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Federal Intranet Work Sites: An Interim Assessment

E - G O V E R N M E N T S E R I E S

Julianne G. MahlerAssociate Professor Department of Public and International AffairsGeorge Mason University

Priscilla M. ReganAssociate ProfessorDepartment of Public and International AffairsGeorge Mason University

June 2002

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FEDERAL INTRANET WORK SITES

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T A B L E O F C O N T E N T S

Foreword ..............................................................................................5

Executive Summary ..............................................................................6

Models of Intranet Use ........................................................................9Background......................................................................................9Use of Intranets ................................................................................9Field Research Questions and Hypotheses ....................................11

Design and Development of Intranets in Federal Government Agencies ............................................................................................13

Department of Transportation ........................................................13Department of Housing and Urban Development ..........................16Environmental Protection Agency ..................................................19General Services Administration ....................................................22Department of Commerce..............................................................24Department of Justice ....................................................................26

Human Resources Applications on Agency Intranets ........................29

Findings and Recommendations ........................................................31Findings ........................................................................................31Recommendations..........................................................................35

Appendix: Agency Personnel Interviewed ..........................................37

Bibliography ......................................................................................39

About the Authors..............................................................................40

Key Contact Information....................................................................41

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F O R E W O R D



F O R E W O R DF O R E W O R D

June 2002

On behalf of The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for The Business of Government, we are pleased topresent this report by Julianne Mahler and Priscilla Regan, “Federal Intranet Work Sites: An Interim Assessment.”

This report is the Endowment’s 12th study in its E-Government series. This is the first study, however, toexamine how the federal government is using Internet technology to communicate and provide services toits own employees. Numerous previous studies, including those by The Endowment, have examined gov-ernment’s ability to provide services to both citizens and businesses via the Internet. There have been farfewer studies of how government has developed and used intranets for its own internal purposes.

While the federal government has made great strides in improving its ability and capacity to deliver onlineservices to the American people via the Internet, it appears that the federal government is not using intranetsto deliver a full portfolio of services to its own employees. Based on case studies of six federal departmentsand agencies, the government seems to be providing limited online services to employees. Most depart-ments and agencies examined provide information, such as employee benefits, online but have developedlimited transaction capabilities to date. In addition to providing findings, Professors Mahler and Regan setforth three key recommendations on actions that federal departments and agencies can take to more fullyutilize the potential of intranets to improve services to their employees.

We trust that this report will be useful and informative to government managers as they increasingly turntheir attention to how Internet technologies can be used to enhance the productivity of their own employeesand to increase internal services to those employees. The federal government has made great strides inrecent years in providing on-line services to the American public. The next set of challenges is in its ownbackyard—providing services to its own employees.

Paul Lawrence Ian LittmanPartner, PricewaterhouseCoopers Partner, PricewaterhouseCoopersCo-Chair, Endowment Advisory Board Co-Chair, Endowment Advisory [email protected] [email protected]

F O R E W O R D

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Intranets linking Government to Employees (G2E)are the subject of this study. A number of federalagencies have reported efforts to use some form ofintranet, but the complexity of these intranets andtheir actual levels of use vary widely. For example,as part of the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) reformeffort, intranets are used to provide a communica-tions strategy for informing staff about changes in tax law, policy, and procedures, and for improv-ing agency-wide communication (Letter Report,04/21/2000,GAO/GGD-00-85). The NationalResources Center, the IRS’s intranet website, wascreated in 1998 to serve as a site for centralizedguidance on policy and procedures, to provide away to disseminate answers to employees’ questionsso that all staff would have the same answers, andto provide training for the provisions of the reform.

Other examples of intranet uses for managementare included in the General Accounting Office’s(GAO) report on successful strategies for enhancingagency information and knowledge management(GAO/GAO-01-376G). A number of agencies, forexample, use a service that makes press clippingsavailable to staff, a significant improvement inspeed and cost over traditional methods. In theVeterans Health Administration, intranet access toperformance information such as patient satisfac-tion data is used to encourage performanceimprovement (GAO/GAO-01-376G).

This study is concerned with identifying the uses ofintranets in federal government agencies. First, weask, what are the present capacities and designs of intranets in use? Secondly, why have agencies

developed their intranets, and what value do theyenvision they will gain from them? Informationabout capacity and purpose will make it possibleto know how to work with agencies to enhancetheir systems and to move from current designs to ones that will do more of the work they wouldlike them to do.

To answer these questions we studied six agencies.We interviewed individuals at the Departments ofTransportation, Housing and Urban Development,Commerce, and Justice, as well as the Environ-mental Protection Agency and the General ServicesAdministration. Our rationale for this selection was to optimize the chances of finding the mostadvanced and sophisticated examples of intranets.Case studies of agencies with little or no experiencewith intranets would not offer much about theirpotential or the directions in which agencies wantthem to develop. The emerging vision of intranets askey management tools in government is more easilyobserved in agencies that are more advanced intheir exploration of intranet uses and limitations.

CasesDepartment of Transportation (DOT)In the Department of Transportation, existingintranets in each of the agency’s 11 operating divisions preceded efforts to establish a single, unifying intranet. Management designers hoped tocarve out a place for a department-wide intranetby identifying crosscutting features. Efforts to makethe site attractive included using existing terminol-ogy rather than requiring users to learn a new

E X E C U T I V E S U M M A R Y

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vocabulary of work functions. Another appealingfeature is that each worker’s home page can bepersonalized. A feature allowing interest-basedgroups to form and to collaborate online hasdrawn many adherents.

Department of Housing and Urban Development(HUD)In contrast to the Department of Transportation, theHUD@work intranet was the only internal net inplace. It developed rapidly as a communicationstool. The HUD intranet had a staff separate fromthe Internet team, which is unusual, and headed bya manager who designed it to carry out manage-ment tasks. The intranet had top-level support fromthe HUD secretary and was designated as the siteto report downsizing decisions. All these factorshave contributed to very high use rates.

Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)A team of information resource management pro-fessionals created the EPA intranet. The first versionwas composed of text-based links. Despite thecapacity of the intranet to support chat and collab-orative work, respondents suggest the site is under-used. Major marketing efforts are under way.

General Services Administration (GSA)The intranet at GSA was created by a former privatesector web designer. Travel and human resourceslinks were among the first ones offered. Over twoyears the site grew in features and popularity. Nowit is a work site for conducting the business of theagency as well as a document site. A simple bul-letin board site increased in use when the head ofGSA began to monitor it and make comments. Herestaff could be heard. Rewards for good suggestionsmade on the site have further increased its worth.

Department of Commerce The Department of Commerce intranet, like theone at the Department of Transportation, faceschallenges because of seven pre-existing divisionalintranets. Investigation of one of these intranets, inthe Commercial Service, indicates that it is a well-developed collection of work tools for identifyingclient matches and scheduling events at whichmatches may occur. The site is a joint product of

a few contractors and Commercial Service staff.The intranet for the department as a whole wasbuilt quickly in response to administration calls for“digital democracy.” It has functioned as a documentsite with an information resources managementdesign team. Visits to the site have not been asnumerous as designers had hoped, and efforts areunder way to improve its usefulness.

Department of Justice (DOJ)Like Commerce and Transportation, the Departmentof Justice houses a number of agencies with sepa-rate identities and their own intranets. Both theexternal website and intranets are maintained anddesigned by the same staff group, composed ofcomputer technicians and library informationresource specialists. The intranet content is now acomponent of the DOJ library, which is developingan information resource management specialty. The site is largely non-interactive at present. Itoffers links to the most recent department policyfiles and government sites. The next generation ofthe intranet is to be more interactive, but this willtake a major change in architecture and representsa huge investment. The information resource staffwill depend on the Internet website builders in thedepartment for this advance.

Findings and RecommendationsThe lessons learned from the six cases can be dis-tilled into a set of five overall observations.

• In large multi-divisional agencies, divisional or regional intranets predate the agency-wideintranet and pose challenges for establishing a niche for an umbrella intranet.

• Top departmental support for and interest in theagency’s intranet is especially critical in the ini-tial planning for and launching of the intranet.

• Marketing of an agency-wide intranet is crucialto encouraging staff use.

• Within federal agencies, more attention andenergy is devoted to the agency’s public accesswebsite than to its intranet.

• In all the agencies examined, the developmentof the intranet has been an iterative processand is still very much evolving.

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Based on the analysis of the case studies, we offerthree recommendations for enhancing intranetdevelopment in federal agencies.

• An agency-wide intranet requires an agency-wide effort to be successful.

• The more that intranets provide services thatemployees can use on a day-to-day basis, themore employees will gravitate toward the site.

• As intranets become more personalized andare used more for collaborative work, agencieswill need to address issues of workplace sur-veillance and monitoring.

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BackgroundThe growing interest in intranets is spurred by theirusefulness as management tools to foster produc-tive communication and coordination, manageinformation, and encourage self-organizing workteams. Business to employee (B2E) intranets infirms are developing rapidly because of theiradvantages in optimizing strategic communications.Allcorn (1997) identifies the “parallel virtual orga-nization” composed of an intranet and organiza-tional databases as the information and knowledgemanagement model for the future. Curry andStancich (2000) identify the advantages of theintranet for strategic decision making. SouthwestAirlines is cited by the General Accounting Officeas an exemplar of the uses of intranets for informalcommunication among employees at dispersedwork sites to develop and maintain a culture ofteamwork and pride (GAO/GGD-00-28).

Here we pose two principal questions about theintranet in federal government settings. First, whatare the present capacities and designs of intranetsin use? What features do they have and how arethey used? The second set of questions concernswhy agencies have developed their intranets, whatthey hope to get from them, and what work theywould like them to do. Information about capacityand purpose will make it possible to know how towork with agencies to enhance their systems and tomove from current designs to ones that will domore of the work staff would like them to do.

Use of IntranetsIntranets are part of the larger e-government land-scape that includes Internet services for citizensand commercial applications for businesses to easeand speed their relationships. HUD notes in their2001 website that e-government is the interchangeof value, including services and information, throughan electronic medium, and includes relationshipsbetween:

• Government and citizens

• Government and nonprofits

• Government and business

• Government and employees

• Government and government

Similarly, Stowers’ study of e-commerce applicationsin the public sector distinguishes e-governmentoperations that link governments to citizens (G2C),governments to business (G2B), and business togovernment (B2G). Government to citizen trans-actions online include a number of services allow-ing citizens to obtain copies of vital records, payfees, renew licenses and registrations, file and paytaxes, and bid at government auctions (Stowers,2001). Government to business e-linkages includeopportunities to file taxes, obtain licenses and per-mits, and purchase government services. E-com-merce applications between businesses andgovernment include creating software to simplifypurchasing and improve agency productivity. For

Models of Intranet Use

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example, the Department of Defense EMALL opera-tion provides one point of entry for Defense cus-tomers to buy goods and services from commercialvendors and other government sellers. (Stowers,2002, 26). Stowers also found applications of gov-ernment to government e-commerce in WashingtonState’s Central Stores Online, patterned after com-mercial online retail shopping sites.

