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Anyone who has worked for, or with a large organisation over the last 10 years has probably experienced the implementation of the corporate intranet as it has been rolled out to the organisation. Many will have also been totally bewildered by the vast array of links and areas within the Intranet with apparently meaningless titles. The 2-hour training session, given by HR, was more of a sales pitch about how the organisation was investing in its employees than real training and in any case, as a result of geographic location, most of the organisation received it months in advance of the roll out and can't remember the details.
Organisations invest in Intranets in order to save money. Unfortunately most of the savings as a result of implementing an Intranet are so called 'soft savings': that is savings where you never see the cash. It is therefore extremely difficult to calculate the ROI of an Intranet project. Paul Chin at Intranetjournal.com claims that some managers don’t even bother trying to measure the ROI. "An in depth ROI analysis will end up taking more time than actually building the Intranet itself."
The investment made in the Intranet technology can be vast with Gartner estimating that even a 5,000 user organisation would spend in excess of $1m on planning, implementation and operation. So when you look at the three main expense categories (Technology, Information, Personnel) it is little wonder that the one that gets squeezed is the latter: Personnel. It is difficult to build an Intranet without infrastructure or content, but employees, well they will find there way around it!
Economists already agree that a significant factor in the expanding economy have been productivity improvements as a result of IT investment. InformationWeek reported that in the US economists such as Robert Reich and Laura Tyson point to IT as "perhaps the most significant factor in the countries prolonged economic expansion". InformationWeek Research also found that the most important technologies that help boost worker productivity were collaborative software tools such as email and Intranets.
So why haven’t organisations looked for improved employee productivity as a result of improved usability? Jakob Nielsen suggests that during the 90's "corporate Intranets were severely under funded". Given that productivity gains were being achieved in any case, through the deployment of technology, further gains were perhaps not sought out. In fact many organisations still argue that usability is not required in the corporate Intranet. This is no doubt driven by the lack of data available about how employees are actually using the Intranet and the assumption that they will learn as they go. In reality large parts of the Intranet remain unused and unexplored.
So what is the argument for carrying out usability on corporate Intranets? Research carried out by Jakob Nielsen for 'The 10 Best Intranet Designs of 2001' suggested that on average use increased by 98% after redesigning the Intranets to make them more usable. This is dramatic providing that the use of the Intranet equates in to benefits for the organisations. There are a number of areas where increased use can lead to productivity improvements and also to increased employee satisfaction.
For example, employees spend a significant amount of time looking for information on the Intranet. If the content is arranged in an illogical manner, perhaps reflecting the organisations database structure or vertical market orientation, it can lead to employees wasting considerable amounts of time either searching for themselves or helping colleagues search. A usable User Centered Design that increased use does transform into greater employee productivity. This may be an obvious example but what about organisations empowering employees to manage their own careers? The HR Intranet, built on applications such as Peoplesoft, is being introduced to free the role of HR from its administrative duties and also to provide managers with more effective tools for managing employees. Employees are given access to their personnel records online, and can review benefits, appraisals and even plan their future career and development requirements from a PC.
According to CIPD (Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development) "the more sophisticated systems attempt to appeal to employees by offering direct links to associated websites so that, for instance, an employee could arrange a hospital appointment under his or her healthcare cover without having to refer to the HR department beforehand. Some companies are going even further in their attempts to retain employees by offering such services as online grocery shopping facilities."
Although some commentators believe that 2002 will be the year that companies start taking their Intranets seriously it seems unlikely that usability will play any sort of role in the immediate future. Organisations do not have a clear grasp on the benefits from their Intranets and further investment will not be granted without a more sophisticated ROI business case being presented. Given that this is difficult to produce it seems that employees will have to continue to struggle.
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