When Corporations
Put Their Knowledge Online
What happens when information goes from paper to pixels?

This paper was written in April 2003 before Enlighten.Net, Inc. spun off from DISC.
by Deborah Ketai, Marketing Communication Specialist, DISC

Where the answers are
When I started working at DISC two years ago, I had a million questions—and I quickly learned that most of the answers were on E.Net. (Throughout this article, "Enlighten.Net" refers to our commercially available product; "E.Net" means the intranet that we at DISC use every day.)

E.Net made it easier to learn my co-workers' names, faces, and functions. All I had to do was look in the "Who's Who" section, which featured photos, names, and initials of all DISCers (as we DISC employees call ourselves), or pull up the organizational chart.

An Enlighten.Net application called Net.SignOut gave me not only a phone extension and an e-mail link for every employee but also a way to check whether someone was out sick or tied up in a meeting before I trudged over to the other wing of the building to find them.

"I rely heavily on E.Net for our new hire orientations," says Human Resources Generalist Dot Seelye. Besides taking new DISCers, such as Java Programmer Nitin Gujral, through the photo section, she reviews company policies and benefit information with them on the intranet; explains how to use Net.SignOut and another application that tracks use of paid time off; and demonstrates how to enter requests for technical support and Corrective Action Requests ("CARs"; these process failure reports are the building blocks of our continuous quality improvement program).

She also introduces new hires to the department home pages. Documenting departmental procedures online has helped employees like Gujral get up to speed quickly.

After orientation comes training, another area in which the intranet has proven its worth. According to Penny Pastuszak, our Customer Services department's assistant operations manager, taking information out of the dozens of binders in which it used to reside and putting it on E.Net has reduced the time required to train new Customer Services employees by 50%.

After their preliminary training, technical support staff participate in DISC's KA$H (Knowledge and Salary Hike) program, a learning system that rewards them with raises for passing tests in various subject areas. Guess where they access the tests and keep track of which ones they've taken? That's right: on E.Net.

What's the point of an intranet?
Like most business organizations, we started planning for an intranet with certain goals in mind. They included:

• Centralizing and standardizing information
• Ensuring that information was kept up-to-date
• Improving productivity by allowing faster access to information
• Decreasing the cost of paper and paper handling

Most of our customers buy Enlighten.Net with the same objectives in mind. Before these companies installed their intranets, no one could ever be sure which version of a document was the most recent. Now, all their documents are in one central place.

At Air Hydro Power Inc., the intranet holds all information from vendors, customers, employees, and management, prompting Operations Manager Mary Martin to call Enlighten.Net "our Central Brain." "You don't have to remember everything," Martin says. "It's right there."

Other customers tell us they use their intranets to post sales reports, track customer preferences, and link quickly to shippers and credit reporting agencies. An added benefit for Rodney Samuels, Manager of Information Systems for Carolina Fluid Components: It's a relief to be able to copy and paste reports from Enlighten.Net to other applications easily.

Searching an ever-expanding universe
Whatever the original reasons for its deployment, an intranet can expand at an amazing pace once an organization truly commits to a knowledge management program. Six years after a DISC committee first began even thinking about building an intranet, E.Net is still growing by approximately 300 documents per day and will soon exceed 700,000 files—an impressive size for a group of just over 70 users.

The sheer number of documents in an intranet puts the power and flexibility of its search engine at a premium. A good search engine allows full-text searches of the entire document bank. Users should be able to phrase their queries in any of several formats, including natural language (i.e., normal English phrasing instead of keywords). It's also helpful to be able to limit your search to specific groups of documents, for instance, by location, date, or file type. (Unlike some intranets, Enlighten.Net allows users to publish documents in their native format, whether HTML, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF, or any other application.)

For example, our Customer Services department stores call history on the intranet, allowing support personnel to conduct searches for previous calls on any given subject or for any customer. Most searches run in a matter of a few seconds, at most, making it possible for a consultant to find an answer almost before the customer on the phone has finished asking the question.

The browser-based nature of an intranet lets users search not only for specific documents but also for specific information within individual documents. Sales managers, for example, no longer have to scan pages and pages of a printed report to find buried figures; they can sift through the data in no time using CTRL + F to find exactly what they need.

Saving the planet
Which brings us to the save-a-tree factor. Whether the motivation is cost cutting or ecology, an intranet can be a huge step towards the dream of a paperless office.

Rodney Samuels says that storing reports in Enlighten.Net has helped reduce the amount of paper that Carolina Fluid Components' accounting and purchasing departments use. Tri-State Technical Sales Corporation's systems guru, Ken Mulhollan, quantifies his company's savings: 18 cases of paper per year for report storage alone, not to mention two-thirds of the staff time previously spent on month-end reporting. In addition to reducing the cost of paper, notes Mitch Provoast, the president of Provoast Automation Controls, cutting down on printing saves labor costs.