In contrast to these applications, intranets are typi-cally newer applications that emerged in the earlyto mid-1990s in the private sector and, based onour respondents’ accounts, mainly after 1997 infederal government agencies. Intranets are web-sites within government agencies that connect thegovernment agency to its employees and theemployees to each other. In large multi-agencydepartments such as the Department of Transport-ation, intranets may be nested so that department-wide intranets and agency-specific websitesoperate simultaneously.

Information in bulky and expensive directories andmanuals of policies and procedures can be pro-vided in a more convenient, easy-to-find, andtimely way in an internal web network. Intranetsmake it possible for employers to communicatequickly and efficiently and to save time and moneyin the dissemination of news and policy changes.Intranets may be principally portals linking employ-ees to static information resources, or they mayinclude interactive elements that provide humanresources services such as the Employee Expresspayroll contract service. Some offer chat roomswhere employees can communicate outside of for-mal channels, air grievances, and seek solutions.

We will describe cases in which the intranet hasbecome a host for virtual meeting places for com-munities of interest that may yield program innova-tions or policy ideas. This communication functionin at least one of the cases described here hasspurred efforts to use the intranet as a vehicle fortrying to foster the emergence of an agency-wideculture, not weakening the strong divisional cul-tures but encouraging an overarching mission and identity.

The scope and complexity of agency intranetsappear to be somewhat more limited than thosefound in corporate settings. In corporations, appli-

cations range from functional web-based solutionsfor a single process such as travel arrangements toa multifunctional array of portals that create a per-sonalized work setting for employees. In govern-ment agencies, single functional solutions, such asEmployee Express, make it possible for employeesto enter changes in payroll information directlywithout the intervention of human resources actors.We found no cases, however, of functional portalsin which such web solutions fully covered an entireorganizational process such as human resources(HR). Except for Employee Express, intranets wereused to provide information to help employees find out how to request needed services from the HRoffices.

In many cases we found that federal agencies wereusing intranets as “thin portals” to communicatenews and policy changes to employees as well asoffering a reliable, updated place to find informa-tion about existing programs and procedures. Wedid find cases of agencies working toward “fat por-tal” solutions by creating opportunities for the cre-ation of self-organizing communities that couldfoster e-learning (see Figure 1). Similarly, weuncovered one case in which the department-wideintranet had been created to foster cultural unifica-tion; however, no evidence of success was notedby agency actors.

In the literature, a number of federal agencies havereported plans to use some form of intranet, but theextent of the content and the level of actual use inagencies vary widely. Before moving to the detailsof findings in this study, the efforts in other agenciesmight be noted. For example, intranets are centralto the IRS reform efforts by providing a communi-cations strategy for informing staff about changes in tax law, policy, and procedures, and for improv-ing agency-wide communication (Letter Report,04/21/2000, GAO/GGD-00-85). The NationalResources Center, the IRS’s intranet website, wascreated in 1998 to serve as a site for centralizedguidance on policy and procedures, to disseminateanswers to employee questions so that all staffwould have the same answers, and to providetraining for the provisions of the reform.

The difficulties the IRS had in setting up theNational Resources Center are typical of the prob-lems we found in intranet development. Many staff

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did not have computers that could access theintranet and others were unaware of the site. Theseproblems limited the success of reforms designedto bring consistency to procedures in the IRS.

Other examples of intranet uses for managementare included in the GAO report on successfulstrategies by chief information officers for enhancing agency information and knowledgemanagement (GAO/GAO-01-376G). In one case, the intranet at the Agency for InternationalDevelopment was used to make press clippingsavailable to staff, a significant improvement inspeed and cost from traditional methods. In theVeterans Health Administration, intranet access toperformance information such as patient satisfac-tion data is used to encourage performanceimprovement (GAO/GAO-01-376G).

Many have noted the uses of intranets for speedingand personalizing human resources functions inorganizations (Holz, 1997). GAO reports uses ofintranets in private firms to foster human capitaldevelopment that can serve as models for govern-mental agencies (GAO/GGD-00-28). Integratinghuman capital staff into management teams directlyor via an intranet is seen as an exemplary develop-ment. GAO also reports on an exemplary use at Federal Express, where senior managers apply an automated intranet-based tool to assess theleader skills, potential, and development needs of

mid-level managers so that new assignments andpromotions can be made quickly and effectively.

How relationships between governments andemployees can be facilitated through the use of intranets is the focus of the research here.

Field Research Questions andHypothesesBased on the development of intranets and e-gov-ernment solutions in the federal government, weexpected to find a range of intranet designs andpurposes—from simple newscasts to sophisticatedportals linking employees to sites for humanresources needs, travel planning, training, and self-designed collaborative linkages. In fact, we found anarrower range of designs than expected. The rea-sons for this and other patterns in the developmentof intranets emerge from the individual case studies.

The examples are based on case studies in sixagencies. We interviewed several individuals in theDepartment of Transportation, the Department ofHousing and Urban Development, the Environ-mental Protection Agency, and the General ServicesAdministration. We interviewed several respondentsin different offices of the Departments of Commerceand Justice, which are multi-agency departmentswith complex intranet structures. We began toidentify these agencies, and the offices and actors

Deg

ree

of C

ompl

exity

Functional PortalsDeliver a single management function (e.g.,

HR, Finance)

Fat PortalsComplex, multifunctional, enterprise

site which creates a personalized work environment

Functional SolutionA web application of a single management

process (e.g., new hire, travel)

Thin PortalsDelivers organization’s information and provides linkages to other intranet sites

Organization Scope

Figure 1: How Organizations Are Using Intranets

(Diagram adapted from PricewaterhouseCoopers, Introduction to B2E and G2E Solutions, April 1, 2001)

Wide

Low

Narrow

Hig

h

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within them, from leads provided by the ChiefInformation Officers Council, its E-GovernmentCommittee, and its Intranet Roundtable. Additionalcontacts were recommended by these actors. Ourrationale for this approach to selecting cases wasthat we wanted to optimize our chances of findingthe most advanced and sophisticated examples ofintranets rather than a representative sample of allstages of intranet development in federal agencies.Case studies of agencies with little or no experi-ence with intranets would not offer much guidanceabout the potential of intranets or the directions inwhich agencies want them to develop. The emerg-ing vision of intranets as key management tools ingovernment is more easily observed in agenciesthat are more advanced in their exploration ofintranet use and its limitations.

We posed questions about the current state ofagency intranets, their origins, and major changesto the site. In several cases we were able to docu-ment the design of sites at different stages of devel-opment. We questioned actors about the originalpurposes and motivations behind intranet creation.We tried to determine what pressures within thefederal setting might encourage intranets. We alsoprobed the sources and level of resources availablefor development. The composition and mission definition of intranet development teams wereinvestigated. Agencies differed in whether theintranet was allocated its own team or had to shareresources with Internet staff. Some agencies putweb technicians at the head of projects while othersplaced managers in charge. As research progressed,we also became aware of the need for agencies toencourage intranet recognition and usage, and sowe came to collect stories about how the intranetwas marketed to agency staff. Finally, we investi-gated other factors that appear to have encouragedor impeded intranet development. We turn next tothe details of these cases.

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Department of Transportation(DOT)The director of the Department of Transportationintranet development team also heads up theIntranet Roundtable of the E-Government Committeeof the Chief Information Officers Council. Thedirector came to DOT after successfully creating an intranet at the Department of Housing andUrban Development (HUD). The task set for thedirector was to create a single intranet for DOT’s11 operating divisions, including the Federal AviationAdministration, the U.S. Coast Guard, and theFederal Highway Administration. Each of thesealready had a functioning intranet, and the admin-istration at DOT believed that strong cultural iden-tities within some of these divisions prevented asingle DOT ethos from emerging. It was hoped thatthe intranet could foster the development of anoverarching DOT culture by generating strong link-ages across divisions. There was strong top-levelsupport for this objective from then DOT SecretaryRodney Slater.

In the summer of 2000, a reorganization created ane-government unit within the newly designed Officeof the Chief Information Officer. There were fewresources available for intranet development. Perhapseven more important, however, the intranet teamwas tasked with creating and maintaining both thedepartment’s Internet website and its new intranet.The intranet shared resources with the better recog-nized and established external website. The existingintranet was a static page with few features andlow usage.

Shortly thereafter, in September 2000, a contractfor a new intranet was negotiated, and a new pro-totype was tested in December. Then followed anintense period of consultations with managers andincorporation of their suggestions into the new site.Buy-in by the central and divisional managers wasseen as key if the new agency-wide intranet was to be a success, given that there were already asmany as 11 intranet sites within the department. In considering what new features might be appeal-ing to department employees, the team directorfocused on crosscutting issues and services. Thoughin many cases human resources functions arecrosscutting, here they were already decentralizedinto the divisions. Instead, the director consideredwhat the central site could offer in the way of communication and information resources. Online communication, e-mail, chat rooms, and access to performance measurement databases weredesigned into the system. Design choices weremade to use known terminology and managementcategories rather than requiring employees to mas-ter new website language. This simple principlewas credited with contributing to the later successof the site.

Standard elements available on each employeehome page include:

• Links to organization and budget information

• Breaking news features and access to onlinenews services, news clippings, and specializedtransportation publications

• Archives of past announcements

Design and Development of Intranetsin Federal Government Agencies

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• Library resources, including links to the in-house library, online publications, policy statements, reference works, and other govern-ment document repositories including GPO[Government Printing Office] Access andFedWorld

• Work tools such as proprietary online collabo-ration software, databases and analysis soft-ware, and work-related forms

• Feedback links to intranet designers

• Department directory

• Department-wide human resources programinformation, including information aboutawards, benefits, wellness programs, jobopportunities, training, and information about balancing work and family

• Department calendar

An important characteristic of the new site, andone that designers were particularly happy with, is that employees can personalize the content oftheir home page on the intranet. Each employeecan create his or her own version of the elementslisted above. The DOT intranet team had investi-gated the use of portal technologies but found themto be too expensive and decided to use existingsoftware that enabled some level of personaliza-tion. A personally selected menu might includepages for:

• Personal calendar

• Administrative tools

• Modifying links to self-selected virtual groupsand communities, as well as group sites

• Dictionary

Figure 2: Department of Transportation Intranet Home Page

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• Weather

• Google

The next-generation intranet is now in design. It willfeature interactive travel and training features forgenerating tickets and arranging for training ratherthan offering only forms and information about pro-cedures and policy, as in the 2001 version.

Another important innovation at DOT is thatemployees can initiate online groups to collaborateabout task issues or emerging program interests.Standardized templates for the groups make it easyto create a group and put up content on groupspaces. Some groups have spawned subgroupsinterested in collaborating on particular problemsor work issues. A page called “My Modules” offerstools for creating and altering the personalizedhome page, and for creating and altering contentand membership on group pages. The contentmodification page offers a menu-driven method for:

• Creating, modifying, or deleting new content in groups

• Creating a new group

• Managing new group memberships

• Managing the group bulletin board

• Reviewing feedback on the site

• Creating a calendar event

• Creating a link to a group

• Creating an employee recognition article

There are few procedures, or barriers, for volun-teers who want to join, create, or volunteer to heada community of interest. Groups can be open orprivate, and content can also be private to thegroup, encouraging use of the virtual groups forcontroversial or embryonic ideas. Documents and content can be uploaded to a bulletin board.Conversation takes place through chat rooms thatcan be open and public or password-protected andprivate. There is no group writing or special collab-oration software such as Lotus Notes in use nor is it planned. Rather, access is kept simple and trans-parent. Open and closed groups can be created,and members can be limited and, in some cases,removed. The web administrator can also monitor

a community and remove members. Groups formand disperse as needed.

