Case Studies

 

Chapter 3 - Creating Intranets for Management and Collaboration in Federal Agencies
Managing IT in Government, Business & Communities
by Gerry Gingrich (ed)
Idea Group Publishing 2003

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Department of Transportation

When the DOT's department-wide intranet was first created in 2000, there were already active intranets in the department's 11 operating divisions, including the Coast Guard, the Federal Aviation Administration and the Federal Highway Administration. In fact, one of the principal reasons for the top-level support of the project was to encourage the development of a more unified organizational culture across the department as a whole. To create appealing and useful functions for the new intranet, designers sought cross-cutting tasks not already included in the divisional intranets. The new intranet offered several communications opportunities including e-mail and chat rooms. Links were available to breaking news, news clippings, sites for information about the organization and its budget, performance measurement databases, the employee directory, the calendar, and human resources information. The intranet linked employees to the agency library and to many other online works and government documents. The newest iteration allows employees to create their own home pages from a selection of administrative tools.

A particularly important innovation in the DOT intranet is the ability of employees to create online work groups around topics of interest or concern to themselves, within or across divisions. The procedures for creating groups are extremely flexible so that open forums or private sessions are possible. Groups that begin as problem-sharing may evolve to problem-solving. These groups may self-organize around current issues. Documents may be simply uploaded and shared. While no evaluation of the groups has been done, many large and small continue to be formed.

One characteristic of the intranet identified as critical to its success by designers are that the managers led the design teams. Managers on the design team worked closely with the technology experts, but the managers led the effort and managers offered the suggestions for the functions to be included. The capacities of the intranet were designed around management priorities rather than technological opportunities, and the applications for communications, home page design, and collaborative work were kept simple and transparent with ordinary language terminology. The success of the intranet and its high level of use were attributed to this choic.

Department of Housing and Urban Development

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) first launched its intranet in November 1996. Since then there have been four subsequent iterations; the first four were named "HUDweb" and the most recent revision in 2001 was renamed hud@work. The genesis for the intranet came from management concerns about communication breakdowns and technical teams that believed online computer functions could facilitate internal communications. The idea was that HUD could "work smarter, not harder, without paper." HUD leadership at the Secretary level supported the intranet as it responded to both internal problems and to the Clinton administration initiative on the information superhighway.

Three factors were critical in spurring the growth of the intranet in HUD. First were a series of external events that challenged HUD's viability. Shortly after the launch of the second HUDweb, Congress proposed abolishing HUD, and Secretary Cisneros used the intranet as a means to communicate with staff. This brought employees to the intranet on a more routine basis. Second were agency decisions to make certain kinds of information available only on the intranet. When the Office of Personnel stopped printing vacancy announcements and posted them only on the intranet, there was a dramatic increase in intranet use. The third factor was marketing of the intranet. The launch of each new intranet was accompanied by a campaign to inform employees about the innovations and to encourage them to use the intranet. Slogans such as "smart HUD employees work online" and the intranet is a "tool, not a toy" were typical of these promotions.

Four items appear on the HUD intranet home page: a daily message from the Secretary, today's feature, employee highlights, including personnel announcements and an employee locator, and a "what's new" feature, which includes personnel rule announcements and policy statements. The current iteration of hud@work has a customization feature by which employees can design the layout and some of the content of their intranet homepage. It also has virtual team technology, which allows staff to exchange files, engage in real-time chat, teleconference, and set up meetings.

Environmental Protection Agency

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) introduced its first agency-wide intranet, EPA@work, in 1998. Prior to that, several components of the EPA, including the regional offices, had their own intranets. The goal of the agency-wide intranet was to provide information and functions that were common to all EPA employees. The intranet development team members came from the Office of Information Resources and Management, but had support from upper management in the EPA. The members of the team all had some computer and technical background, but were basically interested in information applications.

