A Process-oriented Framework for Efficient Intranet Management
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A Process-oriented Framework for Efficient Intranet Management Thomas M. Kaiser (
[email protected]) University of St. Gallen Switzerland Roland E. Schmid (
[email protected]) University of St. Gallen Switzerland Dr. Volker Bach (
[email protected]) University of St. Gallen Switzerland
Abstract At present a lot of organizations are developing and deploying Intranets to improve the internal communication and to facilitate the distribution of information. Frequently the Intranet solution is not integrated in the business processes of the organization and responsibilities both for the operation of the necessary infrastructure and for the Intranet content are not clearly defined. This can cause the whole Intranet project to fail because of downtimes and inconsistent or outdated content. This paper addresses the problem of efficiently managing an Intranet once it has been set up. The main result described in the paper is a detailed framework of processes and roles that are necessary to manage Intranets in daily business. The result is intended to be used as a template for future Intranet deployment or improvement projects. This can help organizations dramatically decrease the risk of project failure. Examining the various tasks that have to be carried out when running an Intranet, it turns out that the process framework can be divided into four categories of processes. The first and second categories refer to the business side of the Intranet solution and contain the business processes, which produce and consume information. The third and fourth categories reflect the information system side. These processes are responsible for managing content and applications. The concepts and results described in this paper are derived from several successful Intranet projects among which are Credit Suisse—one of the world’s largest banks—and LGT Bank in Liechtenstein—an international private bank. Both are successfully running an Intranet based on the results described in this paper.
Table of Contents l 1 Introduction l 2 Research method l 3 A Framework for Intranet Management 3.1 Roles 3.2 Process categories 3.3 Reference processes
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l 4 Implications in practice: LGT Bank in Liechtenstein 4.1 Brief Portrait of LGT Bank in Liechtenstein 4.2 Information Required for the Sales Process 4.3 Intranet at LGT Bank in Liechtenstein 4.4 Integration of the Intranet Management Processes l 5 Summary and future work l 6 References l Appendix: Reference processes
1 Introduction Intranet management is the task of keeping a corporate Intranet running and to ensure that the Intranet supports the users’ tasks within the business processes. Intranet management consists of very heterogeneous activities including the generation and update of content, the support of users, the management of user accounts and access permissions, the maintenance of hardware and software components and many more. Despite the obvious necessity of an efficient Intranet management, in many Intranet development projects it is omitted to plan an organizational framework for these tasks. However, undefined responsibilities and unclear processes usually result in downtimes and outdated content, which make the usage of the Intranet very unattractive to the users. Low return on investment due to refusal of the Intranet by the users may be the consequence [2]. In this paper we will describe a framework for efficient management of an Intranet. This framework is intended to be used in practice as a template for implementing organizational structures that help running an Intranet successfully. Due to the varying company-specific circumstances, the framework will always have to be customized to the individual needs of a company developing or improving an Intranet. What is novel in our approach is our firm process-orientation. We focus the design of the supporting processes to the actual information needs of the business processes. As business value is always generated in business processes, every Intranet and all organizational structures that support this Intranet must aim at supporting the business processes. Therefore the business processes that are consuming information out of an Intranet and producing information for an Intranet are directly integrated into our framework. Besides deriving the information needs from an organizations business processes, we structure the Intranet management tasks as supporting processes. [6], [7] and [8] contain related work about Intranet management.
2 Research method The framework for Intranet management has been developed as part of a methodology for the deployment of Intranets in companies. Besides Intranet management this methodology comprises various aspects like strategy, architecture, security, information structuring and application design [4]. The partner companies involved in this research project were ABB Switzerland, AGI, Credit Suisse, CSS Insurance, LGT Bank in Liechtenstein, Swisscom and Winterthur Insurance. This work has been conducted as part of the research program "Information Management HSG". The research method used for this work is action research [1]. This means that all theoretical results have been applied in projects at partner companies. The observations made in these projects have then been used to further improve the theoretical results. This research method ensures that all results have been verified in practice and are therefore suitable to solve practical
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problems.
3 A Framework for Intranet Management The framework consists of processes and roles. Processes are used to group the various tasks that are necessary to run an Intranet and to define the order in which the tasks should be carried out. Each task is assigned to a role that is responsible for carrying out the task. Using roles as a level of indirection, the individuals do not have to be directly assigned to the tasks. Individuals are assigned to roles instead, where any number of individuals can be assigned to a role. This level of indirection facilitates human resource management. Whenever one individual is replaced by another, only the corresponding role assignment has to be updated while the task assignments stay untouched.
