Chapter 9: The Intranet as Communications Platform

Overview

Author: John Colby

• Communication technologies

• Using forums to build a knowledge base

• Demonstration systems

Many companies and organizations know that they have a problem with communications. Typically, a company will appoint people to oversee the development of communications. Their brief is commonly built round the words "effective" and "efficient" and maybe "attributable". One problem for any organization with many individuals is the organization and management of e-mail. This form of communication, although fast (efficient) and providing a record of transactions (attributable) may be taking over and the sheer volume of mail may reduce its effectiveness. The aim may be to provide a more widespread communications platform. Consider the following situation:

You are anywhere in the world. You have a question, or you've become stuck and are unsure about something you're doing in your job. You have access to a communications device with Internet facility, so you e-mail someone with the question that will solve the problem. They mail you back, and your problem is solved.

What happens when someone else has a similar question? Another e-mail, another reply. And again... and again. There is a proliferation of e-mail on the same subject which all takes time, especially for the person to whom all the queries are directed. And they have their own job to do.

Let's analyze this from an operational point of view. There is no problem with answering questions via e-mail. In fact it's a very good medium for that. However, if someone has a similar problem then you have to repeat the process. So what do you do? Copy the e-mail to everyone who is likely to need it? Hardly, as the load on the e-mail servers would be immense and the avalanche of unnecessary information would just be too much, the answer you want would soon be buried among all the other answers that you don't need. And then again, those who receive these e-mails may be a subset of those who actually need to know the information you're imparting. What this chapter does is discuss effective ways of sharing information, the software for their implementation, and managing your company's communications resource.

So what are the options for using the intranet as a communications resource? What do we want out of it? You could consider many solutions, forums, chatrooms, mailing lists, Wiki, FAQ lists, conferencing, and proprietary solutions such as NetMeeting. Some are a way of making conferencing facilities more widely and more economically available while others provide a transactional record of the messages. How you wish to implement any of these is dependent on your own needs. We'll deal with them in more detail as we proceed.

In this chapter we will cover the following areas:

• The solutions in general: - Including information on forums and discussion groups, chatrooms and messaging, and what purpose they serve.

• Concerns about the information - Security, privacy and accountability, validity and relevance, accessibility, legal requirements, moderation, and administration

• Control - How controlled is your information? Is it too tightly or too loosely managed? Who is responsible? What issues may arise from creating a knowledge base?

• Demonstration Systems - Setting up a demonstration forum or chatroom system.