The object, of course, of making it easy to formthese groups and share information is to fosterintra-agency communication and collaboration andthereby encourage a unified DOT-wide culture, or“One DOT.” The organizational effects of fosteringthe online communities may be more complex anduseful, however. These groups constitute a kind ofself-organizing process that may lead to new multi-agency projects and smoother interdivisional policydevelopment. They may also spawn innovations inprogram ideas as agents from different sectors ofthe department chat, complain, or join forces totackle problems.

While there has been no evaluation of whether a unified culture or self-organizing teams haveemerged, there is evidence that the 2001 designchanges have made the site far more attractive anduseful than its earlier version. In May 2001, beforethe new design was online, there were 278,000 hitsto the site, while in July 2001, after the changes,there were 2,700,000 hits. While these increasesare large, they also represent a great deal of effortto prepare managers and staff for the changes andencourage them to use the site.

The intranet team leader attributes the relative suc-cess of DOTnet to at least three key factors:

• Putting managers in charge of design decisions

• Working with managers to identify usefulIntranet functions

• Gaining the active support of top managementin promoting the use of the site

Putting program and personnel managers rather thanweb technicians in the lead in design was importantto the success of the DOT intranet, as it had beenat HUD. Rather than allowing technical capacity toshape the design of functions, terminology, and lay-out, the intranet team leader gave managers, amongwhom she includes herself, the task of determiningwhat information would be useful. Rather than mak-ing employees learn the web design program termi-nology, language already in use was employed.New ideas emerged from discussions with depart-mental managers and were pilot-tested with them.

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Lessons Learned• High levels of use and acceptance do not hap-

pen as a matter of course. High levels of usemust be designed into to the site with self-consciously user-friendly terminology andfunctions that make sense to organizationmembers and clearly contribute to their abilityto do their work. Intranets built to demonstrateprogressiveness through digital management do not convince members of their usefulness.

• Design decisions placed in the hands of man-agers make intranet applications that contributeto management tasks, especially communicationand coordination.

• Group membership rises when employees areallowed to form their own groups and conductgroup work with some autonomy and privacy(though actual contributions to managementeffectiveness and self-organization are notknown).

• When intranets and the public access websitemust share design and maintenance teams, theintranet is likely to have a lower priority.

• Multiple divisional intranets make the creationand use of an umbrella intranet challenging.

Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopment (HUD)The Department of Housing and Urban Developmenthas had five iterations of its intranet beginning inNovember 1996. The first four, called “HUDweb,”were referred to as “HUD’s Internal InformationNetwork.” From 1996 to 2000, the HUDweb wasmodified on a yearly basis, with the goal of simpli-fying the website and making it more useful toemployees. A major rethinking and revision of thewebsite occurred in 2001 with the unveiling of acustomizable intranet renamed “hud@work.”

In August 1996, HUD decided to “add on” anintranet in response to perceived managementproblems, especially breakdowns in communica-tion. The initial idea for an intranet came from thetechnical team who worked on the public accesswebsite, but management staff wanted to play a prominent role in its development and design. The intranet was viewed as a management tool toimprove communications. The idea was that the

agency could “work smarter, not harder, withoutpaper.” From the beginning, the intranet, orHUDweb, had support from HUD’s leadership.Although not directly concerned about the man-agement problems and the potential of an intranetfor solving those problems, then Secretary HenryCisneros was taken with the Clinton administra-tion’s vision of the Internet as a superhighway andunderstood that a HUD intranet might contribute to getting computers into public housing.

The technical team that worked on developing theintranet was dedicated to that project and separatefrom the technical team working on Internet proj-ects. The intranet team recognized that the audi-ences for the two systems were also different. Indeveloping the Internet website, staff needed tothink about how citizens and nonprofit groupswere likely to use HUD’s website. In developingthe intranet, the focus shifted to thinking abouthow staff were likely to use the intranet. Theassumption was that staff would not access theintranet for things specific to their program, butwould want to be able to do things that were gen-eral to HUD as an organization, such as humanresource information and tasks.

From August through October 1996, the intranetteam worked with managers in general administra-tion on developing the conceptual content. Theintranet team reported to the deputy secretary. Inorganizing the planning for the intranet, manage-ment learned from its experience in the develop-ment of the HUD public access website, whichincluded staff volunteers on a working group at the planning stage. This resulted in a large workinggroup of about 35 people, mainly people withtechnical skills and without a department-wide perspective. There was no working group for theintranet but instead a small team including bothmanagement and technical people.

The team asked managers what questions theywere asked most often. Generally, their responsesconsisted of basic information questions thatentailed information exchange rather than problemsolving issues. The team developed broad topicsusing an almost intuitive common sense under-standing of what should be accessible on theintranet. In November 1996, a prototype of the firstHUDweb was launched. Top-level support was key

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at this stage. Indeed, the information technologydirector had a blank check to work toward the success of the prototype. The intranet team heldbriefings and worked through a network of staff toencourage use of HUDweb. Although the intranethad support at the secretary’s level, managerswithin HUD often regarded it as the Internet’s“baby sister” and saw the public access website as the primary electronic work site.

As is often the case in technological adoptions,exogenous events played a critical role. Shortlyafter the launch of the second version of HUDweb,Congress proposed abolishing HUD, and SecretaryCisneros decided that the intranet would be a goodway to communicate with staff about the future of

HUD. The resulting information campaign broughtemployees to the intranet on a more routine basis.When staff accessed the intranet, they first saw amessage from the secretary in the center of thehome page. During the tenure of Secretary AndrewCuomo, there was further development of intranetcontent with particular attention to what wasimportant to the staff. The intranet home page wasorganized by topics: What’s New; Feature; HomePage; and Highlights.

The availability of information in both paper andelectronic forms posed a problem in terms of gen-erating and sustaining employee use of the intranet.If information was sent to all employees or postedon bulletin boards, then employees had less reason

Figure 3: hud@work Intranet Home Page

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to access the intranet. A major boost in intranet use occurred when the Office of Personnel ceasedprinting vacancy announcements and posted them only on the intranet. When Secretary Cuomoannounced there would be a cut in HUD staff from12,000 to 7,000 and suggested that staff checkHUDweb the following Monday for job announce-ments, the server crashed.

At the time of budgetary cutbacks, the intranetoffered a chat room for staff to post commentsanonymously. The purpose was to enable employ-ees to discuss issues associated with managingchange in the agency. The chat room was moder-ated by a chair, and both the secretary and deputysecretary participated for a while. There were 6,000discrete users at one time. As the budgetary crisispassed, use of chat rooms diminished.

In 1998, there was a Web Awareness Day inWashington and in the regional offices to launch“two websites ➔ one hud” to teach staff the differ-ent benefits of HUD’s public access website andintranet (see Figure 4). The message was thatemployees should use HUDweb—the intranet—todo their job; the deputy secretary’s message wasthat the intranet was a “tool, not a toy.” On theother hand, HUD’s external website was designedfor the public as a clearinghouse of informationand services for consumers and business partners.As a result of this campaign, there was a doublingof intranet hits in six months, and that level of usewas sustained for the next several years.

By 2000, HUDweb was four years old. With a con-sistent look and feel, it was used by employees inthe field offices and Washington. It was operatedby a small, centralized group. Employees’ comput-ers opened to HUDweb’s home page with a focusand theme for the day. HUDweb was not personal-ized to each staff person.

One of the recurring problems in generating andsustaining employee use of HUD’s intranet contin-ued to be differentiating it from HUD’s Internetwebsite. The names of both were very similar:HUDweb and HUD.gov. The look and colors of the two websites were also very similar. In 2000 a contest was held to rename HUD’s intranet. The new name, announced at a HUD Web Day,was hud@work. Red became the primary color for

HUD.gov; for hud@work, it was green. The motto“if it’s green, it can’t be seen” was crafted to remindemployees of the difference between the two sites.

As a result of focus groups with employees,hud@work added a customization feature. Whenemployees booted up their computers, thehud@work page appeared. Four items appeared on every employee’s intranet home page:

• Daily message from the secretary

• Today’s feature, which can be a news or personnel item

• Employee highlights including personnelannouncements and an employee locator

• “What’s New” feature, which includes person-nel rule announcements and policy statements

Features that appear automatically in the left tool-bar include:

• Chat

• Groups

• Handbooks and forms

Figure 4: HUD Intranet Flyer

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• Headquarters offices

• Jobs and benefits

• Local offices

• Management

• Procedures

• Resources online

• Work online

• Suggestions

• Staff locator

• Search

Employees also have links to design the layout andcontent of the page. They can personalize otherfeatures they wish to include from five categories:hud@work tools, personal tools, working groups,Internet tools, and federal government tools.

The current iteration of HUD’s intranet has virtualteam technology whereby staff can exchange files,engage in real-time chat, teleconference, worktogether from different geographic locations, and setup meetings. Although managers are keen on thiscapability in concept, they seem reluctant to use it.

Lessons Learned• Intranets should be designed to work in har-

mony with the culture of the organization.Intranet modifications should involve employ-ees in design and solicit feedback from employ-ees on what is, and is not, working for them.

• Support at the secretary’s level is similarlyimportant for the intranet to be a department-wide success. It is likely that various bureaus or field offices within a department will initiatetheir own intranets. But the value of a depart-ment-wide intranet is that it serves a depart-ment-wide service and function. Although thereis often field office resistance to Washingtonoversight, there is no need for field offices toduplicate the departmental information andservices offered by the department’s intranet.

• Development of the intranet should be drivenby management goals and involve manage-ment staff. It should not be driven by the tech-nical team alone. Indeed, a technical

perspective can limit the possibilities. If design-ers think in terms of what the technology cando, they are limited by the current hardwareand software. Common sense and openness tonew ideas appeared to be more important thana sophisticated understanding of the technol-ogy. Indeed, the most successful developmentpattern involved management staff developingwish lists of applications and the technicalpeople then determining the operational capabilities.

• Marketing the intranet within the agency is also key to success. Throughout the developmentand deployment of the five iterations of HUD’sintranet, the intranet team was conscious of theneed to involve staff and managers, and to pro-mote the advantages of the intranet. Sloganssuch as “smart HUD employees work online”were typical of these promotions. Two market-ing campaigns were especially important atHUD: the 1998 campaign “two websites ➔one hud” and the 2001 customizablehud@work, advertised as “HUD’s NextGeneration Intranet.”