Figure 1. Processes, roles and individuals.
3.1 Roles Within our research project the following roles have been identified to be involved in Intranet management: l The Author is responsible for producing and updating a specific of the Intranet content. l The Content manager coordinates the content produced by the various authors. He is
responsible for ensuring consistency, for avoiding overlapping content and he also suggest changes and new content to the authors. l The Webmaster represents the interface between the content side and the technical side of Intranet management. His main responsibility is to keep the web applications running and formally consistent (e.g. no broken links). Furthermore the webmaster carries out several administrative tasks concerning the web applications themselves, e.g. the conversion of documents to adequate formats like HTML. l The Technical Administrator is responsible for running and maintaining the underlying hardware and software components. His main tasks are surveillance, logging, configuration, hard- and software installation and user management. This role can be divided into the three subroles Network Administrator (responsible for network hardware and software), Server Administrator (responsible for server hardware and software including server operating systems) and Client Administrator (responsible for client hardware and software like web browsers). l The Supporter is responsible for running a help desk. He supports end users as well as authors and content managers. He also forwards requests he cannot solve himself to the
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competent specialists. l The Trainer is responsible for the training of end users, authors and content managers.
3.2 Process categories It is the business processes where business value is generated. The primary goal of an Intranet must be to supply to a given business process exactly the information that satisfies its information need. All efforts of Intranet management must aim at supporting this goal as efficiently and effectively as possible. Within the framework for Intranet management these business processes consuming information from the Intranet belong to the first category of processes. The second category denotes the counterpart of the information consumers—namely the business processes that produce information. The information producing process is responsible for creating the content, keeping the content up to date, removing outdated content and for distributing the content. Each of these tasks initiates the corresponding information process (third category, see below) that carries out the necessary activities (e.g. review of content, conversion of documents etc.). It is important to note that any business process can both produce and consume information and thus belong to the first category and to the second category simultaneously, depending on the context. For example the marketing process may consume statistical data produced by the sales process and then produce a market analysis to be used in the product development process. The third category comprises the information processes for providing, distributing, maintaining and removing information in an Intranet. These processes ensure that the content of the Intranet is always up to date and that they meet given quality standards. This includes detailed regulations for authoring, releasing, publishing and archiving Intranet content. These processes are usually invoked by the information producing processes. The processes responsible for running the necessary hardware and software components belong to the fourth category. They cover tasks like installation, administration and support. The information is stored in data and information sources that can be distributed among numerous systems and locations. The first and the second categories—i.e. the business processes consuming and producing information— reflect the business side of the framework, while the third and fourth categories represent the information system side. Figure 2 shows the relationship between the framework’s process categories. The remainder of this chapter explains the reference processes of the information system side. The processes belonging to the business side are the existing business processes of a company. Therefore each of them is individually designed according to the purpose in business, thus it is not possible—and it would not make sense—to provide reference processes for the tasks of producing and consuming information.
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Figure 2. The framework consists of four process categories.
3.3 Reference Processes The main benefit of reference processes is to be used as templates. In a project these processes can be customized to the individual need of a company instead of developing new processes from scratch. As the reference processes have been verified and approved in practice, using reference processes allows to define processes of high quality in less time. In this paragraph graphical representations are used to visualize the reference processes. The columns in these activity chains [5] represent the organizational unit or role that is responsible for the tasks in the same column. Tasks that are shown in a white rectangle are partially or fully ITsupported; other tasks can be carried out manually. Events are represented by a hexagon. The arrows between the tasks indicate the chronological dependencies. The tasks of other processes that are directly interacting with the represented process are also shown in the activity chain. For reasons of clearness only one activity chain per process category is included in this chapter. The activity chains for all reference processes can be found in appendix A. The processes Information creation, Information maintenance, Information removal and Information usage build the interface to the business processes. I.e. certain tasks of these processes can simultaneously be tasks of the corresponding business processes. For example the task Create document is a task in the process Information creation and it is simultaneously a task in all business processes that are producing information for the Intranet. For graphical representations of these four processes see Appendix A. Figure 3 shows a graphical representation of the process Information distribution. The processes for information creation and information maintenance hand the created documents over to this process, which is then responsible for verifying, releasing and technically incorporating the document into the Intranet. Usually several organizational units are involved in this process. For example a marketing and a legal department may be needed to ensure that a document meets http://ccinet.iwi.unisg.ch/inhalt/papers/inet99/paper.htm
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certain corporate standards. A content manager belonging to the same business area as the author may be needed to verify the content and a webmaster located in the IT department has to technically process the document and to integrate it into the Intranet applications. This process is critical for an efficient Intranet publishing solution. The delay between the creation of a document and its availability in the Intranet depends mainly on the time needed to complete this process.
