health,healthy foods,cancer,disaster,foods: health inspectors and corporate

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My uncle is the Director of Health for a large and wealthy county here

in Northern California. (For those of you at my wedding, he was the

caucasian man with a beard that sat in the front row) Yup, he's the

big cheese and has the authority and responsibility to keep the

citizens safe, informed, and to implement programs to be a caretaker

of his community.

Waaay back when he was starting his career in public health we was a

local Health Inspector. This required him to review restaurants,

establishments, places of business and others, I kid you not, some of

the stories he's told me will never make you want to eat out again.

In his experience and wisdom, he told that as a health inspector, it

was pretty obvious method to tell when there was an issue. He noticed

a consistent pattern that:

"The restroom of a dining establishment is often a good reflection of

what the kitchen looks like"

So if a restroom was well kept, the same love (or lack of love) would

be given to the kitchen. On the other hand, if the toilet had not been

cleaned, was dirty, smelled like funk, and hardware woefully

maintained, he could pretty much assume what was in store when he

showed his credentials and did a formal inspection of the kitchen.

Now how does this apply to "Web Strategy"?

I've been involved with four Enterprise Intranets (among other types

of websites). As a member of the team, each Intranet had a different

focus, tools, people and purpose. Often overlooked, Intranets are the

coordinated spaces that employees use to obtain information, work

collectively, and share knowledge. A company's intranet is a direct

reflection on how the company is structured, behaves, and lives.

One could learn a lot from looking at an Enterprise Intranet, think

about how it is:

* Structured (Silo'd or cohesive departmental sites)

* Information Flows (top-down, bottom-up, sharing or collaboration

of information)

* Efficient and effective (web usability, organized information

architecture)

* Demonstrates Corporate Unity (cohesive, holistic user experience,

and branding)

* Is there Love and care for information (records kept up to date,

single set of data which ultimatly translates to how employees

deal with customers)

Thereby, like my uncle a noticed a pattern on enterprise intranets:

"An Intranet is a good reflection of the inner workings and 'Corporate

DNA' of a Company"

Next time you take a look at your Corporate Intranet at your work,

think about it, the website tells a story on how the company is

structured, it's focus, and how employees interact.

Jakob and Crew have some ideas on what they consider award winning

Intranets. Also have you looked at your Intranet through User's Eyes?

Apparently, Google has a unique intranet called Moma, they've got

quite a bit of info available about employees.

If you want to understand what your users want I reccomend picking up

Observing the User Experience, it really demonstrates the specific

methods to uncover the specific needs of your user.

Check out what Patrick writes about having a specific role called

Information Management (No, he's not talking about IT groups that

manage tools, but management)

Some think that as employees start to work closer with customers to

build the best products that firewalls will lower. I still think that

Intranets will NOT die

Joe has thoughts on the Death of Enterprise Software, besure to read

what James's responses. James and I are both in the Intranet User

Experience Group that I moderate, Feel free to join to learn more.

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1 Responses to "Health Inspectors and Corporate Intranets"

1. Blogger Mark on 4:36 AM

I came up with: "organisations get the intranet they deserve" to

explain this phenomenon succinctly a while ago. It was taken up by

the intranet benchmarking forum (although wrongly attributed to a

colleague in the forum!) a while ago. It's a nice phrase (if I say

so myself) for explaining to senior management what may be wrong,

and how intranets can be an engine for change and change

management. I like to counter the enthusiasm that follows ("we

have no money, but let's hit some low-hanging fruit") with "low

hanging fruit are sometimes rotten" as well. Aphorisms seem to

work for senior managers for some reason.

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Tuesday, 12 February 2008

health inspectors and corporate

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