Environmental Protection Agency(EPA)The EPA’s intranet, EPA@Work, became availableagency-wide in January 1998. The idea behind theintranet was to put information that is important to EPA employees at their fingertips: “Multiplesources of information to help EPA employeeseffectively do their jobs are just a click away.” Thelatest iteration of the EPA intranet utilizes a newtasks and topics “portal” design by which EPAemployees can quickly access agency processesand areas of interest by subject.

The first EPA intranet was not a spin-off from EPA’sInternet site, but resulted from the realization thatother agencies were developing intranets and thatthere would be value from an EPA intranet. A teamof three, operating from the Office of InformationResources and Management but with support fromthe top of the agency, developed the prototypes ofthe intranet and oversaw its initial agency-widedeployment in January 1998. The members of theteam all had some computer and technical back-ground but were basically interested in information

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Figure 5: EPA@Work Intranet Home Page

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applications. In developing applications, teammembers interviewed managers of various pro-grams to identify areas where the intranet mightoffer new opportunities. The intranet did not haveits own budget; instead, funding came from thebudget for the public access website.

Information was organized similarly on the EPAintranet and its Internet. In each case librarians catalogued metadata records using a hierarchy ofcontrol terms. In the case of the intranet, materialwas organized as text-based links under three main topics:

• Across the Agency—news from the EPA admin-istrator, recent agency initiatives, contacts andwork groups, news, and the calendar

• Management and Administration—employmentand job openings, budgeting and purchasing,computers and networks, internal policy site,and employee services

• EPA’s Mission—including major recent researchinitiatives, Congressional action, and access toboth summary and full text presentation of thelaws and regulations under which the agencyoperates

The links from the EPA@Work front page include:

• Search and locator functions

• Link to the EPA external website (epa.gov)

• Organization and locations with charts of headquarters and regional offices

• Information resources, with calendar and e-mail

• Links for comments and help

• Link to the headquarters intranet, with featuresfor making changes in personnel documents,travel information and forms, customer satisfaction program, contract forms, humanresources, and a link to information on admin-istrative policies

Several other components of EPA, including theregional offices, had intranets of their own. Thegoal for the agency-wide intranet was not to dupli-cate these but to provide information and functionsthat were common to all EPA employees.

About 70 percent of the EPA@Work content hasbeen facilities-oriented including activities such asoffice cleaning, copying, and parking. One func-tion that employees have consistently used andfound valuable is the “EPA locator” by which staffcan find contact information for other employeesand contractors. This function has been prominenton all iterations of EPA@Work. Another popularfunction involves forms and information on travel.Forms can be downloaded and printed, but cannotyet be completed and submitted online.

The EPA intranet offers the capability of workgroups, chat rooms, and collaboration through itslicense for Lotus Notes and Lotus Notes Mail. Thesemore interactive functions have not yet been usedwidely in the agency because of training require-ments, firewalls, and costs. The intranet teamrecently had a demonstration of the PeopleSoft portal, which would allow customization and morecollaboration and flexibility; this may be the nextiteration of EPA@Work.

Lessons Learned• Marketing of the intranet to employees has

been important throughout its developmentsand deployments. At various points, “IntranetWeeks” were held when the intranet team dida “dog and pony” show to illustrate the bene-fits and capabilities of the intranet. Althoughattendance tended to be low at such events,the team found these to be an important way of publicizing the intranet. For the launch ofthe September 2001 iteration, the intranet teamdesigned a “power-up with EPA@Work” cam-paign using an “Empower Bar” theme to con-vey the idea that employees who are hungryfor information can get “vital, up-to-date infor-mation” by starting their day with the “newand improved” agency intranet. This campaigninvolved posters, flyers, and bookmarks withthe same slogans and images.

• The EPA intranet team believed it was impor-tant to expand the intranet as the technologybecame available to do more on it. The teamtended to develop its own software and not be constrained by what was available “off theshelf.” Money was a constraint and affectedwhat the team was able to develop; for exam-ple, portal technologies were too expensive.

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General Services Administration(GSA)The GSA intranet, InSite, was developed in 1996 as a result of an initiative offered by David Barram,the GSA administrator during the second Clintonadministration. Barram had come from privateindustry, had a close relationship with AOL, andwas surprised at the lack of online activities atGSA. GSA had developed an Internet site in 1994for citizen and business access, but the site was not accessible from within GSA. There were somesmall intranets operating within areas of GSA, butno agency-wide intranet. At a GSA informationtechnology meeting in 1996, Barram proposed thathe order GSA to offer employees Internet and intranetaccess within four months, by Flag Day (June 14,1996). The chief financial officer shared the viewthat an intranet would enhance GSA’s ability toconduct its business. However, others feared that ifemployees were able to browse the Internet, theymight be distracted by other online activities.

In response to the GSA administrator’s proposal,the chief information officer (CIO) worked with a small team to make GSA’s computer networkInternet accessible and to develop a vision for anintranet. GSA’s intranet was “home-grown,” largelybased on the experiences of team members in navi-gating Internet sites. There were five major cate-gories of features for the GSA intranet includingtravel and human resources. The administrator, whoretained a close interest and offered several ideasfrom his industry experience, named the site“InSite.” The Office of Communications marketedthe rollout on Flag Day 1996 and planned the offi-cial announcement. The rollout highlighted GSA’sdesire to have a useful site for its employees andemphasized the practical aspects of how to browsethe intranet and the “do’s and don’ts” of using it.

It took over a year before intranet use took off. Keyto its success was having it become a work site, not just a document site. The bulletin board area of the intranet, called “My 2 Cents,” was a popularfeature that brought employees to the intranet. Thisbegan as an anonymous, open bulletin board forthe posting of questions and answers, but problemsarose as the comments digressed and some users

failed to understand “netiquette.” The GSA adminis-trator intervened by monitoring the bulletin board,responding to comments, and offering cash awardsfor suggestions. He also encouraged other topexecutives within GSA to participate, but somemanagers were reluctant to reply by name.

As the intranet became more robust and more of a tool, employees gravitated to the site. Basic fea-tures such as a telephone directory drew people tothe site. The intranet team still struggles with makingit more useful to the end users. At this time, there is no collaborative work space on the intranet, butthere are some pilots under way. Other methods of knowledge sharing, such as Lotus Notes andQuick Place, are being investigated. One idea thatis attracting interest is using the intranet as a tool of “knowledge management,” but at this point theterms and labels are somewhat fuzzy to managers,who are more business oriented.

Lessons Learned• Functionality is key to success. If the intranet

offers useful services, employees will come to it.

• Although the GSA-wide intranet was initiatedfrom the top of the agency, top managementencouraged experimentation and further devel-opment by others in the organization when itbecame available. Experimentation by subunitshad benefits in that employees had some senseof ownership over the intranet and were enthu-siastic about its possibilities. But this strategyhad costs because employees created subunitintranets and quickly became more attached tothem than to the GSA intranet.

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Figure 6: GSA InSite Intranet Home Page

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Department of CommerceWe were able to investigate intranet use at theDepartment of Commerce from two points of view.The Office of the Secretary houses the department’sinformation resource management functions andsupports the umbrella intranet for the entire depart-ment. The second perspective is from one of theseven operating units of the department, the U.S.Commercial Service, which maintains its ownintranet. Like Transportation, the Department ofCommerce is in some ways a holding companywith separate divisions, each with its own strongidentity, mission, and culture. This makes the devel-opment of an intranet challenging because it mustovercome not only the typical resistance to newtechnologies, but also the insular tendencies of his-torically entrenched divisions.

CS Intranet. The intranet for the Department ofCommerce’s Commercial Service (CS Intranet) ismuch more elaborate and sophisticated than itsdepartment-wide counterpart, which is more of asite map or portal. The present Commercial Servicesite is the third-generation design, and staff expectsonly cosmetic changes in the immediate future,although eventually they expect to add a searchfunction. The CS site is not personalized, thoughsecurity and authentication were recent issues, and the site is password protected.

The reasons behind the construction of the siteappear to be most clearly tied to the need to sharebusiness process software. The core task in the CS is to match business opportunities to interestedinvestors here and abroad. Databases for each, categorized in various ways, allow CS staff to help accomplish this commercial matchmaking.Business process software and databases are sharedon the intranet. The software helps staff coordinateevents for bringing businesses together and makearrangements for foreign trade missions. Teamworkis a key element of this commercial matchingwork. The final brokering of deals is done in personor by phone, but the information needed to knowwhat deals are possible is made available with thesoftware. A unified intranet makes it easier to com-municate and coordinate information among the287 offices outside of Washington, D.C. Intranetsoftware has made it possible for staff to improveforecasts of event attendance, for example.

The current intranet was created by “one or two”outside contractors and CS agency people. Many of the programs and ideas for work elements on the intranet came from teams within CS who areable to get management support for their idea. Theintranet development process was incremental.Ideas for applications emerged in response to prob-lems in the field. There is only a limited level ofsupport for project development, however, andthere are more ideas than resources available.Projects must be readily seen to have value forthem to get the needed in-house support. Not allideas are successfully translated into applications,however. For example, staff wanted an interactivemeeting scheduler for coordination among theremote offices, but found they could not do it evenwith a modest investment in new software.

Software expense is an issue. CS Intranet hasacquired a shared document application, and usesinstant chat and some large data sets. However,staff did not believe the division could afford desirable B2G software. Additional externallydesigned software is desired but seen as out ofreach. Established government sites such asEmployee Express are available from CS Intranet.Some of the material for the intranet also camefrom the Commerce Department’s Internet site.

Seven main programs constitute the basic businessprocesses. Menus for these programs are organizedas follows on the site:

• eMenus, including applications to arrangetrade events, make contacts, and obtainfinance and product management

• Programs to match businesses with investors,arrange trade fairs, identify likely business andtrading partners, provide access to marketresearch and commercial news

• Marketing materials, including success storiesand best practices, newsletters, and pressreleases

• Critical databases for market research, perfor-mance measures, and the Commercial ServiceOperations Manual

• Employee search programs

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• News

• Personnel, including Employee Express, jobannouncements, and travel policies

Much of the software in these menus requires train-ing to use. Descriptions of training opportunities,though not the courses themselves, are availableonline. Interview comments suggest that it has not been easy to get as widespread a use of theapplications as desired. As the intranet content has become more valuable to staff, and moreimportant within the organization, its use hasincreased.

Office of the Secretary, Department of CommerceIntranet. The intranet for the Department ofCommerce as a whole was created as part of for-mer Secretary William Daley’s effort to quicklyestablish a digital capacity. He challenged the

department to become a “digital department” in 45 days and built consensus for this with a series of town hall meetings. His vision was to have inter-active features on the intranet permitting membersto conduct international business, communicate,and make travel arrangements online, for example.Communication was perhaps the largest issue. With 50,000 employees to inform, a wide-reachingcommunications method was a necessity. In 1999,designers were challenged to come up with a homepage to show quick success with e-government inline with the Clinton administration’s priorities.Many of the individual program divisions, such as the Bureau of the Census and the CommercialService, already had their own intranet, somelargely based on their Internet websites. The currentsecretary has not yet focused attention on thedepartment-wide intranet at this point, but staffexpect this to happen.