Figure 3. The information distribution process. While the processes of category three deal with the information itself, the processes of category four concern the operation of the underlying systems and other content-independent tasks. Category four consists of the processes Maintenance, Support, Statistics, User management and Training. For the complete activity chains of these processes see appendix A. The maintenance process groups all routine tasks that are necessary to keep the IT infrastructure working. This includes both tasks that have to be carried out on a regular basis (surveillance, checking log files etc.) and tasks that are triggered by certain events, e.g. configuration changes, installation of new hardware or software etc. The activity chain of the maintenance process is shown in Figure 4. The abbreviations A, N, S, C stand for Application, Network, Server and Client. This distinction is necessary as the same task for different components can be carried out by different roles. For example the responsibility for the surveillance of the application components can be assigned to the webmaster while the technical administrator can be responsible for the surveillance of the network, client and server components.
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Figure 4. The maintenance process. The support process is the connection between the users and the IS/IT staff. Whenever a user, author or content manager has a question or problem, he or she contacts the supporter (usually by calling the helpdesk). The supporter provides first level support to the users. Any problems and requests the supporter cannot solve himself are forwarded to the competent person in the IT department. The supporter also processes requests for configuration changes or changes in user management. The statistics process consists of the collection and analysis of statistical data (e.g. the number of accesses to a given object) or of performance data on the network. This statistical data is important for planing future extensions to the infrastructure and for providing information about usage and acceptance of documents to the authors and content managers. They can request the desired statistical analyses via the supporter. The user management process is necessary for creating, changing and removing user accounts and user groups for all components of the Intranet system. This includes the management of the access rights. All requests for changes in the user or group data are forwarded to the responsible administrator via the supporter. The training process comprises the organization of training classes for end users, authors, content managers and for the IT staff. This helps each individual carrying out his tasks as good as possible and thus increases the process quality.
4 Implications in practice: LGT Bank in Liechtenstein
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In this chapter we show the application of our framework in the context of an intranet deployment project at LGT Bank in Liechtenstein. For a full description of the bank’s project see [3].
4.1 Brief Portrait of LGT Bank in Liechtenstein LGT Bank in Liechtenstein AG is a financial services provider, which is active on an international level as a private bank and on a regional level as a retail bank. The key emphasis of the bank's activity lies in asset management and investment counseling for discerning international private clients. On the regional level, the bank offers a full range of modern financial services. LGT Bank was founded in 1920 and has its headquarters in Vaduz, Liechtenstein. It has always been closely linked with the national economy of the Principality. The bank maintains subsidiaries in Liechtenstein and abroad (on the Cayman Islands and in Dublin) and has a branch in Zurich. It also has representative offices in Hong Kong and Tokyo, a Bureau d'information in Luxembourg and a network of intermediaries.
4.2 Information Required for the Sales Process The existing applications in the bank's information system supply the client advisors with data about their clients (master data, transaction data, orders) and the relevant markets (exchange rates, money and capital market information). The applications' functionality enables the administration of clients, accounts, custody accounts, portfolios, loans and funds, the processing of orders in the bank's or other names and the analysis of market positions and trends. The systems obtain data from the bank's host operative database or from Reuters datafeed. However, various information such as standard presentation material about the bank and its business environment, about products and their features, research findings and reports and so-called "soft facts" about the client, are not or only partly available in electronic form. During the project, a complete list of the information required for the sales process was drawn up in cooperation with representatives of the bank's departments. The gaps that were identified were to be closed by the KUNO (abbreviation for customer focus) front system.
4.3 Intranet at LGT Bank in Liechtenstein The KUNO front system is a part of LGT Bank's Intranet system. The bank's Intranet consists of several applications which are largely parallel but which were developed independently in terms of scope and content. The applications are integrated in the Intranet under a single user interface. Besides the KUNO front system, the Intranet contains a general application to distribute general bank information (e.g. organization diagrams, general business conditions, press communiqués, minutes of meetings, directives and menus) as well as a project information system, which is used to coordinate the bank's current projects. The project information system administers project plans, status, documentation and expenses as well as providing manuscripts for project documentation. Whereas the application to distribute general bank information is aimed at all employees, the target users of the other two applications are the client advisors and the business sector and project leaders. The KUNO front system represents the interface between the bank's sales process and its product management and market analysis processes. Information created by these processes is provided directly via the KUNO front system and called up when required by the client advisor. Conversely, the advisor has the possibility of providing feedback to the product manager and the analyst via the system. The KUNO front system therefore integrates the sales, product management and market analysis processes (see Figure 5).
