The Foreign Service Journal, April 2017

THE FOREIGN SERVICE JOURNAL | APRIL 2017 21 SPEAKING OUT Why We Need a Better Intranet and How to Get It BY BRADL EY MEACHAM Bradley Meacham is currently preparing for a consular tour in Hanoi. Before joining the State Department Foreign Service, he was a business and finance journalist at organizations such as MSNMoney, Crain’s and Bloomberg, and a corporate commu- nications executive. During his tour in Mexico City he was nominated for a depart- mentwide award for innovative use of technology by a non-tech employee. O rganizations around the world are spending significant resources to better manage their information via internal websites, or intranets. These tools help employees navigate oceans of data, includ- ing news, day-to-day work and social media. Done right, intranets empower employees and minimize distractions. Consider typical Foreign Service officers. They are bombarded with news about the United States, their current country and previous assignments. They navigate management updates from post and Washington, plus a thicket of internal online resources and web- sites that don’t necessarily work well together. This leaves little energy to process important messages, let alone think about strategy and goals. Before joining the State Department I had worked for years as a journalist and corporate communications execu- tive. I had led projects to revamp the intranet at T-Mobile USA and at Ver- tafore, a software company with about 1,400 employees. Here at State, I quickly noticed opportunities to improve communications among 80,000 people across more than 300 locations. During my recent tour in Mexico City I led a revamp of the SharePoint intranets of the embassy and nine constituent consulates in U.S. Mission Mexico. From the beginning the project was much more than redesigning a website—it involved rethinking work processes and information flow across a complex mission of 2,800 employees. The goal was to share knowledge, save time and provide common space to col- laborate on policy goals and, ultimately, help us become better diplomats. Problems for users were easy to identify through existing employee sur- veys. There was little use of the intranet for collaboration, and the sites were not accomplishing the goal of sharing information across the mission. Some employees said they didn’t understand how their work fit into the mission’s goals or what other offices were doing, and it was difficult to find the resources they were seeking. Introducing Mexico Information Exchange (MIX) To fix this, we followed an ambitious 12-step plan including research, design, development and training. Our Share- Point was rebranded with a new name, Mexico Information Exchange, or MIX, with several important characteristics: • Common starting point. The MIX homepage was designed to be the common online starting point for employees each day, like a virtual “town square” for the mission community. Updating the design of the SharePoint master page gave the entire site a clean, modern look consistent with the State Department’s global branding stan- dards and distinct from the blue-and- white style that comes with out-of-the- box SharePoint straight from Microsoft. The homepage prominently fea- tures news, including management announcements and security notices, a calendar and a shortlist of links to most- used internal websites. MIX can be set as the default homepage for Internet Explorer and Chrome on office com- puters so that everyone gets the same messages at least once a day. • Simplified content structure. No matter how pretty it is, an intranet only works if it’s useful. To that end, MIX reflects the tasks employees do every day instead of the organization chart. Usage data and focus groups helped identify those needs. The most-common tasks and most-requested information were grouped into new pages under a “Services” dropdown at the top of the Done right, intranets empower employees and minimize distractions.