Intranet debacle.

Our Intranet sucks.

I said it. It had to be said. You can build your Intranet on jury-rigged FrontPage and an IA based on Org Charts if you want to, that doesn’t make it a good bleepin idea! (a little homage to Chris Rock there - Bigger and Blacker baby, it’s classic)

Anyway, it’s true. I guess the first step in recovery is recognizing you have a problem. The problem here is that our Intranet down at the hospital is, well, crap. We spend a lot of time (and therefore money) trying to keep the status quo of something that people don’t use, and something that doesn’t work well for the average user.

It’s got potential, don’t get me wrong, but in it’s current state it’s a hard to use, harder to maintain, big non-standard, proprietary, bloated beast. It’s built on a mish-mash of FrontPage, ASP and who knows what else. The Information Architecture is well, a joke if anything, it’s impossible to find good information, the search feature is so-so when it’s working, and the list goes on. Don’t get me started on the process to update some of our stuff - we spend hours on stuff that, frankly, I don’t think the majority our users care about. The directory and file structure make it so that, in order to find anything (so you can fix it for instance), you have to know the site inside and out. It’s got bad file names and to make it worse a bunch of re-directs that confuse the issue even more. It’s just a nightmare.

I’ve spent a good portion of my day today patching and fixing broken FrontPage includes, and creating default pages where there weren’t any - as well as various other work-arounds. We moved the site from one server to another, and just like I predicted, everything broke. Ok, well not everything, but lots of things.

It’s time for our Intranet to be all it can be! I wish, oh how I wish, we could scrap it and start over, but I don’t think that’s possible. A complete re-work is in order though, as well as a re-visioning.

Ironically, in the midst of the train wreck that was my day, I got a few tidbits in my inbox:

First off, Intranet Usability: The Trillion-Dollar Question from Jakob Nielsen’s good old AlertBox. He makes many good points in here, pointing out pretty much everything we are doing wrong. Unfortunately he makes it sound much easier that it actually is, and frankly I think some of what he says is unrealistic. Yeah, it might be true in theory, but as is often the case, it’s not really an option in practice. The underlying issues, politics, territorialism, etc would need to be pushed out of the way first, and that is only the beginning. John S. Rhodes over at WebWord points out some more issues with what Nielsen is saying. I can particularly identify with the whole bit about costs and culture shock.

If that weren’t all, McGovern tells how to demonstrate your Intranet delivers value. Some going points here, but again, I’m not sure how relevant this is to the real world, or at least our situation. Anyway - both of these pieces help reinforce the idea that our Intranet has major problems and needs to be fixed.

I’m not sure how we got to this point, and frankly I don’t care, I just want it to reach it’s potential. I want it to be easy to maintain, easy to use, easy to navigate, delivering quality and up-to-date content and everything else it needs to do to be a tool that everyone in the organization to be proud of. I want to be able to introduce collaboration, and tools that people will actually use. FrontPage is not the answer, at least not on a sitewide level, maybe we can introduce something along the lines of Movable Type, which I would think would work great with our CMS and anything else for that matter - I know we’ve talked about that. Somehow it seems like if we can open up a toolset that is easy to use, based on Web fricken standards, etc. to the users and get them more involved we’d kill two birds with one stone. Decrease our maintenance time as well as increase the functionality to our Intranet as a whole.

The time for talk and excuses is over, it’s time for action. I’ll keep y’all up to date with how it goes.