Ventura’s One-Man Intranet
by Greg Francis
Developing an intranet can be expensive and time-consuming. But as Ken Kraft, business manager of the Ventura County (Calif.) Star, demonstrates, it doesn’t have to be.
Kraft launched the paper’s intranet within a month. Aside from the time he spent on the project, developing the paper’s internal site cost nothing. "The hardest thing was just the time commitment," he says.
Kraft credits two factors for the intranet’s jump-start. "The first was the ease of using Front Page," Microsoft’s site-authoring tool. "The second was my desire to see it become what I thought it could be."
Another factor: Much of the information Kraft wanted to post was already saved in Microsoft Office documents and easily convertible to Front Page.
After learning how to use Front Page, gathering documents, adding graphics, creating a distinctive look, building prototype home pages for individual departments, and adding external links to sister newspapers and industry sites, Kraft demonstrated the 20-page site to his publisher, who quickly approved it.
After presenting the prototype to department heads, recruiting volunteers and collecting suggestions, the intranet was up and running. Stored on an internal server, the site is accessible from any in-house PC running Web-browsing software. The newspaper even wired its lunchrooms so employees without their own PCs could access the intranet.
Nearly a year after the project’s approval, the site now includes a phone directory, mission statements, a form for communicating to the publisher, timesheet and insertion-order instructions, a history of the paper, an in-depth glossary of newspaper terms, and account charts. But much remains to be done.
"Every department handles its own page," says Kraft. "It’s hard to get people to commit the time. The site will always be a work in progress."
Francis is an Arlington, Va.-based free-lance writer. E-mail, grfhome@aol.com; phone, (703) 838-9565.
Attitude and Knowledge
Carolyn Vesper Bivens kicked off her SuperConference segment by stating a simple goal–to give her advertisers the flexibility to "change an ad on the newsstand."
On the newsstand?
"Not quite," admitted USA Today’s associate publisher and senior vice president for advertising. "But the time between idea and ink is narrowing."
Bivens outlined the technological strides the Arlington, Va.-based daily has taken to narrow that window, including screen grabs of television ads to create related print-ad campaigns; the ability to accept any form of ad, electronic or not; and an ongoing move to computer-to-plate production (TechNews, November/ December 1999, p. 22).
A customer-focused attitude is just the beginning, however. "Knowledge management" also can improve operations and generate revenue, according to Lotus Development Corp.’s Scott Cooper.
Cooper, vice president and general manager of knowledge-management products at the Cambridge, Mass., comp-any, defined KM as "a discipline to systematically leverage information and expertise." Companies with "dysfunctional knowledge environments" suffer from knowledge hoarding, information overload and slow diffusion of innovation, costing an average of $5,000 per employee, according to International Data Corp.
KM combats these demons using five technologies: business intelligence (data warehousing and mining); collaboration (groupware, synchronous messaging,
e-mail); knowledge transfer (computer-based training, distributed learning, live collaboration); knowledge discovery and mapping (search, classification/navigation, document management); and expertise (expert networks, visualization, affinity, identification).