Figure 7: Office of the Secretary, Department of Commerce Intranet Home Page

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Cultural consolidation of the seven program divi-sions of Commerce was not a top priority, so thismission for the intranet was not a driving force, asit was for Transportation. As a result, few generalpurpose applications have emerged. The focus sofar has been as a source for important departmentaldocuments, forms, policy statements, and informa-tion about building maintenance services andmeeting spaces. Interactive features such as travelplanning are considerations for the near future.Home access is an objective, and collaborativeonline work group programs have also beenexplored, but are not yet features of the intranet. Apilot project testing online collaboration found thatface-to-face communication was preferred.

The site functions largely as a portal, but onedesigned to provide easy access to applicationsused with outside customers, with less attentionplaced on employee needs. The present site wascreated in the Public Affairs Office within theOffice of the Secretary. Library staff and web tech-nicians are represented on the design team. For the most part, the intranet site features informationlinks, not interactive functions. The site containslinks to a number of services:

• Major offices in the Office of the Secretary

• Department policy statements on administra-tion, civil rights, security

• Department news and documents

• Employee services, including cafeteria informa-tion, forms, mail and telephone directories,and travel policy information

• Employee resources including links toEmployee Express, the employee handbook,orientation

• Services for building maintenance

Some effort has gone into making staff aware of thesite, but marketing has not been aggressive. Thosewho find the site are reported to like it. A demon-stration at a town meeting in 1999 and one in thesummer of 2000 introduced the site. Commitmentto the site and its maintenance have been issues.Synergy between the intranet and Internet sites forthe department is seen as the key to maintainingthe site and keeping information up-to-date.

Resources have been a problem, too. The intranetand Internet sites share a technical staff and a com-mon budget, but funds for either are scarce. In gen-eral, the intranets within the divisions are viewedas more sophisticated and are apparently betterfunded and maintained than the umbrella intranet,because they use applications that interact with the public.

Lessons Learned• With more specialized and sophisticated soft-

ware come barriers to use and the need fortraining that can impede the full use of thecapacity of intranets.

• Intranets may be created in response to themandate for digital government as well as inresponse to a specific need.

• Library-based designers, in contrast to designteams composed of management or technicalmembers, tend to create information resourcelinks rather than group collaboration or inter-active applications.

• Cost-conscious agencies can create intranetsites, with minimal use of outside contractors,using incremental changes to existing platforms.

Department of Justice (DOJ)The intranet at the Department of Justice, DOJnet,was created in 1998 as a spin-off of the formationof the department’s Internet site, established earlier.The designers and technical systems staff were orig-inally brought into the organization to determinehow to respond to Freedom of Information Actrequirements to make agency data available to thepublic. Another purpose was to serve the Clinger-Cohen Act requiring agencies to make informationand services available online. The mandate by theClinton administration to make a “Kid’s” Internetpage available at each agency was a third impetus.DOJ respondents believe the federal push has beenfirst for the Internet to link clients and employees.The intranet emerged from the concerns of thedepartment’s chief information officer that anumbrella intranet was needed to provide informa-tion and better communication to the departmentas a whole. Some information was being copiedand mailed to employees across the 36 compo-nents of the department. For example, a recently

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added subscription to an online news servicelinked to the intranet replaced in-house news clip-ping, copying, and distributing. Other news,administrative, and policy documents were beingduplicated in the separate, divisional intranets. LikeCommerce and Transportation, the Department ofJustice houses a number of agencies with separateidentities and their own intranets.

Both the Internet and intranet sites at Justice aremaintained and designed by the same staff group,composed of computer technicians and libraryinformation resource specialists. As the Internet sitewas developing, the technicians quickly realizedthey needed help with content, and the involvementof the library staff in web design evolved from that.The technicians work to maintain the server andwrite the html code. The intranet content is now acomponent of the DOJ library, which is developingan information resource management specialty. Thelibrary staff design the content of both the Internetand intranet sites including the appearance and theorganization of the data. This placement of the webdesign function is seen to have affected both thelibrary and the design process.

Funding for both the intranet and Internet sitescomes from the same budget line. No particularlevel of resources is allocated to the intranet, andfunds are tight. Cuts in the Department of Justicebudget are more likely to come out of administra-tive funds than funds seen to affect crime fightingmore directly. Only the first version of the intranetwas designed by a contractor. Since then all workhas been in-house.

Library staff determined the content of the sitebased on the types of reference informationrequests they receive in the library. Ideas for linkswere based first on the reference sources thatemployees ask for most often. Librarians also brain-stormed about what information might be useful,examined other sites, and gleaned ideas fromIntranet Roundtable participants. Other informationsupport staff in personnel, litigation, and manage-ment offices were queried about what requests forinformation they receive most often.

The site is largely non-interactive at present. Itoffers links to the most recent department policyfiles and government sites such as Employee

Express. Forms can be printed and mailed, but notfiled online. The major categories of services andinformation sources on the departmental intranetsite in October 2001 were:

• News and Events, including today’s news clips

• People, Places, and Offices, employee organi-zations, shuttle bus routes, and commercialdirectories

• Research Resources, including library links,full-text legal decisions and manuals, asset forfeiture information

• Career Development, including job listings,résumé builder, training opportunities, e-learning

• Your Workplace, with links to ethics laws, EEOcomplaint forms, office supplies, personnelinformation

• Your Finances, with links to investments andsavings plans, insurance information, payrollinformation, Employee Express, and retirementcalculators

• Health and Welfare, including health benefits,employee assistance program, work life andflextime information, and leave bank

• Technical Information on web developmenttraining

• Travel and Weather

Categories as well as contents are much expandedfrom the previous version.

The next generation of the intranet is to be moreinteractive, but this will take a major change inarchitecture and represents a major investment. The information resource staff will depend on theInternet builders in the department for this advance.Overcoming security issues and including electronicsignatures will mean that the system will be able totake time and attendance information online, mak-ing the site heavily used.

Virtual groups and collaboration are features ofintranet work sites within the program divisions,where litigation work, such as briefs, may beshared. Many such work spaces are confidentialand password protected. The department also spon-sors extranets, cross-divisional work spaces, that

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are secure. They are used for work involving inter-departmental jobs such as between Treasury andthe IRS. The DOJ-wide intranet itself does not yethave applications for collaborative work.

An example of one type of interagency intranet isthe Consolidated Assets Tracking System, CATS.This system is used in five agencies in officesacross the country to maintain an up-to-dateinventory of assets seized under drug, money laundering, and racketeering statutes. Most officesin the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA),Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), Immigrationand Naturalization Service (INS), the U.S. MarshalsService, and the U.S. Attorney’s offices have accessto a computer dedicated to this system. The systemitself is not interactive, but a special interagency e-mail links users. The system connects to the DOJintranet from the Research Resources page. Therehas not been funding for marketing the program,and designers estimate that only about half ofthose eligible to use it know about it. Improve-ments planned include moving from a DOS-basedto a Windows-based operating system.

Security issues in the department complicate thecreation of an intranet considerably. The FBI andDEA have stand-alone computers not linked toother DOJ sites, including DOJnet. Separate com-puters available in some offices do link into thedepartment-wide intranet, but the transition is awkward and inconvenient. These and other lawenforcement divisions do have their own intranets.Because some of the information on the intranetmay be sensitive, agency respondents asked us notto reproduce their home page.

Little has been done to explicitly market DOJnet,but its value has been recognized within thedepartment. Its use has snowballed. One of theactions that helped popularize the site was to giveit links to personnel functions and personal financeinformation. Highlights of news and new informa-tion items are also sent out by e-mail, makingmembers aware of what is available at the site. E-mails also announce the existence of an archiveof past items and provide a link to the archive onthe intranet. At present, the Netscape home pagefor employees is the DOJ Internet website. DOJ isconsidering making the department intranet homepage the home page for all employees. There is

some reluctance to do this, however, because ofthe strong identity employees have with the divi-sions and divisional intranets.

Lessons Learned• Once again we observe that when Internet and

intranet sites are funded from the same budgetand must share allocations, the Internet seemsto get the larger share of funding.

• Funding for intranet and Internet sites, alongwith other administration-related functions, ismore readily cut from tight budgets than other,more directly mission-focused work.

• Cost-conscious agencies must typically rely onin-house solutions and do not necessarily turnto outside consultants.

• Security issues in some agencies create chal-lenging conditions for intranets since sensitivedata must be protected from unauthorizedaccess. This has meant stand-alone computersand the absence of linkages among intranets.

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Since intranet uses for human resources functionsare often the most common and well developed ofthe uses of intranets, the human resources applica-tions in the six agencies were examined in particu-lar detail.

Department of Transportation. The department-wide intranet offers crosscutting human resourcesfunctions at the Department of Transportation,while HR procedures that are specific to a divisionare provided on the divisions’ intranets. Most of theHR functions on the DOT-wide intranet are non-interactive, offering a central repository for informa-tion about awards, benefits—including long-termcare options—job opportunities, and work-life bal-ance. Centralizing this information was seen asoffering major savings in time and labor, though theamount has not been quantified.

Department of Housing and Urban Development.In developing an agency-wide intranet at HUD, theassumption was that staff would not access theintranet for things specific to their program, butwould want to be able to do things that were gen-eral to HUD as an organization, such as humanresource information and tasks. The design teamasked managers what questions they were askedmost often, and generally the responses related tobasic information questions that entailed informa-tion exchange rather than problem solving issues. A major boost in intranet use occurred whenPersonnel ceased printing vacancy announcementsand posted them only on the intranet. One of fourfeatures that appear on each employee’s intranethome page is Employee Highlights, including per-sonnel announcements and an employee locator.

Additionally, employees can select to personalizetheir page with features including handbooks,forms, jobs, and benefits.

Environmental Protection Agency. At EPA, one ofthree links from the EPA@Work front page is toHeadquarters Intranet, with features for makingchanges in personnel documents, travel informa-tion and forms, the customer satisfaction program,contract forms, human resources, and links to infor-mation on administrative policies. One functionthat employees have consistently found valuableand regularly use is the “EPA locator” by whichstaff can find contact information for other employ-ees and contractors. This function has been promi-nent on all iterations of EPA@Work. Anotherfunction that is popular involves forms and infor-mation on travel. Forms can be downloaded andprinted, but cannot yet be completed and submit-ted online.

At EPA, most of the HR functions that are availableinteractively at this time are made possible throughEmployee Express and the Thrift Savings Plan (TSP).EPA is in the process of implementing HR Pro, thePeopleSoft enterprise software that is being cus-tomized for EPA. When that is in place, employeeswill have access to their personnel records andemployee leave will be managed there. EPA alsohas an automated Employee Benefits InformationSystem (EBIS) through which employees canreceive a synopsis of their leave, TSP account hold-ings, and health and retirement benefits, eitherCivil Service Retirement System (CSRS) or FederalEmployees Retirement System (FERS) as appropri-ate. Finally, EPA has an automated job database

Human Resources Applications on Agency Intranets

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available on the public access site called EZHire(www.epa.gov/ezhire/), which will be linked fromthe intranet.

