posted 21 Nov 2005 in Volume 2 Issue 6

Not your average intranet

The last thing Christian Aid needed was a traditional intranet, which is exactly what Steven Buckley and his team told senior management in the early stages of a project that never got off the ground. The result was a comprehensive, collaborative system that is becoming fundamental to the charity’s relief efforts. By Steven Buckley

With an annual income of around £70m, Christian Aid is one of the largest grant-awarding organisations in the UK, as well as a leading international development agency. Three years ago, the charity almost embarked on a ‘traditional’ intranet project, thinking it would be the answer to increasingly problematic information and communication challenges at the organisation. Instead, a small team began a patient game of holding back staff expectations, while introducing a series of change projects that would fundamentally transform ways of working at the charity.

A change in direction
Three years ago, a charity was the last place I expected to end up working at. Back in the summer of 2002 I was the international marketing manager for a software firm, working crazy hours and having a ball. Then, one day I broke my leg. Badly. Sitting up in bed flicking through the pages of The Guardian, I spotted a job advert from Christian Aid, which was looking for someone to install an intranet and internal communications strategy. The job itself looked pretty boring, but the organisational challenges the post was supposed to address… well that was something else. Without a further thought for my future career prospects, I went for it.

Christian Aid had long realised that there were issues with how information and knowledge was being shared and, like many mid-sized organisations, decided that only a consultancy firm could effectively pinpoint the issues and prescribe a solution. A classic case of having your watch taken and being told the time. To be fair, the consultants did a pretty thorough job of the analysis. They found that there were huge disconnects in culture between head office and the regional UK offices – a lack of appropriate IT systems, and staff who were fiercely passionate about their own roles but pretty ambivalent about the work of their colleagues.

The solution they prescribed was to adopt a knowledge-management (KM) strategy and deploy an intranet, which they wanted to build. This was the point when I arrived at the organisation and the next three months were spent persuading the senior management team that we didn’t want to do what the consultants had recommended. We needed more budget, more time, and we certainly didn’t want anything that remotely resembled a traditional intranet.

The arguments against…
A quick look through the network drives at head office found that we had almost one million electronic documents – mostly duplicates, old versions and obsolete data. The problem was that no one could tell me which was which. Legacy systems could not meaningfully share or blend information and e-mail was unreliable. There was no benefit to be gained from putting in an intranet on top of this lot.

In addition, we know that over 60 per cent of all intranets fail, usually for one of three reasons:

1. Another place to store stuff – the intranet adds to all the network drives, c-drives and mailbox accounts already in place;
2. There is a bottleneck – a specialist team is required to upload content and the intranet editors cannot possibly keep pace with the volume of information the organisation is creating. So, the content on the intranet quickly goes out of date;
3. The intranet grows to a size where it is impossible for staff to know what has changed and where.

The upshot of this was the view that ‘traditional’ intranets have a very short lifespan and rarely deliver the intended benefit for their organisations.

Then there was the issue of KM and internal communications. Looking around the corporate sector, KM systems had also failed to deliver tangible results. There was too much effort towards easily detectable, quantifiable information and over-structured tools for the job. How would it be if, instead of trying to capture everything, we made all information available to staff and then signposted them to the people who could help them make sense of that information?

Guiding principles and objectives
From these arguments we developed our guiding principles for what was to be called the ‘Common Knowledge Programme’. My team would not be responsible for internal communications and knowledge sharing. Instead, we would provide the framework, training and tools to help collaboration take place within Christian Aid. We would look for everyone to share everything, on the basis that it would encourage cross-functional interaction and reciprocity. We would challenge existing organisational norms and processes – after all, there’s no use in having a knowledge system that simply embodies all the bad habits you’ve picked up over the last sixty years – and we would try not to implement anything that could add complexity or duplication along the way.

We published just three objectives for what we wanted to achieve, couched in an organisational language that everyone could grasp and understand.

1. Make information easily available;
2. Get teams talking with one another;
3. Deliver information just in time.

A simple framework for staff (see Figure 1) explained that to achieve our objectives, we would deploy some technology as a foundational layer. On top of this, a cultural change programme would look at improved ways of working. Together, the two foundational levels would enable staff to collaborate and share information. Eventually, they might do this through channels – the third layer of our diagram – that we would provide. The organisation went for it and we bought ourselves some time from having to deploy an intranet.