When I started working at DISC, I was amazed how quickly I adapted to using the intranet. It became second nature to check E.Net first, rather than a book, binder, or hanging file, for whatever information I needed.

As a speed reader with plenty of research experience, I can probably locate any single piece of information on paper almost as quickly as online. The big question is, how long does it take me to jump between multiple pieces of information? Compare the split-second mouse click on an intranet with the physical task of combing through titles, tables of contents, and indices of paper documents—let alone trekking from bookshelf to filing cabinet—and you can see how the time savings of an intranet mount up.

Finding your way around
Learning to navigate a well-constructed intranet doesn't take much time, either, compared to learning one's way around a company's printed "database." As an example, picture a sales report that refers to supporting documents—a spreadsheet, a customer list, some outstanding quotes, and several similar reports from previous time periods. Those documents might not be attached to a printed version of the sales report... in which case, the interested reader would have to figure out where to hunt them down, probably in several different locations.

On an intranet, in contrast, readers don't have to know where the spreadsheet is stored. Simply click the hyperlinked reference, and their browser will take them to it. The spreadsheet (or any other supporting document) might be in the same file directory as the report, but it could just as well be anywhere else in the system.

Early on, Enlighten.Net's development team had grappled with the question of navigational structure and settled on an eclectic strategy that offers at least five ways to reach any given document:

1. Drill down to it through the NAVbar (a combination application toolbar and navigation bar)
2. Click on a Link to the document from an e-mail, another document, or a page of search results
3. Type or copy the document's location into the browser's address bar
4. Click the icon that changes the navigational portion of the NAVbar to a list of directory files, and then double-click the icon of the document you want
5. Bookmark the page by adding it to your Favorites list

During any given session, of course, one can also use the browser's "Back" and "Forward" buttons. All this flexibility makes navigation a matter of a user's personal preference and style. Nitin Gujral finds the NAVbar handy for reaching certain high-traffic areas of our intranet, whereas I tend to rely more on links, searches, and site files.

But wait! There's more!
Even companies with limited initial expectations for their intranets can discover unexpected benefits once they put their systems in place. At DISC, the intranet eliminates not only a great deal of paper but also a certain amount of document routing, group e-mail, and even meetings.

It can also compensate for the inevitable disconnects in information transfer that are caused by employee absences. DISC's Customer Services group meets weekly for topical training sessions. Notes from those classes are posted online, says Michael Fitzgerald, "so if you're out that day, you don't miss anything."

If Fitzgerald's job would be a lot harder without the intranet, Marlene Geary's would be almost impossible. A Senior Support Analyst, Geary telecommutes from her home over 1,200 miles away, in Kissimmee, Florida. If it weren't for E.Net, the collaborative aspects of her work would go much more slowly, and she'd feel considerably more left out of the corporate culture.

Intranets improve processes—and people
Intranets often help make process improvements possible, as with the CARs quality program I already mentioned. In particular, an intranet can facilitate processes in the human resources area. Many of those processes are internal to the HR department, of course. But others, such as documenting performance reviews or tracking hours worked, may be initiated by managers or workers.

At DISC, we use our intranet to conduct so-called "360-degree" evaluations of our managers, co-workers, and direct reports. We fill out these performance appraisals online in strict confidentiality. The resulting summaries are completely anonymous; neither employees nor their managers can tell who said what about whom.

Working for a software provider is fun, because our wishes for product development become reality almost as quickly as we can dream them up. Dot Seelye, for example, has seen her wishes grow into Net.Employees, a new HR module for Enlighten.Net.

Understandably, Account Representative Dave Lusk appreciates the way our developers' responsiveness to user requests keeps adding depth and value to the Enlighten.Net product. "Flexibility is key," he says. "We've established a simple framework, which our customers can customize to their business culture."

An example: Because some companies prefer to limit which employees can publish to their intranets, DISC recently came out with a "read-only" version of the Enlighten.Net client application. Users with read-only NAVbars can access information from the intranet but cannot post to it.

Corporate policy aside, technical ability should not be a prerequisite for intranet publishing. "Lay people can publish to Enlighten.Net if they can drag and drop files," says Lusk. "That's a big deal. If they know how to attach something to an e-mail, they can publish to the intranet."

At DISC, all of us rely heavily on our intranet. Many of us publish to it at least weekly—some daily—and everyone uses the knowledge it stores. As John Pearse, our president and founder, is fond of saying, "DISC couldn't run its business without E.Net." With it, we are measurably more efficient; our new employees accelerate rapidly up to speed; and our knowledge retention is a permanent corporate asset.