Speaker: Mike Mahoney

Meeting notes by: Alan Muirhead

This was among the insights that Mike included in his informative and entertaining presentation on corporate intranets at the October meeting.

More than fifty people attended the meeting, the second annual joint meeting of STC-PMC with the Philadelphia chapter of IABC, the International Association of Business Communicators. Prior to the main presentation, Bev Bruns and Bill Seiberlich, the presidents of the two organizations, briefly described each group.

Databases
The presentation focused on one type of intranet site—web look-up databases. Mike made the analogy that finding information on such sites is like finding a needle in a web haystack.

Many people in a company assemble databases, such as name and phone number directories, product information lists, or project status summaries, that they may occasionally print out to share with a group. These databases, often kept on a PC in Microsoft Excel or Access, are more accessible and provide more value when they are posted on the company intranet.

Putting them up on the corporate intranet server is easy. Mike recommended the series Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week by Laura Lemay; the second book shows how to write the "five lines of Perl script" to do the look-up search. Preparing the data for the web is also straightforward. The trick is using the mail merge function in Microsoft Word to extract the desired information from Excel or Access and write it out in a formatted HTML file.

Examples
Mike cited three examples of the databases he has helped put on the DuPont intranet.

Plant directory. This started as a listing of U. S. plant sites, contact names, and local government officials, adapted from a database kept in the Public Affairs group. After it went online, Mike was approached by several other groups that wanted to add additional information for each plant. There was, of course, no budget for any of this. And, Mike found, many of the requests went away when he asked for clean, up-to-date data.

Quality management. This database listed the status of the ISO9000 activities at various sites. Since the data was relatively clean, Mike was able to complete the preparation in one afternoon, and it was approved and running live within three weeks. Putting the information on the intranet eliminated the need to print and distribute 400 copies every quarter. And recipients can download the entire database to do their own analyses.

Product information. DuPont’s corporate telecontact center had developed an internal database to help answer 800 number calls. By putting it online, Mike hopes to increase internal visibility, making it easier to browbeat product managers into providing more complete and updated information, which can then be used on DuPont’s external web site as well.

Challenges
While putting databases online is technically easy, Mike identified several political and cultural challenges to successful implementations:

• Fresh, valid data. When the whole company can see it, it’s vital that the data be correct and up-to-date.
• Scope creep. As in the plant directory example, lots of people may want to add onto the original, "simple" project.
• User "density." Mike struggled to find a polite word, but the fact is that not all users actually understand how to do a search on a database.
• Support. A web database is neither a pure PC application nor a full-blown mainframe application. Therefore, corporate IS doesn’t see it, can’t understand it, and won’t support it.
• Respect. People often correlate cost with value. Mike cited a web commerce site that was never promoted or publicized, at least in part because it was too cheap. (He was able to do it for less than 1/10 of the $100,000+ that an outside consultant had bid.) Then, of course, the client complained that the site didn’t have many hits!

As Mike observed, free miracles don’t get no respect.