Building the foundations
First, we decided to deploy separate ‘best-of-breed’ software applications for image management, web-content management (for the external sites, not the intranet), document management, search and classification, and a new portal. Together, they formed a roadmap for enterprise-content management. We identified the software vendors as: Extensis for image management; Tridion for content management; Documentum or iManage for document management; Verity for the search engine; and, Plumtree for the portal.

For the change-management foundation, we established a semi-annual staff cultural audit, which employees could complete anonymously online and give us some measure for the improvements we wanted to put into place. An innovative internal advertising campaign (see Figure 2) recruited a number of staff onto the ‘Corporate Revolutionaries’ training programme – a year-long series of workshops that looked at communication, knowledge sharing and employee empowerment, using advanced techniques such as natural language processing, rapid communication, web logging and rapport building. More widely, training was given to a larger group of staff on new ways of working and thinking tools such as De Bono’s ‘Six Hats’ technique, which is intended to encourage lateral thinking. Simply, we didn’t want staff posting 20 pages of meeting minutes and calling it knowledge sharing – we wanted them to think and communicate in new ways.

The worst 18 months of my life
All had started swimmingly with the Corporate Revolutionaries training and the deployment of an image-management system, which meant that staff could do photo research from their desktops and download images ready for Microsoft PowerPoint or desktop publishing. But we got stuck on the deployment of the content-management system (CMS). It was a fine piece of technology but trying to put in a very complex system with all the associated change processes took us the best part of 18 months – and a lot of very late nights. I was working longer and harder than I ever had before and we had severely underestimated the time needed to effect change.

The CMS was, ultimately, a success. But it was now October 2004 and we were 12 months behind schedule. There was a lot still to deliver, and the organisation was, again, getting restless about the lack of an intranet. It was time to reconsider the roadmap.

Way back at the start of the programme, we looked at version one of Microsoft SharePoint and quickly discounted it. Now, version two was looking much more robust and we saw it could deliver most of our document management, search and portal aspirations for a tenth of the price and at a fraction of the implementation, staff training and integration time we would otherwise incur. We could also call it an intranet.

Deploying the intranet at last
In October 2004, we decided to deploy SharePoint and issued a request for proposal to four systems integrators. In December, we decided to work with Silversands, a Microsoft Gold certified partner for SharePoint. Then, just after Christmas, the South Asian Tsunami struck. The intranet would be the ideal way to share rapidly changing information about the disaster across multiple countries but we were not nearly ready to deploy it.

The product was hosted as an external site. We built a working site in under a week and by the beginning of January, our emergency team were using the technology for all documents, regardless of their location. The disaster had given us an early proof of concept – we knew that in the future, we would be able to use the technology and have staff begin work on an emergency site using accurate information, well within 24 hours of the event. Before the Tsunami, decisions could be delayed by the need to gather together 30 or more people for the emergency task force to make decisions.

Excited by the potential for the system, during January 2005 we conducted more than 40 hours of staff workshops to understand what information our colleagues might want to share. We also began to set the idea that what we were talking about was the long-awaited intranet. By February, we had our solution design completed and by early May the technology was in place, tested to destruction and ready for rollout to the organisation.

Of course, a fast deployment and a lovely configuration count for nothing if you fail to manage staff expectations. During deployment we involved a user acceptance testing group – representative of the entire organisation – and had a series of communications to inform everyone about what was going to happen. The change that was about to hit them was pretty big.

Teams were migrated, wholesale, to the new intranet system. Around six weeks prior to migration, we nominated a ‘super user’ per team, to concentrate on housekeeping old files and to develop the site taxonomy (we apply organisation-wide metadata to team sites but allow site-level folder structures). Only current content is moved to the team site – older files that need to be kept are left as read only in a network drive archive.