General Services Administration. InSite, the GSAintranet, includes five major categories of featuresincluding travel and human resources. As theintranet became more robust and more of a toolthat employees could use, staff gravitated to thesite. Basic features such as a telephone directorydrew people to the intranet. Currently, there aretwo HR/financial applications available throughInSite. One is FEDdesk, which is an applicationthat handles time and attendance records, traveland miscellaneous reimbursements, and cashawards. Another is Pay and Leave Statements, apayroll application that renders employees’ payrecords and permits employees to change addressand federal and state tax withholding information.

Department of Commerce. The department’sintranet provides information to employees on anumber of HR-related functions. It operates as aportal for information for employees such as direc-tories, travel policies, occupational safety issuesand reports, and information on health, retirement,and other benefits. These informational services,though not interactive, offer major savings in HRemployee time and printing costs. EmployeeExpress, the contract payroll service provider, isinteractive and makes it possible for employees tomake changes in payroll information online. Thissaves time for HR personnel who would otherwisehave to handle these changes. According to thestaff we interviewed, the greatest time savings fromthese intranet services is to the employees. Nolonger must they spend time trying to find the cor-rect HR specialist to see, since the information isalways available online. Such savings are neededbecause of major reductions in the size of the HRdepartment over the past decade. It is not a matterof transferring HR specialists to new tasks so muchas doing more with less.

Department of Justice. At Justice, the organization-wide intranet is also largely non-interactive.Information on health benefits, investments andsavings plans, employee assistance programs, andwork-life and flextime, as well as the leave bank,

are all available from the intranet. As in Commerce,Employee Express allows employees to makechanges in their payroll options without the inter-vention of HR specialists. While more interactiveHR functions are desired, such change is expectedto be expensive and had not been made six monthsafter we first heard of their plans.

Overall, the respondents readily acknowledged thatthe HR functions, both the more typical non-inter-active ones and the hoped-for interactive develop-ments, are enormous timesavers for HR staff who otherwise spend enormous amounts of timeresponding to requests for information. Printingcosts are also reduced through online provision ofnotices, rules, and directories. Many HR functionsare still performed on an individual basis, however,including benefits changes and choices, as well asevaluations and rewards.

31


FindingsWe can collate the lessons learned from each ofthe case studies into five overall observations.

Finding One: In large multi-divisional depart-ments, divisional or regional intranets predate the department-wide intranet and pose challengesfor establishing a niche for an umbrella intranet.In five of the six agencies examined—Transportation,EPA, GSA, Commerce, and Justice—divisionalintranets existed prior to the creation of a depart-ment-wide intranet. In several agencies, employeesin those divisions had become accustomed to using their divisional intranets in their day-to-dayoperations. This was particularly apparent for theDepartment of Commerce’s Commercial ServicesIntranet—which has become integral to matchingbusiness opportunities and interested investors, the core function of the division—and for theDepartment of Justice’s interagency intranet, theConsolidated Assets Tracking System. In both cases,much of the work of divisions was actually con-ducted on the intranet.

Not only did these agencies have small task-oriented intranets, but there were also robust divi-sional intranets. For example, at DOT, each of the11 operating divisions had a functioning intranet.At EPA, each of the regional offices had intranets of their own. Within the Department of Justice, anumber of agencies with separate identities andestablished functions, such as the FBI and INS,have their own intranets.

In several agencies, individual program or divisionintranets are regarded as more sophisticated andappear to be better funded and maintained than the agency-wide intranet. Three factors seem toaccount for this. First, over time these smallerintranets have been adapted to their users’ needsand have developed a clientele through repeatedexperiences. Second, fewer people to appeal toand a more focused functionality have made it easier for these intranets to be responsive to theirusers. And, third, most of these divisions make adirect contribution to the public, and although theintranets are not accessible to the public, they dosupport the public service mission of the division.

The successes of divisional and regional intranetspose a challenge to the success of an agency-wideintranet. Within all the agencies examined, there isevidence of the usefulness of an internal, closedwebsite for an organization. But it may be that thereis an optimal size for the utility and functionality ofan intranet. In most of the agencies examined, theagency-wide intranet was eclipsed by sub-agency(regional and divisional) intranets. In these instances,there was generally a link to the agency-wideintranet for department-level functions and informa-tion. But it would appear that most of the work ofthe department occurs in the smaller units and thatthe sub-agency intranets are more valuable to staffon a daily basis.

To be successful, a department-wide intranet needsto identify a role for itself that will draw employees.The Department of Transportation attempted to dothis with some success. It viewed the department-

Findings and Recommendations

32


wide intranet as a means to foster a common cul-ture within the agency. Similarly, at EPA, the goalfor the agency-wide intranet was not to duplicatethe divisional and regional intranets but to provideinformation and functions common to all EPAemployees. The Department of Justice is strugglingwith the same question. At present, the Netscapehome page for employees is the DOJ public accesswebsite, but there is talk of changing that to theintranet home page. Still, there is some reluctanceto do this because of the strong identity employeeshave with the divisions within Justice and employeelinks to their divisional intranet.

GSA has also experienced tension between sub-agency intranets and the agency-wide intranet.Within GSA, each service has now created its ownintranet, which is used as the default home site foremployees in that service. The regional offices havecreated their own intranets as well. To some extent,these entrepreneurial ventures were encouraged bythe GSA intranet team, but the effect has been torelegate GSA InSite to the role of a holding com-pany that is accessed from the other intranets.However, trying to consolidate and impose central-ization on a decentralized organization is likely tobe impossible given the organizational culture.

Finding Two: Top departmental support for andinterest in the agency’s intranet is especially criti-cal in the initial planning for and launching of the intranet.In virtually all of the agencies examined, supportfrom the secretary or deputy secretary level wasessential. Without such interest and support, anagency-wide intranet would not have developed. In three of the six organizations, support for adepartment-wide intranet came directly from thesecretary.

• At HUD, both Secretary Cisneros and SecretaryCuomo were proactive in the development ofthe intranet and found opportunities to broadenits use. Cisneros, who was intrigued with theClinton administration’s vision of the Internet as a superhighway, supported the intranet as aconcept and project. When Congress proposedabolishing HUD, Cisneros suggested using the intranet as a tool for communicating withemployees. As a result of this initiative, more

staff became accustomed to accessing theintranet. When he became secretary, Cuomoalso supported the HUD intranet. On one occa-sion, after he announced the necessity of a staff cut and suggested that employees consultHUDweb for job announcements, there was so much traffic that the server crashed.

• GSA Administrator David Barram had comefrom private industry, had a close relationshipwith AOL, and was surprised at the lack ofonline activities at GSA. At a GSA informationtechnology meeting in 1996, Barram proposedthat he order GSA to offer employees Internetand intranet access within four months, byFlag Day.

• Commerce Secretary Daley challenged thedepartment to become a “digital department”in 45 days and built consensus for this with aseries of town hall meetings. His vision was tohave interactive features on an agency-wideintranet, permitting members to conduct inter-national business, communicate, and maketravel arrangements online, for example. With50,000 employees to inform, a wide-reachingcommunications method was a necessity. In1999, designers were challenged to come upwith a home page to show quick success withe-government in line with the administration’spriorities.

In two of the case studies—the Departments ofJustice and Transportation—support came primarilyfrom the deputy secretary level. In these depart-ments, the genesis for the intranet and staff supportfor its development came primarily from the chiefinformation officer.

• At the Department of Justice, the intranetemerged from the concerns of the department’sCIO that an umbrella intranet was needed toprovide information and better communicationto the department as a whole. It seemed unnec-essary that in the electronic age much agencyinformation was being copied and mailed toemployees across the 36 components of thedepartment. The intranet offered a way to moreefficiently distribute information. For example, a recently added subscription to an online newsservice linked to the intranet replaced in-housenews clipping, copying, and distributing.

33


• At the Department of Transportation, the e-government unit within the Office of theChief Information Officer played the lead rolein implementing an agency-wide intranet thatwould meet the goal of the development of a common DOT culture by generating stronglinkages across divisions.

At EPA, the first intranet resulted from the realiza-tion that other agencies had developed intranetsand that there would be value from an EPA intranet.A team of three, operating from the Office ofInformation Resources and Management but withsupport from the top of the agency, developed theprototypes of the intranet and oversaw its initialagency-wide deployment in January 1998.

Finding Three: Marketing of an agency-wideintranet is crucial to encouraging staff use.Three of the six agencies examined had aggressive,and successful, marketing campaigns to generatestaff interest and use. In general, these campaignsinvolved slogans and meetings, and accompaniedthe launching of each new iteration of the intranet.

• Marketing of the intranet to EPA employees hasbeen important throughout its developmentsand deployments. At various points, “IntranetWeeks” were held when the intranet team dida “dog and pony” show to illustrate the bene-fits and capabilities of the intranet. Althoughattendance was often low at such events, theintranet team believed their publicity fosteredmore interest in and use of the intranet. For the launch of the September 2001 iteration, the intranet team designed a “power-up withEPA@Work” campaign using an “EmpowerBar” (see Figure 8) theme to convey the ideathat employees who are hungry for informationcan get “vital, up-to-date information” by start-ing their day with the “new and improved”agency intranet. This campaign involvedposters, flyers, and bookmarks with the sameslogans and images.

• At HUD, the intranet was viewed as a manage-ment tool to improve communication: “Worksmarter, not harder, without paper.” The slogan“smart HUD employees work online” wasdesigned to encourage employees to use theintranet. In 1998, HUD made a concerted effort

to differentiate its public access Internet site andits intranet for employees. A “Web AwarenessDay” was held in Washington and in theregional offices to launch a “two websites ➔one hud” to highlight the message that theintranet was a “tool, not a toy.” As a result ofthis campaign, there was a doubling of intranethits in six months, and that level was sustainedfor the next several years. Some problems withdifferentiating HUD’s intranet and public accesswebsite continued, and in 2000 a contest washeld to rename the intranet. The winning namewas hud@work. Again, slogans were utilized tocatch employees’ attention. “If it’s green, it can’tbe seen” reminded employees that the primarycolor on HUD’s intranet was green while itswebsite color was red. Once more in 2001,when HUD added customization features to theintranet, this was advertised as “HUD’s NextGeneration Intranet.”

• The GSA administrator named the agency’sintranet “InSite.” The Office of Communicationsmarketed the rollout of the intranet on FlagDay 1996 and planned the official announce-ment. The rollout highlighted GSA’s desire tohave a valuable site for its employees. It alsoemphasized the practical aspects of how tobrowse the intranet and the “do’s and don’ts”of using it.

Figure 8: EPA@Work EmpowerBar

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Three departments—Transportation, Commerce,and Justice—have made more modest attempts at marketing their intranet sites. For example, theDepartment of Commerce introduced its intranetwith a town meeting in 1999 and a demonstrationin the summer of 2000. But in all cases, as employ-ees become aware of the real value of the intranets,use increases.

