Giraffe Forum

Dear Gerry:

Thank you for the ongoing series of articles.

I think you are very far off the mark in terms of the potential of the Intranet. If it is used to squeeze out five minutes here and there is will become just another rewards and punishment tool for employees. Of course it needs to have a healthy structure but also must adapt to the new ways people are sharing ideas, knowledge and information that is much more ad hoc than in the past. What 20 year old University graduate would want to work in a staid rigid structured environment when they have spent their past few years using the net in all its creativity to learn and share and explore their professions?

Your summary – “focus on time and efficiency” sounds like a statement from the old factories where time motion studies were the be all and end all of control. Those have been replaced by the many better approaches in team work, quality circles and collaborative environments.

Saving time on the mundane tasks is always a good thing and some of the tools on the intranet will help but is not what makes an organization effective or a leader.

The Intranet is best used as a tool to enable employees to collaborate better, to exchange ideas on how to help customers and other employees with their work. By creating a collaborative creative and enthusiastic environment you build innovation, higher productivity and drive out bad practices more quickly.

The best profitable organizations are focused on leadership, teams, collaboration and exploring better ways to achieve goals. If I thought I worked for a company looking to save a few minutes here and there using intranets I would quickly move to an organization. An organization that gets productivity through , as per Don McLeod “people doing what they do well working together with other people doing what they do well” and this is where we can get major boosts in companies.

I am always amazed at the great productive ideas and solid approaches that come from customers, team members, outsiders across network spaces.

Hi Gerry,

This is certainly a contentious topic! Always worth the discussions necessary to find the middle ground.

Now, I’m going to stand by my post on this topic, and will move on to bigger topics:

Something I’ve written about in the past is that there are four fundamental purposes for an intranet:

* content
* communication
* collaboration
* activity (the ‘intranet as a place for doing things’)

http://www.slideshare.net/jamesr/the-four-purposes-of-an-intranet/

If the intranet just focuses on content and communication, there is no ROI. All we can talk about is reducing the time needed to “find things”, which is very weakly correlated with staff’s actual activities.

Instead, we need to increasingly focus on activity, such as allowing people to actually book travel onling, and not just find the travel policy.

The ROI on these activities can be easily measured, and time (or dollar) savings quantified. This is the intranet becoming more *useful* rather than just *usable*.

So I attack the “time saving” metric to encourage intranet teams to look beyond merely justifying what they’ve already done, and instead to find what else they can do for their organisations.

Let’s get beyond debates over dodgy numbers, and instead explore how we can really make intranets into the invaluable business tool that we all want.

(And no, the intranets I see are no different to the ones you have seen.)

Cheers, James

In my experience, inefficient processes (whether internet based or not) become institutionalized and over time start to define the work requirement. I have worked with business teams that insist that the job is defined by multiple steps in a process. They often have difficulty extracting the real business goal from the institutionalized processes. In its worst case, task effectiveness is defined by completion of tasks that do not relate to any defined business goal. While Gerry talks about relatively simple intranet tasks like checking pay details, my experience comes from business contexts that are starting to embed web applications into their work flow processes. Even if there is a glaring need to support collaboration,information retrieval and informed decision making, these goals can often get lost in a morass of inefficient processes.
As a final point I would like to add that time to complete a task and minutes saved are just a couple of ways of looking at efficiency measures. While harder to measure, users’ perception of task complexity vs business goal can often be a more meaningful measure of how mind numbing inefficient processes can become.

I fully agree with Jonathan’s statement that time savings should not form the core of the business case. However the corollory probably should. The system/application should support business tasks in a way that enables users to function more efficiently, effectively AND with confidence. Important business tasks should have outcomes that are measurable. Success criteria can be applied to these measurable outcomes. At the end of the day investment in designing interfaces that optimize tasks to users’ mental models will be mesaured not in minutes saved but rather by such things as reduction of user errors, improvments in the time to get to a decision, greater client and user satisfaction with system/application response (in terms of information returned and time to receive the information), etc

I’m not sure anyone here, including James, is arguing that it’s not worth treating people’s time as precious, or not worth ‘fixing the basics’ on the intranets we work with in an attempt to make savings.

James makes some good points when it comes to *measuring* these savings on an intranet, though. I find it hard to believe you disagree with ‘practically all’ of his post, Gerry - perhaps you are exaggerating that metric ?!

I’m sure we’ve all seen examples which assume that 10,000 staff members perform task X three times a week and it takes two minutes, so improving it to one minute will save 30,000 minutes a day which at $10/hour means $300K. In all but the simplest of jobs, this is hugely misleading as it assumes that people are otherwise 100% efficient and always have something productive they could be doing instead (and often the number of people and time saved per task look a little over-estimated too).

To put it another way, if each person worked for 5 minutes extra every day, would their organisations benefit from an equivalent % increase in earnings ? Probably not, in most cases.