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Figure 5. Integration of processes using the KUNO front system.
4.4 Integration of the Intranet Management Processes The completeness and reliability of the information provided is of decisive importance for the success of the KUNO front system. The integration of the product management and market analysis processes with the bank’s sales process illustrated in Fig. 6 will function only if the provision of information in the KUNO front process is anchored in the work procedures of the bank’s staff. This aspect gains added significance due to the fact that authors and users of the information objects are generally not the same persons. The bank therefore specified the procedure for providing information objects at an early stage and assigned responsibilities accordingly. Overall responsibility for technical aspects and content was assigned to two new specialist positions created for this purpose, i.e. to the webmaster and the online editor. Furthermore, 15 so-called content managers were designated within the individual specialist departments. Content managers are responsible for the content of a group of information objects (e.g. credit products). They designate and lead a team of authors, review the information objects produced and enter these in the KUNO front system. A second aspect within the context of the integration of the system in the work procedures of the bank’s staff is the holding of surveys to obtain reference values (e.g. access figures). On the one hand, these should serve as an incentive for the provision of the information objects and the use of the application and, on the other, they should also enable the actual relevance of individual information objects for the client advisors to be determined. So far the bank has not carried out such evaluations, but the specification and collection of reference values is planned for the near future.
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Figure 6. Information distribution process at LGT. The LGT case study shows the practical impact of the Intranet management framework discussed in this paper. LGT used the framework as a template for the corporation-specific definition of the necessary roles and processes. As you can see in the information distribution process, several tasks have been omitted and a role (online editor) has been added compared with the reference process. This accounts for the fact that there are probably no two companies in the world with exactly the same requirements, thus a customization will take place in every project developing an Intranet management solution. However using the templates gives the project team a good starting point, reduces the time needed to develop a solution and reduces the risk of omitting important tasks or responsibilities.
5 Summary and future work In this paper we described a framework for organizing efficient Intranet management. This framework consists of reference processes and a set of roles, which are responsible for the processes’ tasks. According to their characteristics we assigned the processes to four different categories, two of them belonging to the business side and two of them belonging to the information system side of the Intranet organization. Finally we demonstrated the practical use of the framework in an Intranet project at LGT Bank in Liechtenstein. Once an Intranet is established and well integrated into an organization’s processes, it is predestined for supporting the flow of information and knowledge within the organization. Currently ongoing research includes the suitability of Intranets for supporting knowledge management in businesses. Key questions in this topic are: l l l l
how to identify and structure relevant information and knowledge how to best satisfy the specific information need of business processes how to motivate employees to create content and contribute knowledge how to measure the efficiency and benefit of the Intranet
Our latest projects have shown that this framework is also suitable as a basis for building an infrastructure for corporate knowledge management.
6 References http://ccinet.iwi.unisg.ch/inhalt/papers/inet99/paper.htm
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1. Avison, D., Lau, F., Myers, M., Nielsen, P.A., Action Research, in: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 42, Nr. 1, January 1999, S. 94-97 2. Campbell, I., The Intranet: Slashing the Cost of Business, International Data Corporation, http://big.ids.net/intranetdev/idc/report.html 3. Kaiser, T.M., Beck, D., Österle, H., I-NET Enabled Customer Focus – The Case of LGT Bank in Liechtenstein, Working Paper IM HSG/CC I-NET/5, Institute for Information Management, University of St. Gallen, 1998 4. Kaiser, T.M., Vogler, P., Bach, V., PROMET®I-NET, Arbeitsbericht IM HSG/CC INET/4, Institut für Wirtschaftsinformatik, Universität St. Gallen, 1998 5. Österle, H., Business in the information age: heading for new processes, Springer, Berlin/Heidelberg, 1995 6. Miller, M., Roehr, A., Bernard, B., Managing the Corporate Intranet, John Wiley & Sons, New York 1998 7. Szameitat, U., Betriebsführungskonzept für Client/Server-Architekturen, GAUSS GmbH, Hamburg 1996 8. Telleen, S.L., IntraNet Methodology™—Conecpts and Rationale, Amdahl Corporation, 1996, http://www.amdahl.com/doc/products/bsg/intra/concepts1.html
Appendix: Reference processes This appendix contains the graphical representations of all reference processes that are mentioned in the paper.
Information creation
Information maintenance
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Information removal
Information usage
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Information distribution
Maintenance
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Support
Statistics
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User administration
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Training
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