How to Create Intranet Chaos
In previous articles I've talked about how important it it to have a governance plan. I think it works well to start from the other side of the coin on what happens without governance and "How to Create Intranet Chaos". Governance is really a top down cultural thing, that does require buy off from the organizations. Some of these topics may resonate with your organization.
1. Don't agree on a common platform for your Intranet, embrace (platform) diversity... Leave each organization or group to determine their different infrastructures & architectures making difficult and expensive to integrate. If HR finds their recruiting app is the best on some platform that is non standard, just get rid of the standard. Go with a 50/50 split of Windows, .NET and Java and Linux technologies and your developers will have a hey day. But hey, users can't tell ;) right? Use different technologies for your enterprise search, different interfaces for collab workspaces, and something else for publishing, and some thing else for records management, etc... 1b. You don't need a browser standard and forget about service packs the users can manage this. Having a server in each location of the company with a different solution and different configuration will empower the local IT staff. It was once described to me as the democratic way.
2. The Intranet is suppose to be a web right? Well, make sure all users have personal web server, apache, or better yet, run server environments at the end of each hallway. Each team can designate someone to run the team site or better yet, hire a developer that can come in for $50K to build the site then walk away and someone on the team will figure out how to maintain it. Who cares about bandwidth and latency when the intranet you care about is on your desktop? Who needs a datacenter anyway? Utilization on the network is simply a battle of wits. If everyone has their data locally then who cares... FIFO first to download or watch the latest videos wins. Getting rid of servers by serving up data from desktops saves on unnecessary hardware anyway. Think about it... This is truly the wild wild west!
3. Backups are over rated. They take up too much disk space, and tapes are a waste of money. Drives are resilient. You have a greater than 99% chance it won't fail. Just make sure everyone makes copies on their desktops and stores them on their personal shares. Everyone has pleanty of disk space on their cheap drives on their desktops and laptops anyways, might as well use it. More than just backups... failover clusters, load balancing technologies, and solutions like log shipping and database mirroring are expensive and redundant. Getting rid of these technologies will be a sure way to cut costs and save money.
4. Force feed your users your Intranet with no training. Users will figure it out eventually, it's just techology. Even if they don't understand how the menus work or how to add their time sheet or access the HR handbook or company directory those things are over rated anyway. They should be doing their work not looking up people or reading about company rules or standards. Contributing to a document management or collaboration workspace is or should be intuitive enough on it's own.
5. Ensure Inconsistency. Make sure the taxonomy and navigation of all sites is as inconsistent or consistent as each group decides. Global navigation is overrated. Corporate branding? Make sure that each team and group site has a different look and feel it will promote pride within the team. When navigating the intranet each page for each division should feel like a different place, if HR likes tree controls and Finance likes drop downs then so be it.
6. Duplication is the Rule. Since we get rid of backups, we need to make sure there are lots of duplicates. As well with duplicates we'll make sure everyone has the right answer. No need for version control or check in or check out. Everyone will have a copy. Whoever makes a change can email it out to everyone and then they can save it to their desktops and their team sites.
7. Life Cycle Management... Overrated. Disks are cheap, we should keep everything. We could easily buy a NAS for every hallway to ensure everyone can dump their desktops to the NAS or file server. For compliance we should keep everything anyway. Although this sounds like a form of backup, it's just simple duplication. If you don't delete anything you don't run the risk of loss of data. Sites can easily become nice archives, great for reference. Just add more disks when needed. Having a retention/expiration policy requires oversight and work to monitor and implement.
8. Everyone Full Control - Ever found out something existed and you needed it and couldn't get at it? Well, you can solve that problem by giving everyone full control. If that's not good enough give anonymous full control. That will really ensure its easy to find. The search in desktops is good enough for search anyway. Just choose the location of what you want to search, and even if it is a web site as long as their is a back door that's open with NFS or NTFS share you can easily search it. Least priviledged access leads to information not being able to be leveraged by other teams. If you want to make it really easy, just add everyone as administrators on your web servers on your intranet. That way, anyone who needs to update anything can easily go in and change whatever they need to.
9. No Site Directories, No Required Meta Data, No Enterprise Search - I already addressed that people can use their desktops to search across files for data anyway. Structured search or search across databases and search across files isn't very common anway. Think about how unsecure it would be if we allowed people to search across the enterprise it may expose data we didn't want people to see. With our security by obscurity method, search would totally break that plan. Every team knows where their data is anyway, so there doesn't need to be a directory of the groups and team sites. Taxonomies and information management is overhead. Having users put in meta data when they add a document adds an extra layer of unnecessary management. We're not using it anyway.
10. Developers Rule and Everyone a Developer - Any good intranet site has a developer that really "owns" the production box. Having a separate dev environment or usage policies on what types of assemblies, components, server side code, etc.. should be installed or run will simply slow down the deployment process. Don't do performance testing or user acceptance testing, use production for that, it's the closest to reality anyway. You can yank it down if it doesn't work anyway. There are so many good free components, gadgets, web parts, on the web that you don't need to test them, they've already been tested, just let your users add them. Create a share to the GAC on your servers or to the bin of their virtual servers. Allow users terminal services or Telnet access to your servers (they are admins already) and that way they can register their own components, scripts, or executables.
Summary...
1. Consistency of platform, browsers, collab and enterprise search strategy
2. Manage Centrally as possible with a tight team with a means to communicate to the CXOs that have a vested interest
3. Have a killer backup strategy that meets the needs of your business and make sure it works before day 1.
4. End user training and education is the key to end user adoption
5. Have a Governance and Information Management Plan. Branding consistency with a corporate master page, style guide, and consistent taxonomy will allow users to know they are on the corporate Intranet.
6. Enforce workflows and approval on document centers and pages where official documentation comes together. Leverage version history and version control to maintain a history and master document that all can refer to.
7. Life cycle manage site collections, and documents with policies such as creating rules on content types with expiration.
8. Properly secure corporate assets. Sites with (PII) personally identifiable information should be appropriately flagged and secured.
9. A corporate browse and search strategy for the enterprise will ensure you are making the most out of your intranet assets. These 2 items will likely be the most important aspect of your intranet.
10. Platform Usage Policies and development and test environments will ensure that only code you want to introduce that follows corporate guidelines such as limiting server assemblies to business unit developed or third party supported, will ensure the environment is supportable and able to maintain SLAs.
