Would You Like To Improve Agency Communications? Develop an Intranet! An Agency Case Study:

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"Would You Like To Improve Agency Communications? Develop an Intranet!"
An Agency Case Study: The Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center

The Stanley M. Isaacs Neighborhood Center reaches across generations and cultures with innovative programming that encourages growth and self-reliance throughout every stage of life. Founded in 1964 in the settlement house tradition of helping people help themselves, our services include Meals on Wheels, adult day services, a senior center, after-school and evening programs for children and teens, youth employment services, adult education classes, cultural and educational events and workshops, and parent education. The Isaacs Center is located in the Isaacs/Holmes public housing development on the boundary of the East Harlem and Yorkville communities, and operates programs out of five additional sites.

The Need for an Intranet
As is true for many agencies, our staff has traditionally relied on the agency's secretarial staff to provide any number of services ranging from making copies of agency recording forms to tracking down employee information like available sick days or vacation time. An employee can't find the form she needs and asks a secretary to track down the document and print it. Another employee calls the receptionist to find out the telephone extension of a staff member. A third employee calls to ask if a room is available for him to use for a meeting. These may seem like small requests but when you're talking about 100 full-time and 115 part-time employees – the current staff of the center – the amount of time devoted to these functions quickly adds up. And it can prove costly in drawing resources away from more necessary tasks.

Our network administrator, technology planner, and I talked about what we could do to make the daily operation of the center more efficient. We had heard about "Intranets" but didn't know much about them. For two years we batted around the idea without getting down to the business of building it, in part, because we weren't sure how to start. Finally, one day, the network administrator suggested we involve two of our student interns with computer experience (one a high school student, the other a college student) in our Intranet discussion.

If You Build It, They Will Come

Our five-person technology team – comprised of myself, the Network Administrator, the Assistant Network Administrator, our Tech Planner, and two full-time computer teachers – met with the students to outline our objectives. They enthusiastically jumped on the idea and volunteered to design and build the Isaacs Center Intranet.

There's nothing that will turn a person off faster than going into a Web site (or Intranet site) that's full of outdated information.

One of the computer teachers committed to the time and work of maintaining the Intranet. This was one of our primary concerns going in to the project. We knew that if we couldn't keep the Intranet current with agency needs (upcoming meetings, accurate room schedules, monthly calendar information) our staff would become increasingly less inclined to refer to the Intranet for information.

We began by listing all of the items that might assist staff and managers in completing their daily tasks. We wanted to make information readily accessible, thereby eliminating the standard excuses of "I didn't know about that policy" or "I didn't know where to find that form."

The tech team and student interns compiled a long list of what staff needs could be addressed through the Intranet. This included a staff directory, agency calendars, room schedules, the forms regularly used throughout the center, policy and program PowerPoint presentations, syllabus and study materials for the center's numerous training courses, the computer training schedule, the posting of recent agency memos, and all of the center's policy statements. In addition, earned vacation and other accrued time was identified as a staff priority – we needed to find a way to allow employees to access this information in a secure manner.

Finally, we thought to add a "suggestion box" for employees. The idea behind this was two-fold: first, feedback is an excellent thing to encourage; and second, by including an "interactive" element on the Intranet site we would likely encourage staff to come in and actually use the Intranet for something besides e-mail pick-up.

Taking Time to Do It Right

When it came time to building the site, we gave ourselves a leisurely timetable and no deadlines. It was important for us to do this properly and achieve buy-in from the various program staff throughout the center and across our six sites. Too, our student interns were embarking on this intense project with willingness and excitement. We certainly didn't want to compromise their enthusiasm by making extreme demands on their time and energies.

Working over several months, with the help of the Network Administrator, the student interns were able to shape a very useful Web site for the agency employees and administration.

Our student designers jumped right in and did a great deal of research on other Intranets. They worked with the Technology Planner (who coordinated the effort) to come up with a design. It was a relaxed and easy process as the tech team watched the Intranet develop from the "shell" of an idea. Each time the Intranet design group (the two students and the Technology Planner) made changes or added a new item, they would show it to the rest of us and we'd discuss making adjustments where necessary. Much of the fun was in seeing the headings and designs the Intranet group selected. For example, when staff clicks on the page that allows them to see how much vacation time they have remaining, they click on a palm tree.

Once the entire tech team agreed to the final vision, the students designed the web page and one of our computer teachers was charged with gathering all of items slated to appear on the site and then adapting them for web use.

