The new intranet will be a forum to promote what is going on around the Society. We need to foster a sense of community at the Society by providing point-of-contact areas on the intranet to facilitate exchange of ideas, social activities and internal communication – this is our space.

The ultimate goal of the new intranet must be to achieve a critical mass of acceptance where the intranet becomes sufficiently entrenched in the Society to gain a life of its own. When everyone thinks of the intranet as the place to look for and publish information and the place to communicate with their colleagues, we’ll know we’ve succeeded. “Think intranet” will be the mantra.

The re-launch of the new intranet is the first piece in the jigsaw and is as much about improving perceptions of what a good intranet should be, as providing new functionality. It will be the first time that we have a central place where everyone can share and publish information, both formal and informal, along with ideas for discussion and development.

Once launched, every member of staff will receive training around the new design, navigation and functionality. More importantly, it provides the knowledge- management team the opportunity to promote the benefits the new intranet and its place in the CIS (alongside e-mail policy, use of public folders, information guidelines for our new desktop and good filing practice). This is crucial; it is the first time many people have been given the chance to think of the intranet as more than a telephone directory and set of electronic corporate guidelines.

Looking to the future

Cross-organisational teams work on various projects within the Society, such as the redesign of our websites. A community-building tool would enable teams to continue discussions outside of meetings while being able to share and have access to all relevant information, thoughts and developments. Works-in-progress could be published, discussed, commented on and an agreement reached as to how to develop the group’s thoughts further. Threaded discussions around key subject areas could be tagged with a taxonomy term, thus making them easy to track and audit.

Enabling people to meet electronically could speed up processes and ultimately save on the costs and time associated with physical meetings.

There is much to be done in moving the culture to this way of working, but we intend to improve understanding of the benefits and confidence in the technology across the organisation alongside our practical planning for a tool of this type.

Our “people directory” has suffered from little development in content or functionality and certainly lacks champions to promote it. Going forward, the directory needs to be developed to capture people’s expertise and to help everyone locate who does what within the organisation. Alongside this, we need to improve organisational confidence in the tool to encourage a critical mass of staff to keep their details up to date.

The benefit for staff in being able to quickly find someone to help with their query cannot be under-estimated, a need that was highlighted recently in a survey of staff across the organisation. Team interaction will also improve if people are seen to be more accessible; it is one way to start the destruction of the organisational silos.

Finally, there needs to be a link between the “search-for-people” results and the content that these people have published to the site. This will enable the user to find out more about the subject of their search and help build a more in-depth profile on that person.

We have established Café Society as a place where people can communicate informally on a range of issues, from work-related questions, such as a call for comments on a consultation paper, to a review of local restaurants. In developing Café Society, we hope to involve those staff that might otherwise think the intranet has little to offer them and ultimately lead them to other more job-specific information.

The Law Society needs to improve and develop its reuse of intellectual capital to avoid its habit of reinventing the wheel. Much of our work at the Society is project based. Information captured in the process of reviewing projects and key learning resulting from those projects should be recorded in a best-practice log, something we would like to address in the next phase of our development. We would also like to capture learning from training courses and conferences and provide links to authors of best practice within their “people-directory” entry.

We plan to provide seamless integration from the intranet to the HR self-serve module where staff will have access to information about themselves, including the ability to book holiday and complete sick-absence forms, obtain electronic payslips and book on training courses.

Functionality needs to be developed to enable interaction between the two systems. Staff ought to be able to start off in one system, move through to the other and back again effortlessly, guided by the content or subject area they require. This will be particularly relevant for the induction process, where content will be held in both systems.

We believe our intranet will help us realise our vision of working as one organisation rather than in separate silos, with the ultimate aim of providing the customer with the right information and improving customer service. Giving our information the same level of attention and resources we give to our other assets – our people, money and buildings – is common sense.

There is much work to be done to develop the culture and business processes at the Law Society, but there is also much enthusiasm to change. Our intranet offers us a practical tool to move along this journey.

Fiona Parkinson is head of knowledge management and Sarah Benfield is knowledge architect at the Law Society. For further information, contact Sarah Benfield at: sarah.benfield@lawsociety.org.uk.