In the new model, all staff save everything they create to a team site and their ability to save documents to network drives is removed. The SharePoint ‘intranet’ becomes the sole repository for all information – thus removing the first two reasons why intranets fail – and only the most important cross-organisational information is elevated to the portal level. Staff are then expected to set up alerts and audience memberships so that the information they need to know is sent to them when they need it, at a frequency that works for them, thus removing the third reason for failure in intranet systems and meeting the programme objective of delivering information just in time.

Staff now have access to a multitude of team sites. These are created both for physical teams and virtual working groups – already we have over 100 team sites in daily use. In all cases, everyone has read-only access to areas of every site and we hope that over 75 per cent of our internal information will be available to all staff by 2006.

For private documents, alerts management, audience membership and profile information, staff are required to use ‘my site’ – a personal website for every member of staff. Here, they are expected to maintain their personal data, and it is this information that feeds the phone lists and active directory at Christian Aid.

Benefits and next steps
At the time of writing, we have all 32 UK offices and well over half the organisation using the system for collaboration and information sharing. Thanks to the familiar Microsoft interface and a very strong programme of staff training (all staff must attend a three-hour mandatory session), we’ve had very little resistance from staff about the amount of change we’re asking of them – and overwhelmingly positive comments from those teams that have been migrated.

Alongside the document libraries, staff are making great use of the search engine, team web logs and RSS feeds; as well as the survey, discussion board and image library tools. The huge benefit of the system is that, once you have the infrastructure in place, there’s no need to wait for IT to set up a new function for a team site – everything is user configurable.

We’ve also exceeded our own expectations for emergency response. The team site used for the recent earthquakes (see Figure 5) was populated and set with the appropriate permissions in less than one hour. We’re now about to start a field office trial in Tajikistan and expect that the majority of our 120 field staff will have access to all sites by March 2006. Even with poor or zero bandwidth availability, staff will be able to access and contribute to the sites using specialist technology.

Next year we also hope to extend the system into records management and compliance – as a campaigning charity we hold to account governments and large institutions, as well as the partner organisations we assist. It is only right that, in turn, we can be held to account in our work. Through the system, it will be much easier for us to give donors and regulators a clear view of our operations.

We are also looking at an extranet for partners, document digitisation, management information systems and instant messaging projects – all of which have SharePoint at the heart of them. But that’s a case study for next year, maybe.

For now, we’re close to having – for the first time ever – all Christian Aid staff able to view and contribute to the same information; whether they are in head office or a church building, out in Afghanistan or on an international flight. We think that’s pretty amazing.

Far from a career misstep, my time at Christian Aid has been more rewarding than I could possibly have imagined. The programme of projects that we have deployed has taught me that mid-sized organisations have the chance to be rather better organised in collaboration and information sharing than, say, a major bank. By not having access to every toy in the box, by exercising patience, through budget constraints and by thinking a little differently, we have achieved lasting and fundamental change for the organisation.

Steven Buckley is head of the Common Knowledge Programme at Christian Aid. He can be contacted at: sbuckley@christian-aid.org.

Box: Project fact file
Project name: Collaborative intranet project, part of Common Knowledge Programme
Number of people in the organisation: 500 UK-based staff, 120 overseas staff
Project Manager: Jon Day, Christian Aid.
Number of people in the project team: Core project team of two and project board of five, working to PRINCE2 project methodology.
Project timetable from planning to implementation: Six months
Selected solution provider(s): Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003, iOra ON for SharePoint, Nintex Smart Library for SharePoint
Selected partner organisations: Silversands

Box: New initiatives at Christian Aid
In addition to the major cultural and technological change projects that took place under the remit of the Common Knowledge Programme, we introduced a number of new initiatives within the organisation. These included:

1. Organisational metadata schema – based on extended Dublin Core template;
2. Removal of all staff e-mail groups – staff are not allowed to send messages to the entire organisation;
3. Design and development of Majority World News – a daily e-mail sent to all Christian Aid staff with internal news, comment and newspaper reviews;
4. Trailing of instant messaging and web logging – small group tests as proof of concept for collaboration and communication. Both to be deployed organisation wide during 2006;
5. Development of an information resources centre – archivist and senior information officers ‘delivering unfettered access to information’ for all Christian Aid staff.