Intranet Introduction

The college of Engineering is developing a college wide intranet web site to support Faculty, Staff and Graduate Students as they do their administrative work.

The first phase of the intranet will focus on describing how to purchase stuff, be safe in the lab and at work, how to support graduate students, and how to do human resources processes. Phase 1 will also provide a place to post data, reports and other documents.

Later phases will add additional functional areas and will add features to the existing areas. For instance, we plan to support committee and project work by providing tools for posting documents, minutes, and other information associated with committees. In addition we hope to add a full campus directory with the ability to manage groups, committee memberships, and print mailing labels, produce phone lists, produce email address books, and so forth. Memberships managed in this directory will also be able to be used by the intranet to control access to information.

An intranet team, consisting of Paul Davis, Dawn Esposito, Colleen McClenahan, and Andy Vail has been formed to oversee the project. We have spent a great deal of time describing how we think the new web site should work. You can see much of this work at the intranet project website.

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At the end of phase 1, the college intranet is intended to be a structured body of information describing how to do processes associated with the work done by Engineering faculty, staff and grad students. This content will be written by college staff in conjunction with other campus units and will make use of any information already available, either by linking to it or, when it's not available on the web, by incorporating existing documents. In the future we intend the expand the intranet substnatially, but initially we plan to limit the focusing it to answering questions of the form "How do I...". Examples might include: How do I buy something; How do I process a web form, or how do I test face washes. (Thanks to the Hotel school for introducing us to this language.)

The intent is that the structure we develop for the early intranet will grow gracefully as the domains addressed and the content within those domains grow. The structure will also gracefully incorporate additional audiences, such as undergraduate students. Furthermore, the design should scale well so other colleges and functional units can make use of it. Finally, our efforts are intended to integrate well with the campus enterprise portal effort.

The development of the intranet will occur in phases. The first phase will address the content and structure of the pages that answer "How Do I..." questions in three content areas: purchasing, grad student administration, and safety. Our goal is to have the structure for these completed and some of this content written by the end of the summer.

Later phases will add more content areas to the purchasing, grad student administration and safety areas. They will also move beyond "How Do I..." questions to address other domains, such as documentation for committees and projects, calendars, and policies, etc. Role based delivery of content and college directory functionality will be delivered in a later phase as well. These phases will go quickly, starting even before phase 1 is complete. We hope to structure these phases so each one takes only 2-3 months. Writing the content for each of the phases will take longer.

The purpose of the intranet is described in greater detail in our description of the charge to the intranet team. This project is also closely aligned with the college's best practices effort.

Target Audience

The target audience of the intranet is Engineering faculty, staff and grad students. At this point we don't intend to address the needs of undergrads, though the infrastructure would support it. In considering what to write and how to develop the navigation, we have found it more useful to identify the audience as either "process initiators" or "process doers"-- customers or processors for short. In addition we think of process managers (managers) as a separate audience but, until we start building administrative systems and data delivery tools, we have found very little content to target specifically toward managers.

The material should be written in the language of it's targeted audience. Initiators should see material in language they are familiar with, "How do I buy something", whereas processors might see language that includes jargon specific to their functional domain, for instance, "How to process a web req." Particularly for initiators, where the authors are not part of the audience, a great deal of care has to be paid to the language used.

Generally there are a lot more initiators in the college than processors, though most of the content will be written for processors. In many domains there are only 5-20 applicable processors in the college. While the care required in writing for processors need not be as great, there is great value in using the intranet project to standardize processes and that is much of the focus of this effort.

We go into greater detail about our audiences and structure of the answer pages in our Best Practices Outline.

Site Structure

Each web page on the intranet will have several standard features. A search box that allows the users to search the internet, cornell.edu, the college intranet, the list of "How do I..." questions, or the campus staff directory. There will also be a link to the intranet site map and a set of tabs. The tabs allow the intranet to expand from answering "How Do I..." questions into new domains easily. We currently anticipate the following set of tabs: How do I..., Teams and Projects, News, Directories, Calendars, Training, Policies, and, for the interim, Old Intranet.

In addition to each page having a standard look and feel, the site will consist of three standard types of pages:

Homepage: The homepage will list a series of very general "How Do I..." type questions. For instance, "How do I buy something?" In addition it will have a "current news" panel, with links to news relevant to staff and faculty in the college, and a quick links panel with links to the most frequently used "answer pages" (see below). All pages on the site will have feature rich search functionality and a link to the intranet site map.
Choice Pages: When a user clicks on one of the general "How Do I..." questions they are taken to a choice page. Choice pages provide summaries of various answers with enough information so the targeted visitor (in this example a "customer") can make the right choice. In this case the choices might include buying something with a P-Card and buying something with a Web Requesition.

Proposed template for the choice pages.
Answer pages: As the name suggests, answer pages answer the users question either directly in the text of the page or through links to other web pages at Cornell or through links to sub-processes. The answer pages are structured based on template to make them easier to write and easier for web visitors to find what they need quickly.

Propsed template for the answer pages

The page structure and page types are described in more detail in the Functional Specification.

Project Governance

The intranet content is being broken up into content areas and each content area is governed by a content and best practices team. These committees are responsible for identifying the desired content, prioritizing what content they will address first, and seeing that the content is developed and posted to the intranet. The first phase of the intranet has three content and best practices teams: Grad Student administration chaired by Dawn Esposito and Craig Higgins, Safety chaired by Colleen McClenihan and Joe Rowe , and Purchasing chaired by Julie Delay and Andy Vail. These teams work closely with and are guided by the intranet team.

The intranet team has overall responsibility for the intranet effort. The intranet team is responsible for the technology and structure of the intranet, for coordinating and guiding the efforts of the the content and best practices teams and working with them to develop the navigation materials. In particular the intranet team and the intranet programmer will be responsible for making sure the meta data that defines where a page shows up in the navigation structure is entered properly. The Intranet team is chaired by Paul Davis.

The relationship between and rolls of the intranet team and content and best practices teams are described in somewhat more detail in the 3/22/05 intranet team meeting notes.

Future Functionality

Additional Tabs

After the the "How Do I..." part of the site has been developed we will immediately turn our attention to developing templates for the other sections of the site. Projects and Committees will be one of the first to be addressed.

Roles Based Content Delivery

The intranet will eventually include a great deal of information on hundereds and eventually thousands of web pages. Many of these pages are applicable to only a small portion of the overall college community. In order to avoid information overload, we will use web visitor's roles to limit the links and navigation elements to only those he or she is likely to want to view.

Though a web visitor may "see" only part of the intranet from the homepage, the search feature and site map will allow the visitor to view all the pages on the intranet (except those they are explicitly prohibited from seeing), whether they are available from their homepage or not.

The roles will be used to limit the links available from the homepage, not change the content. In other words, we can imagine a homepage with all the links for all the roles. Turning on the roles feature would simply remove the links that aren't appropriate for that role. It would not change the text of the links or the content of the answer pages. The content of any given answer page will be exactly the same regardless of the role of the visitor viewing it.

In order to support this we will assign each potential web visitor in the college a set of roles and we will tag each web page with some metadata indicating what roles it is targeted for. The ability to assign and view roles will be tied into a staff directory that will eventually be developed for the intranet.

Roles based content delivery and the staff directory functionality will not be delivered until at least phase II of the project.

Introduction to the Engineering College Intranet