EPA employees have consistently used and valued the "EPA intranet locator," by which staff can find contact information for other employees and contractors. Another popular function enables employees to download and print forms and information on travel. Much of the EPA@work content has been facilities-oriented, including activities such as parking, copying, and office cleaning. Links from the EPA@Work front page include organization and locations with charts of headquarters and regional offices, information resources, with calendar and e-mail, and links for comments and help. The EPA intranet offers the capability of work groups, chat rooms, and collaboration, but these have not been used widely because of training requirements, firewalls, and costs.

General Services Administration

The General Service Administration's (GSA) intranet, InSite, was developed in 1996 as a result of an initiative offered by a GSA administrator with private sector dot-com experience. In response to this proposal, the chief information officer worked with a small team to make GSA's computer network Internet and intranet accessible and to develop a vision for a departmental intranet. GSA's intranet was "home-grown," based largely on the experiences of team members in navigating Internet sites.

Key to the success of InSite was having it become a work site, not just a source for documents. The bulletin board feature, "My 2 Cents," was popular and brought employees to the intranet. Travel and human resources links were also well-liked. Basic features, such as a telephone directory, also drew staff to the site. Several links are offered on the InSite home page, including those to the GSA library services, human resources, travel, and the GSA online university. At this time there is no collaborative work space on the intranet, but there are some pilots underway. The GSA agency-wide intranet competes to some extent with subunit intranets that have also developed and draw employees away from the agency-wide intranet.

Department of Commerce

As in the case studies of DOT and the EPA, the intranet at the Department of Commerce (DOC) was created after major divisions within the agency had already established their own intranets. One of those, for the Commercial Service (CS), was created principally to share business process software. This software is used to coordinate business events and make arrangements for trade missions. The integrated intranet was also designed to ease communication and coordination of information among the many CS offices in the U.S. and abroad. One challenge the intranet development has faced has been a lack of funds for the purchase of desired new software. Even when a need is identified, it may not be met. In addition, some of the software that is available requires training, and has not been used as much as had been hoped. As applications become more valued, it is expected that use will increase.

The DOC-wide intranet was created in 1999 by Secretary Daley to enable the DOC to become a "digital department" quickly in response to Clinton administration priorities. The original vision was for interactive functions allowing employees to communicate with each other and to conduct business online. At present, however, the site operates largely as a portal with information links, but few interactive functions. It offers links to a wide variety of departmental documents, policy statements and employee information resources. It was a joint creation by Web technicians and library staff. Resources for the intranet itself, however, lag behind those for the large and relatively well-funded Internet. Synergy between the intranet and the established Internet are seen as a key to good site maintenance and further development.

Department of Justice

The Department of Justice (DOJ) site was created in 1998 in response to the Freedom of Information Act, the Clinger-Cohen Act, and the Clinton administration's requirements for digital government. The new intranet was to provide increased information and communication capability to the department. Like the DOT, the EPA, and the DOC, the DOJ intranet was created well after such well-established divisions as the FBI had developed their own intranets. The site was designed to enhance the communications capacity of the department and to offer news services and policy documents, among other administrative information, but the DOJ intranet partially duplicated the services of the divisional intranets. The department-wide intranet was a spin-off from the DOJ Internet, developed earlier, and is served by the same staff group of Web technicians and library information resource experts though resources for the intranet are thought to be very limited. The first version of the site was created by outside contractors, but since then the work has been done in-house. Web selections were based on the resources most asked for by clients and on ideas gleaned from the Intranet Roundtable, a meeting of government intranet designers responsible for disseminating many of the innovation ideas described here.

At present, the DOJ intranet site is largely non-interactive and offers links to information on employee resources, news, library links, career development, and technical assistance. Later iterations of the site are expected to be more interactive, enabling actors across the organization to collaborate on litigation, though that will take a major change in system architecture and strain resources. The department hopes the next versions will be more interactive and will attract additional users. Security issues also complicate the development of more sophisticated department-wide sites. There is some reluctance to make the intranet the home page of all department employees because of the very strong identification many have with their divisions.

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