The other side of intranet efficiency
Posted September 12th, 2011 by David Hamill
I haven’t written anything about intranets on my blog yet. I worked for several years on intranet usability, and after years of counselling feel I’m about ready to talk about my experiences. In this post I’ll tell a story that explains how organisations sometimes think they’re being more efficient when the opposite is true.
A task has two sides to consider on an intranet because both sides of the task equate to internal resources being used in order to complete the task. This story is entirely fictional, but based upon the type of things that happen all the time with corporate intranets.
If you work on one yourself you may recognise some of it.
Task delivery
On one side of the task are the people who deliver it. Let’s use the example of booking meeting rooms and an invented company called DaveTec Logisitics. Large organisations like DaveTec have numerous buildings in different towns often across several countries. In DaveTec they have a team responsible for taking room bookings in all of the company’s 82 buildings worldwide. This team is made up of a manager and 8 telephone operatives who take the room booking calls.
The manager of the room booking team has been asked to make some efficiency suggestions. His brother works at StefTec and has told him that at StefTec all room booking is handled on the corporate intranet. So the manager proposes to make such a facility available in DaveTec enabling him to halve the number of telephone operatives taking calls. The manager shows the figures to his superiors and secures some budget to have his room booking facility developed.
Task users
On the other side of the task are the users, the people trying to book meeting rooms. Before the efficiency improvement these people would call a number and book a room over the phone. Now they have to log on to the new room booking facility and do it all online.
The manager got excited and called it E-book instead of something useful. So not only has he borrowed a term that means something else, but nobody knows how to find the facility on the intranet. They don’t know they are supposed to be looking for something called E-book. It’s on the homepage of the intranet but everyone ignores it and searches for ‘Meeting rooms’ instead.
A helpline is provided manned by the 4 remaining operatives but they are only allowed to talk people through E-book rather than simply take their booking. This is to help people ‘settle in’ to the new way of doing things. In the meantime the manager gets some promotional pens and mouse mats made promoting the ‘E-book brand’
Award winner
The Directors are very happy with the manager because he has reported a dramatic improvement in efficiency. Half of his operatives have been redeployed to other roles so he has reported the cost of employing them as the efficiency improvement he is responsible for. Someone from the Communications Department hears of this ‘improvement’ and writes a very well crafted application to an industry award. Before long the manager is at a posh dinner accepting an industry award for his efficiency idea.
Meanwhile…
What nobody at DaveTec ever measured was the impact E-book had on the productivity of the people that had to use it. These people outnumbered the operatives by about 10,000 to 1 and many were more expensive to employ than the operatives. Instead of being able to just pick up the phone they had to wrestle with a badly made application that it took them 30 minutes to find. When they were at the end of their tether they then picked up the phone to talk to the telephone operatives who then walked them through the process over the phone.
In time, teams within DaveTec learned workarounds. Some didn’t bother to book the rooms and just used them pretending to have booked them. In other teams the resident computer geek would be given the task of booking rooms for everyone in the team because he had worked out how to use E-book.
Efficiency gains?
In reality there were no efficiency gains made with the introduction of E-book. It was expensive to build and needed to be promoted so that people knew how to find it. The cost of employing 4 operatives had been removed from the manager’s budget but hundreds of people across the company had picked up a tiny fraction of their job and were being paid more to do it. Nobody was measuring this, so nobody knew.
The very purpose of booking meeting rooms was being thwarted because people were too busy to deal with the hassle of using E-book. Instead dozens of people in each of the DaveTec buildings would waste time wandering around looking for a meeting room that was free and repeat the process when they were thrown out by the people who’d actually booked the room. Nobody was measuring it, so as far as DaveTec was concerned it didn’t exist.
If only…
Unfortunately this is a common approach for large organisations and their intranets. If they’d considered the other side of the task – that of the intranet users, then they might actually have created some real efficiency gains.
What d’you think?
Do you recognise this type of behaviour or am I exaggerating? Leave a comment below and let’s have a discussion. Sorry but comments like ‘nice post, thanks’ will be trashed.
7 Responses to “The other side of intranet efficiency”
September 12th, 2011 at 1:07 pm
Wow; you just wrote up a case study of one of the exact situations I was in the middle of at my old workplace. Except instead of calling it ebook, it was just referred to as “the way to reserve a room”, and was an obscure form that had to be found and submitted through Outlook. Most departments would just calling of the few people in the building who knew how the form worked to reserve a room.
