College of Engineering Intranet

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Engineering Intranet Next Steps May 1,
2008 Presented by Paul Davis Audience
Reformulated Intranet committee Project Web
site intranet.engr.cornell.edu/intranet/IT/coll
egeIntranet
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This Presentation

• History
• The Charge
• The Plan
• The Implementation
• Summary Timeline
• Status
• Lessons Learned
• What to do Now
• Options
• Discussion

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Charge

• Develop a website to support faculty and staff to
  do their jobs. Example The budget website.
• To provide infrastructure to support college's
  best practices deliverables.
• To provide intranet to academic departments, not
  just Dean's office.
• Current phase will provide "one stop shopping" to
  help some group of faculty and staff with what
  they need to do on a regular basis. Goal is to
  have this phase largely complete this summer.
  (2006)

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Goals for the Intranet

• Develop a Website to support Faculty and Staff in
  doing administrative parts of their jobs.
• To provide Infrastructure to Support College's
  Best Practices Deliverables .
• To provide intranet to academic departments, not
  just the Dean's office.
• Phase I
• One stop shopping" for information about
  administrative processes in several areas.
• Almanac of reference materials such as data
  tables, reports, and a college fact book

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Vision How Do I AnswersOne stop shopping for
Information

• Address needs from the users perspective
• Use the language of the reader.
• Complete authoritative information for each
  area covered
• If the topic area is covered on the intranet, you
  shouldnt have to look elsewhere.
• Easy to find what you need
• excellent navigation
• Best source of information on Campus
• But dont rewrite stuff available elsewhere, link
  to it
• Not simply a catalog of existing materials
• Decide what we want first. If its not available,
  write it.

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Audiences

• Customers
• E.g. someone who needs to buy something
• Need text written in their language
• Presented from their perspective
• Many people will read each page
• Should be written well
• Processors
• Only 10 or 30 people for each topic (e.g. all
  purchasing professionals in the college)
• Will be writing for other people like you
• Can be much more informal

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Pilot is Addressing Five Topic Areas

• Human Resources
• Graduate Program Administration
• Safety (Addressing safety manual)
• Purchasing (part of finance)
• Almanac (fact book, etc.)

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Intranet Content and Best Practice Team
Responsibilities

• Identify your audiences and the information they
  need
• Prioritize pages to write
• Write the content or find someone to write it
• Develop site map and navigation
• Identify and make changes as needed
• Audience driven improvement
• Determine how well you are meeting your audiences
  needs
• Improve information navigation as needed

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Oversight Team Responsibilities

• Overall project management Coordination
• Technology
• Overall navigation
• Maintaining consistency across site
• Providing tools and training you need
• Phasing of the project

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How Do I AnswersOne stop shopping for
Information

• Address needs from the users perspective
• Use the language of the reader.
• Complete authoritative information for each
  area covered
• If the topic area is covered on the intranet, you
  shouldnt have to look elsewhere.
• Easy to find what you need
• excellent navigation
• Best source of information on Campus
• But dont rewrite stuff available elsewhere, link
  to it
• Not simply a catalog of existing materials
• Decide what we want first. If its not available,
  write it.

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Navigation Homepage
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Navigation Second level Nav Page
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Navigation Choice Page
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Template Answer Page
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Later Phases

• Staff and Department Directories
• Manage department, committee and other types of
  memberships, print mailing labels, create email
  lists, etc.
• Access control
• Use memberships from directories (described
  above) to limit access to pages or subsites
• Project and committee sub sites
• Have a place for everyone on a committee to post
  and share documents so you dont have to email
  them around all the time
• Other administrative tools
• We are starting specification of a space
  inventory system

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Timeline

• Deans Office Intranet Completed Summer 2003
• Public Web Site Fall 2003 - October 2004
• Presentation to Managers Winter 2003
• Charge January 2004 (Little work until Summer)
• RFI May 2005
• Hire Vendor August 2005
• Technology Ready for Testing May 2006
• Hiatus May 2006 Dec 2007
• Vendor Complete Oct 2007
• What Now Meeting May 2008

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Concerns

• Phase 1 technology lacks critical functionality
• Access control
• Ease of posting content
• Member roles database
• Is now on old technology
• Still have concerns about gathering content
• Deployment will be labor intensive
• Wikis have come a long way
• Lost early mover advantage
• Project is scaled wrong

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Assessment

• Staffing risk was very high
• Technology still incomplete
• Second project effect
• Shouldnt be early adopters
• Lost huge opportunity cost with delays
• Built with too grand a vision

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Lessons Learned

• Much smaller initial phase
• Adopt more agile project design
• Address risks more actively and retire them early
• Content Risk
• Staffing Risk
• Technology Risk
• Push back on difficult requirements
• Need for review work flow
• Role based navigation
• Chose appropriate scale
• Dont try to solve Universitys problem
• Dont be an early adopter unless it give you
  competitive advantage
• Dont fall in love with the technology
• Be alert for second project effect

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Options

• Continue with Original Plan
• Expand Deans Office Intranet
• Adopt Wiki
• File Share
• Do Nothing

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Option Continue Original Plan

• Pros
• Well be able to justify sunk cost
• Some advantage for those who remember what we
  were doing.
• Cons
• Incomplete implementation
• Scaled wrong
• Labor intensive administration

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Option Expand Deans Office Intranet

• Pros
• Very quick
• Low cost
• Retires content risk quickly
• Almost no technology risk
• Staffing risk minimal
• Technology well known
• Can implement proactive content review
• Cons
• Requires new info architecture and homepage
• Requires new page design
• Need to implement search feature
• Difficult access control management, may want to
  replace
• Few cool features
• Sense of failure We could have done this 4
  years ago
• Role based navigation would be very manual process

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Option Confluence Wiki

• Pros
• Server and Licenses Free - Official Campus
  support
• Immediately available, can scale as needed
• Easy to use
• Becoming de-facto campus intranet, at least for
  IT staff and libraries (very wide adoption in
  libraries)
• Very strong access control module
• Can integrate with email lists
• Good search feature
• Web 2.0 features, integrated Blogs, etc.
• Some audience management through access controls
• Cons
• No Review process
• No campus governance model
• Cluttered with irrelevant projects (unless build
  our own)
• WISIWIG Editor not perfect (but no much worse
  than CSpot)
• Navigation management would be manual
• More used for project documents rather than
  process docs on campus
• Review is post-hoc

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Wiki Examples

• Applied Economic and Management
• KPI Project Home
• CU Web Forum
• Engineering IT Strategic Plan
• Email list archive

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Option Shared File Store

• Pros
• Everyone knows how to save files to file store
• Easy to set up
• Easy access to shared documents
• Cons
• Navigation is restricted to directory tree and
  file names
• Need to set up access control centrally
• No review work flow
• Desktop search tools weak would need to purchase
  search engine and it wouldnt be intuitive to use
• Best tools are MS Windows centric
• May be too easy to post junk

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Option Nothing

• Pros
• Free
• Cons
• No benefits

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Discussion

• Do the requirements still apply?
• Lessons learned?
• Do we go forward? If so how?
• What do we need to know?
• What will be our quickest wins?
• What we need to communicate?