Finding Four: Within federal agencies, more atten-tion and energy is devoted to the agency’s publicaccess website than to its intranet. This is not remarkable given legislative and publicsupport for online Government to Citizen inter-actions, the federal government’s commitment to digital government, and the number of Internetchampions both inside and outside the federalestablishment. Despite this focus on the Internet,all agencies are experimenting with transferringInternet technology and software, as well as theknowledge gained from developing and deployingInternet websites, to an internal agency intranet.

In most of the agencies examined, Internet andintranet staff and resources were shared. This wastrue in the Departments of Transportation, Justice,and Commerce. HUD has a separate staff dedi-cated to the intranet. Despite this, the intranet isstill considered the Internet’s “baby sister” and theInternet website is regarded as the primary elec-tronic work site. At EPA, the intranet team mem-bers, all of whom had some computer and technicalbackground but were basically interested in infor-mation applications, were separate from the Internetteam. The EPA intranet did not have a separate bud-get; instead, funding came from the Internet budget.

Finding Five: In all the organizations examined,the development of the intranet has been an iterative process and is still very much evolving. Agency personnel responsible for intranets are con-stantly evaluating how well their intranet is meetingthe needs of employees and are looking for ways toimprove it. None consider their intranet a finishedproduct but instead see it as a work in progress. Allagencies have had several iterations of their intranet.

• HUD has had five iterations of its intranetbeginning in November 1996. The first fourwere entitled “HUDweb” and were referred to

as “HUD’s Internal Information Network.”From 1996 to 2000, HUDweb was modifiedon a yearly basis, with the goal of simplifyingthe intranet and making it more useful toemployees. A major rethinking and revision ofthe site occurred in 2001 with the unveiling ofa customizable intranet renamed “hud@work.”

• EPA’s intranet was first available agency-widein January 1998. Its latest iteration waslaunched in September 2001 and utilizes anew tasks and topics “portal” design by whichEPA employees can quickly access agencyprocesses and areas of interest by subject.

• The development of the Commercial ServicesIntranet within the Department of Commercefollowed an incremental development process.Ideas for applications emerged in response toproblems in the field.

• The Department of Justice’s intranet is largelynon-interactive at present. It offers links to themost recent department policy files and gov-ernment sites such as Employee Express. Formscan be printed and mailed, but not filedonline. The next-generation intranet is expectedto be more interactive, but this will require amajor change in architecture and a significantinvestment.

As part of this iterative process, chat rooms havebeen popular at particular times in a limited num-ber of agencies. The use of chat rooms has beenmore episodic and hard to sustain for a long periodof time.

• Within HUD, the chat feature on the intranetwas used extensively by employees during thebudgetary crisis under Secretary Cuomo. Bothhe and the deputy secretary encouraged theuse of the chat room and participated in dis-cussions about how best to manage changesassociated with the financial problems. But asthe budgetary crisis passed, use of the chatrooms diminished.

• At GSA, the bulletin board area of the intranet,named “My 2 Cents,” was a popular featureand brought employees to the intranet. Thisbegan as an anonymous, open bulletin boardfor the posting of questions and answers, butproblems arose as comments digressed and

35


some users failed to understand “netiquette.”The GSA administrator intervened by monitoringthe bulletin board, responding to comments,and offering cash awards for suggestions. Healso encouraged other top executives withinGSA to participate, but some managers werereluctant to reply by name.

Customization or personalization of intranets hasalso been a feature of the evolutionary develop-ment of intranets in a few agencies. This iterationgenerally occurs late in the process of developmentafter employees have become accustomed to usingthe intranet and are seeking more innovation.

• DOT added a personalization feature for itsintranet home page in its current iteration.Employees can now create their own version ofthe standard home page elements; establishlinks to online employee groups or communi-ties, a weather site, an online dictionary,Google, and other features; and include theirpersonal calendar.

• HUD’s intranet added a personalization featurein 2001 with its hud@work iteration. In focusgroups for the planning of hud@work, employ-ees had requested such a feature.

Development of collaborative or shared work areason intranets is another feature that has evolved inseveral organizations and is being planned in others.This has been more successful in some agenciesthan others.

• The DOT intranet offers the capacity to createand join interest-based virtual communities. Thisfeature is one that employees value and use.

• HUD’s current (2001) intranet includes virtualteam technology that could be used for collabo-rative work through real-time chat, teleconfer-encing, and file exchange. Although managersfavor the idea, they have been reluctant to use it.

• The EPA intranet offers work groups, chatrooms, and collaboration through its license for Lotus Notes and Lotus Notes Mail. Thesemore interactive functions have not yet beenused widely in the agency because of trainingrequirements, firewalls, and costs. The intranetteam recently had a demonstration of thePeopleSoft portal, which would allow customiza-

tion and more collaboration and flexibility; thismay be the next iteration of EPA@Work.

• At this time, there is no collaborative workspace on GSA’s intranet, but there are somepilots under way. Other methods of knowledgesharing, such as Lotus Notes and Quick Place,are also being investigated.

• The Department of Commerce has exploredthe possibility of collaborative online workgroup programs, but they are not yet features ofthe intranet. A pilot project testing online col-laboration found that face-to-face communica-tion was preferred.

• At the Department of Justice, virtual groupsand collaboration are features of intranet worksites within the program divisions, where litiga-tion work such as briefs may be shared. Thesework spaces tend to be confidential and pass-word protected. The agency-wide intranet doesnot yet have applications for collaborative work.

Recommendations Our research offers a snapshot of intranet evolutionas seen in the second half of 2001. The intranetswe examined and those throughout the federal gov-ernment are continuing to develop to better meetthe needs of management and employees. Basedon the analysis of the case studies, we offer threerecommendations for enhancing intranet develop-ment in federal agencies.

Recommendation One: A department-wideintranet requires a department-wide effort to be successful. This recommendation encompasses three elements:

• Upper management support is required.

If management wants employees to use theintranet, it must actively encourage employeesto avail themselves of the options on theintranet. Managers should champion theintranet in their communications to employees.Their support should not be passive but active.Managers should be models to employees byusing the intranet themselves. Manager supportshould be continual, not just at the point of theintroduction of the intranet and subsequentiterations. For use of the intranet to be sus-

36


tained, managers need to foster a behavioralchange among employees.

Finally, managers should make administrativedecisions that require employees to use theintranet. For example, managers can discon-tinue paper copies of telephone directories andjob announcements, the contents of whichchange frequently and can be easily updatedonline. Similarly, rules and regulations can besearched more easily in electronic form, makingonline versions more useful than paper copies.

• Involvement of employees is essential.

To win employee support, employees need tobe part of the decision-making process fordesigning the intranet. A top-down approachwill not succeed. Rather, employees should be consulted about their work routines, theirsuggestions about how the intranet can makethem more effective and efficient in their jobs,and their “wish lists” for additional features. In many of the agencies we examined, theintranet design teams held focus groups withemployees and found such venues valuablesources of input.

• Technical staff should not lead but must beactive participants.

The development of an agency’s intranetshould not be directed by technical staff, butrather should be led by administrative staff andprogram managers. This helps to ensure thatdecisions are made based on what employeesare likely to want and what functions areimportant to the agency as a whole. If deci-sions are driven by what is technically possibleor innovative, then employees will need toreadjust their work habits to suit the new tech-nology. To be utilized and functional to theagency and staff, intranet technology shouldaccommodate the needs and conventions ofthe employees and the organization. Moreover,if the technology drives intranet development,that development will be constrained by whatis technically possible at that time. If manage-ment and staff needs drive development, newtechnical features may be created. Managerscan challenge technical people to find appro-priate solutions that may not be available withcurrent technologies.

Recommendation Two: The more real value theintranet provides, the more employees will use it.In all the agencies examined, as the intranetbecame more robust and more of a tool thatemployees could use, they gravitated to it. If theintranet offers useful services, employees will cometo it. Functionality is key to success. Basic featuressuch as a telephone directory or personnel noticesdraw people to the intranet. If employees can easilyfind there the information they use routinely intheir jobs, then they will use the intranet. Onceemployees become accustomed to accessing it aspart of their everyday routine, they will also beginto use more enhanced features on the intranet,such as collaborative work places. Sophisticatedintranet software that requires training is less likelyto be used by employees.

Recommendation Three: As intranets become more personalized and are used more for collabo-rative work, organizations will need to addressissues of workplace surveillance and monitoring. The organizations we examined are all in the earlystages of designing personalized features into theirintranets and using the intranet for collaborativework. As they offer these features, agenciesencounter both enthusiasm and reluctance. Theenthusiasm seems to result from the desire to be a part of a highly functional online environment.There appears to be a realization that there is greatuntapped promise from an intranet. At the sametime, employees seem to recognize that if theironline work spaces are personalized and if theyparticipate in online collaboration, they will leavebehind an electronic trail that managers can moni-tor and evaluate.

Thus, managers need to be proactive in explainingwhat substantive and transactional information willbe captured as a result of intranet use, who willhave access to that information, for what purposesthe information will be used, and how long infor-mation will be retained. Managers should adoptpolicies that reflect the collection of the minimumamount of intranet information, should limit accessto and retention of that information, and shouldrestrict use of it. Moreover, employees should havethe right to access any substantive and transac-tional information on the intranet, as well as theability to redress any grievances that result fromthat information.

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Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)Pournima SomanComputer SpecialistInformation Services Branch1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NWMail Code 2843 TWashington, DC 20460(202) 566-0693fax: (202) 566-0685e-mail: [email protected]

Michael J. WeaverComputer SpecialistOffice of Environmental InformationInformation Access and Analysis1200 Pennsylvania Ave., NWMail Code 2843 TWashington, DC 20460(202) 566-0695fax: (202) 566-0685e-mail: [email protected]

General Services AdministrationChristopher F. ForneckerChief Technology OfficerU.S. General Services Administration1800 F Street, NWRoom 3024Washington, DC 20405(202) 219-3393fax: (202) 219-1249e-mail: [email protected]

Dean T. KleinManaging Director for InformationOffice of the Chief Financial OfficerU.S. General Services Administration1800 F St., NWRoom 2122Washington, DC 20405(202) 501-0329fax: (202) 501-3310e-mail: [email protected]

Sally J. PerryDivision Director, Infrastructure ApplicationsU.S. General Services Administration1800 F Street, NWRoom 1211Washington, DC 20405(202) 501-2871e-mail: [email protected]

Department of CommerceAllan BettsE-Business Development CounselorU.S. Commercial ServiceU.S. Department of Commerce14th and Constitution Ave., NWWashington, DC 20230(202) 482-0287e-mail: [email protected]

Appendix: Agency Personnel Interviewed

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Karen F. HoganDeputy Chief Information OfficerU.S. Department of Commerce1401 Constitution Ave., NWWashington, DC 20230(202) 482-2607fax: (202) 501-1180e-mail: [email protected]

Department of Housing and Urban DevelopmentCandis HarrisonDepartmental Web Manager for Field OperationsU.S. Department of Housing and UrbanDevelopmentHUD Tucson Office160 North Stone Ave., Suite 100Tucson, AZ 85701-1467(520) 670-6237fax: (520) 670-6207e-mail: [email protected]

Department of JusticeSusan L. BronstonManger/User CommunicationsDepartment of Justice901 E Street, NW, Suite 101Washington, DC 20530(202) 616-1899fax: (202) 616-0696e-mail: [email protected]

Department of TransportationCrystal M. BushDOT Intranet ManagerOffice of the Chief Information OfficerU.S. Department of TransportationRoom 6100-J, NASSIF Building400 Seventh Street, SWWashington, DC 20590-0001(202) 366-9713fax: (202) 366-7024e-mail: [email protected]

Phyllis PrestonAssociate Chief Information Officer for E-GovernmentOffice of the SecretaryU.S. Department of Transportation400 Seventh Street, SWRoom 6432Washington, DC 20590(202) 493-0216fax: (202) 366-7373e-mail: [email protected]

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Allcorn, Seth. 1997. “Parallel Virtual Organizations:Managing and Working in the Virtual Workplace.”Administration and Society 29:412-39.