The Final Product
Here's what employees see when they sign on to our Intranet.

In addition to the self-explanatory categories of "Staff Directory," "Room Schedule," "Calendars," and "Suggestion Box," the Isaacs Center Intranet also provides staff with access to their employee information. This includes not just the current display of vacation and accrued time but also support information, such as the employee's contacts in case of an emergency. Using his or her own private access code, an employee can log on and change this information online without having to go through the drawn-out process of contacting other members of staff and working through several channels to effect such simple change.

In the "Library," employees can find all personnel policies, as well as PowerPoint presentations on "Safety in the Workplace," "Prevention of Sexual & Other Harassment," and "Dealing with Child Abuse." In the "Technology" section, staff can access employee development training materials and course outlines. There are also evaluation forms and a glossary of Intranet and Internet-related terms.

Finally, one of the greatest time and money-saving resources on the Intranet appears under the simple heading of "Forms." Here, staff can find, download and print-up hard-copy documents, including:

Performance evaluation forms
Family medical leave notification
Fiscal forms (i.e. check request, expense report)
Incident/accident report
New hire forms
Requisition forms (i.e., food service order, MetroCard request, room reservation)
Written warning forms
Senior and youth services monthly reports

No longer do employees have to waste time (theirs and others) trying to locate a copy of a suddenly needed form; it's right at their fingertips.

How It Works
All full-time employees, and many of our part-time employees, have computers on their desks so whatever we put up on the Intranet is immediately accessible to everyone. Staff can access the Intranet from home, another agency or city, as long as they have access to a computer, the Internet, and the center's Web site. It's a secure site and staff must use passwords to log on. When new employees are hired and entered into our human resource database, they are immediately assigned their own password that will allow them to enter the Intranet.

Training Staff
Once the site was up, employees were required to attend one of several brief training sessions designed to introduce them to the Intranet. Because the staff was already familiar with the workings of the Internet through the agency's Web site and e-mail, it didn't take much time for employees to learn how to access the available information. We knew their ability to access their accrued time would prove to be a popular feature of the site and that this function alone would inspire staff to log on and use the system.

New hires are required to attend two training sessions – Computer 1 and Computer 2 – within the first few months of their employment to acclimate them to the center's network, e-mail system, technology policies, and the Intranet. And, as noted earlier, all training materials are available online in the Technology section of the Intranet so that staff can get a "refresher course" whenever they'd like.

Troubleshooting and Future Plans
By and large, the staff's transition to the Intranet has been seamless. We have encountered very few problems, all of which were easily managed. For instance, the agency Excel forms didn't contain the necessary formulas when they were first converted so the process of putting them up on the site had to be redone. Also, staff initially experienced some lag-time in providing the most current information for the Intranet's monthly calendars and room schedules, but this was easily corrected as employees began to use the system regularly.

In the near future, the tech team plans to re-situate e-mail – now accessible as a log-on separate from the Internet – to be a feature of the Intranet itself. This would require employees to enter the Intranet in order to access their e-mail. Given that e-mail is by far the most popular online function, our tech team knows it's the surest way to encourage staff to enter the Intranet daily. This way they will have immediate access to the most recent agency memos and postings.

It is also our intent to do an evaluation of the staff's Intranet use sometime within the next six months. Our Intranet has been up and running since the spring of this year but as of this moment, we don't have a clear picture of how staff is using its various functions. Where do they go most often? What improvements would they like to see on the site? Their responses should provide us with a strong foundation for shaping the center's technology vision in the future.

Some Final Thoughts
In building the Isaacs Center Intranet, we were fortunate to have the technology team we do, including the student interns who had the time and skills to explore design and building concepts. All the resources to develop the Intranet came from within the agency. The only cost came in the form of staff time. Frankly, our student interns shouldered the burden of original work and I don't think we could have done it without them.

It takes time to design an Intranet site – to gather everything you want to put up and convert it to HTML. We had to have the cooperation and ultimate buy-in from the various departments of the agency. The calendars are changed monthly by each department and sent to the computer teacher. The people doing these calendars had to be instructed in the proper format for the Intranet. We've developed our own human resource database in order to maintain the staff directory and accrued time tied to our Intranet site. The ongoing operation of the Intranet is a group effort.

In short, it took the "three T's" – time, talent, and teamwork – to accomplish a project that has improved how we access information and communicate with employees across our agency.

You can reach Walter Higley at whigley@isaacscenter.org. Also check out the agency Web site at www.isaacscenter.org.

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