September 12th, 2011 at 4:00 pm
I’ve seen similar situations in many projects designed to improve efficiency and cut cost. When outsourcing IT helpdesks or financial services, it often happens that the outsourced service is inflexible, either because of the web tools used (as you describe) or because they’ve decided on only doing things one way. So they claim that they are much more efficient, but the real cost of using the outsourced service is buried with each end user.
September 12th, 2011 at 4:20 pm
I agree – this is prevalent as larger companies have the ability to work within a silo mentality. With the short term goals of managers aimed at bringing down costs in their area the bigger picture and potential savings of initiatives lost.
Example:
I’ve just been through a hotel booking procedure – newly upgraded to improve the user experience. It has taken me a good 30 minutes from start to finish. In a large corporation this is a massive waste of time say 50,000 people (of which 10,000 travel). If this were on the internet I would have happily gone to a competitor and so would the rest of their customers…
In the upgrade (which wasn’t communicated) you had to re-register. I now understand why multiple people across the office were exasperated at their computer for not understanding that they new their favourite – Whoops the system lost old registered users data!
Another cracker – there is a 9 digit code that’s rotating at the top of the page which relates to a field at the bottom (if you miss it wait 30sec for it to reappear). The ‘ledger’ number is dependant on where you are travelling… (Surely the system knows where I am travelling as I have confirmed my travel details (this is the payment page) and the number of people that guess the number (hmmm)?
Intranets are vast and sprawling – managers set up an empires ruling their small area with little understanding or care for the poor employee. What’s more frustrating is where a good idea for an online internal service is poorly implemented. Only by providing KPIs on good implementations can this move forward. But it takes a team to see and implement the bigger picture which may not always be conducive to team objectives.
September 13th, 2011 at 10:14 am
Hi David. Nice read!
It is too common to find intranets that are barely used due to inefficiency. Many Intranets that I come across were implemented to make life easier for the staff, but the only involvement staff had in its design was a lengthy questionnaire right at the beginning (that they often had to put their name on so failed to be completely truthful). And we know that how people respond to a question can be very different to how they behave in a real life scenario.
So what’s the answer? I’m sure this will be your next blog post, but Intranets really must be designed with the user as its focus. And I mean ‘really’ as its focus!
September 13th, 2011 at 10:34 am
Hi Ali, thanks for the comment. I’m planning another post on intranets in the future. The answer is very difficult for large organisations because they aren’t set up to work in a way that would work better. As Rebecca said in her comments, each department concentrates on the measures they are responsible for, such as headcount.
The assumption is made that all of these cells concentrate on working toward their targets, then the organisation as a whole will benefit. This approach might be mostly successful but nobody is measuring the efficiency of their staff’s intranet use. This comes under ‘other tasks’ within people’s job description. So if one department can improve the efficiency of the things their performance is measured on and shift that onto the ‘other tasks’ of the whole organisation, then the inefficiency they’ve caused looks like an efficiency.
It’s largely impossible to stamp this out entirely but if you measure the effectiveness of your intranet based on effectiveness rather than popularity then you can identify and stamp out the more important inefficiencies that are passed onto the workforce. More of which later (hopefully)
September 13th, 2011 at 12:26 pm
Great post and discussion. I’m sure many of us been subjected to intranet applications like this.
The situation you describe is an example of exactly what Jonathan Grudin was talking about in his 1988 paper “Why CSCW Applications Fail” –
“1) A factor contributing to the application’s failure is the disparity between those who will benefit from an application and those who must do additional work to support it.
2) A factor contributing to the decision-making failure that leads to ill-fated development efforts is the unique lack of management intuition for CSCW applications.
3) A factor contributing to the failure to learn from experience is the extreme difficulty of evaluating these applications.”
September 15th, 2011 at 1:54 am
Love your work, again. One thing you kind of touch on is the cultural aspect of this whole thing. People do things a certain way and only change if they have to, or the new way is clearly better for them than the old way.
The whole ‘field of dreams’ attitude to IT solutions is alive and well in intranet projects: the assumption that if an IT solution is built, staff will magically come and use it, even without being told it exists, or how it would possibly benefit them. And worse is the whole ‘they’re paid to use it’ attitude.
New internal IT systems not only need to be useful and usable, but they need a comms plan just like external systems.
Thanks for another great article Dave! Looking forward to more intranet stories from DaveTec.
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