Curry, Adrienne and Lara Stancich. 2000. “TheIntranet—An Intrinsic Component of StrategicInformation Management?” International Journal ofInformation Management 20 (4):249-68.

GAO. 2001. Executive Guide: Maximizing theSuccess of Chief Information Officers: LearningFrom Leading Organizations. Guidance,02/01/2001, GAO/GAO-01-376G.

GAO. 2000. Human Capital: Key Principles FromNine Private Sector Organizations. Letter Report,01/31/2000, GAO/GGD-00-28.

GAO. 2000. Tax Administration: IRS’ Implementationof the Restructuring Act’s Taxpayer Protection andRights Provisions. Letter Report, 04/21/2000,GAO/GGD-00-85.

Holz, Shel. 1997. “Strategizing a Human ResourcesPresence on the Intranet.” Compensation andBenefits Management 13:31-7.

PricewaterhouseCoopers. 2001. Introduction to B2Eand G2E Solutions, Internal document. (April 1).

Stowers, Genie. 2001. “Commerce Comes toGovernment on the Desktop: E-CommerceApplications in the Public Sector.” In E-Government2001. Mark A. Abramson and Grady E. Means, eds. Lanham, MD.: Rowman and LittlefieldPublishers, Inc.

Bibliography

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Julianne G. Mahler is Associate Professor of Government and Politics in the Department of Public and International Affairs at George MasonUniversity. She has worked extensively in the area of organization theoryand public management, conducting research on organization culture inseveral federal government agencies. Her most recent research is onagency learning and the evolution of policy technologies.

Dr. Mahler has published numerous articles on decision making, measur-ing customer satisfaction, and organization culture and learning. She isco-author of Organization Theory: A Public Perspective with Hal Gortnerand Jeanne Nicholson. She currently directs the master’s program in polit-ical science at George Mason University. Her B.A. in political science isfrom Macalester College and her M.A. and Ph.D. are from the StateUniversity of New York at Buffalo.

Priscilla M. Regan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Publicand International Affairs at George Mason University. Prior to joining thatfaculty in 1989, she was a senior analyst in the Congressional Office ofTechnology Assessment (1984-1989) and an Assistant Professor of Politicsand Government at the University of Puget Sound (1979-1984). Since themid-1970s, Dr. Regan’s primary research interest has been the analysis ofthe social, policy, and legal implications of organizational use of newinformation and communications technologies.

Dr. Regan has published over 20 articles or book chapters, as well as Legislating Privacy: Technology, Social Values, and Public Policy(University of North Carolina Press, 1995). As a recognized researcher inthis area, she has testified before Congress and participated in meetingsheld by the Department of Commerce, Federal Trade Commission, SocialSecurity Administration, and Census Bureau. Dr. Regan received her Ph.D. in government from Cornell University in 1981 and her B.A. from Mount Holyoke College in 1972.

A B O U T T H E A U T H O R S

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To contact the authors:

Julianne G. MahlerAssociate ProfessorGeorge Mason UniversityDepartment of Public and International AffairsFairfax, VA 22030(703) 993-1414

e-mail: [email protected]

Priscilla M. ReganAssociate ProfessorGeorge Mason UniversityDepartment of Public and International AffairsFairfax, VA 22030(703) 993-1419

e-mail: [email protected]

K E Y C O N T A C T I N F O R M A T I O N

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GRANT REPORTS

E-Government

Managing Telecommuting in theFederal Government: An InterimReport (June 2000)

Gina VegaLouis Brennan

Using Virtual Teams to ManageComplex Projects: A Case Study ofthe Radioactive Waste ManagementProject (August 2000)

Samuel M. DeMarie

The Auction Model: How the Public Sector Can Leverage thePower of E-Commerce ThroughDynamic Pricing (October 2000)

David C. Wyld

Supercharging the EmploymentAgency: An Investigation of the Useof Information and CommunicationTechnology to Improve the Serviceof State Employment Agencies(December 2000)

Anthony M. Townsend

Assessing a State’s Readiness forGlobal Electronic Commerce:Lessons from the Ohio Experience(January 2001)

J. Pari SabetySteven I. Gordon

Privacy Strategies for ElectronicGovernment (January 2001)

Janine S. HillerFrance Bélanger

Commerce Comes to Governmenton the Desktop: E-CommerceApplications in the Public Sector(February 2001)

Genie N. L. Stowers

The Use of the Internet inGovernment Service Delivery(February 2001)

Steven CohenWilliam Eimicke

State Web Portals: Delivering andFinancing E-Service (January 2002)

Diana Burley GantJon P. GantCraig L. Johnson

Internet Voting: Bringing Electionsto the Desktop (February 2002)

Robert S. Done

Leveraging Technology in theService of Diplomacy: Innovation in the Department of State(March 2002)

Barry Fulton

Federal Intranet Work Sites: AnInterim Assessment (June 2002)

Julianne G. MahlerPriscilla M. Regan

Financia lManagement

Credit Scoring and Loan Scoring:Tools for Improved Management ofFederal Credit Programs (July 1999)

Thomas H. Stanton

Using Activity-Based Costing to Manage More Effectively(January 2000)

Michael H. GranofDavid E. PlattIgor Vaysman

Audited Financial Statements:Getting and Sustaining “Clean”Opinions (July 2001)

Douglas A. Brook

An Introduction to Financial RiskManagement in Government(August 2001)

Richard J. Buttimer, Jr.

Human Capita l

Profiles in Excellence: Conversationswith the Best of America’s CareerExecutive Service (November 1999)

Mark W. Huddleston

Leaders Growing Leaders: Preparingthe Next Generation of PublicService Executives (May 2000)

Ray Blunt

Reflections on Mobility: CaseStudies of Six Federal Executives(May 2000)

Michael D. Serlin

A Learning-Based Approach toLeading Change (December 2000)

Barry Sugarman

Labor-Management Partnerships:A New Approach to CollaborativeManagement (July 2001)

Barry RubinRichard Rubin

Winning the Best and Brightest:Increasing the Attraction of PublicService (July 2001)

Carol Chetkovich

Organizations Growing Leaders:Best Practices and Principles in thePublic Service (December 2001)

Ray Blunt

A Weapon in the War for Talent:Using Special Authorities to RecruitCrucial Personnel (December 2001)

Hal G. Rainey

A Changing Workforce:Understanding Diversity Programs in the Federal Government(December 2001)

Katherine C. NaffJ. Edward Kellough

Managing for Resul ts

Corporate Strategic Planning in Government: Lessons from the United States Air Force(November 2000)

Colin Campbell

ENDOWMENT REPORTS AVAILABLE

To download or order a copy of a grant or special report, visit the Endowment website at: endowment.pwcglobal.com

43To download or order a copy of a grant or special report, visit the Endowment website at: endowment.pwcglobal.com

Using Evaluation to SupportPerformance Management:A Guide for Federal Executives(January 2001)

Kathryn NewcomerMary Ann Scheirer

Managing for Outcomes:Milestone Contracting in Oklahoma (January 2001)

Peter Frumkin

The Challenge of Developing Cross-Agency Measures: A CaseStudy of the Office of National DrugControl Policy (August 2001)

Patrick J. MurphyJohn Carnevale

The Potential of the GovernmentPerformance and Results Act as a Tool to Manage Third-PartyGovernment (August 2001)

David G. Frederickson

Using Performance Data forAccountability: The New York CityPolice Department’s CompStatModel of Police Management(August 2001)

Paul E. O’Connell

New Ways to Manage

Managing Workfare: The Case of the Work Experience Program in the New York City ParksDepartment (June 1999)

Steven Cohen

New Tools for ImprovingGovernment Regulation: AnAssessment of Emissions Trading and Other Market-Based RegulatoryTools (October 1999)

Gary C. Bryner

Religious Organizations, Anti-Poverty Relief, and CharitableChoice: A Feasibility Study of Faith-Based Welfare Reform inMississippi (November 1999)

John P. BartkowskiHelen A. Regis

Business Improvement Districts and Innovative Service Delivery(November 1999)

Jerry Mitchell

An Assessment of BrownfieldRedevelopment Policies: The Michigan Experience(November 1999)

Richard C. Hula

Determining a Level Playing Fieldfor Public-Private Competition(November 1999)

Lawrence L. Martin

San Diego County’s InnovationProgram: Using Competition and aWhole Lot More to Improve PublicServices (January 2000)

William B. Eimicke

Innovation in the Administration of Public Airports (March 2000)

Scott E. Tarry

Entrepreneurial Government:Bureaucrats as Businesspeople (May 2000)

Anne Laurent

Implementing State Contracts forSocial Services: An Assessment ofthe Kansas Experience (May 2000)

Jocelyn M. JohnstonBarbara S. Romzek

Rethinking U.S. EnvironmentalProtection Policy: ManagementChallenges for a NewAdministration (November 2000)

Dennis A. Rondinelli

The Challenge of Innovating inGovernment (February 2001)

Sandford Borins

Understanding Innovation:What Inspires It? What Makes ItSuccessful? (December 2001)

Jonathan Walters

A Vision of the Government as a World-Class Buyer: MajorProcurement Issues for the Coming Decade (January 2002)

Jacques S. Gansler

Contracting for the 21st Century: A Partnership Model (January 2002)

Wendell C. Lawther

Franchise Funds in the FederalGovernment: Ending the Monopolyin Service Provision (February 2002)

John J. Callahan

Managing “Big Science”: A CaseStudy of the Human GenomeProject (March 2002)

W. Henry Lambright

Leveraging Networks to MeetNational Goals: FEMA and the Safe Construction Networks(March 2002)

William L. Waugh, Jr.

Government Management ofInformation Mega-Technology:Lessons from the Internal RevenueService’s Tax Systems Modernization(March 2002)

Barry Bozeman

Making Performance-BasedContracting Perform: What theFederal Government Can Learn from State and Local Governments(June 2002)

Lawrence L. Martin

Applying 21st-Century Governmentto the Challenge of HomelandSecurity (June 2002)

Elaine C. Kamarck

Moving Toward More CapableGovernment: A Guide toOrganizational Design (June 2002)

Thomas H. Stanton

44

TransformingOrganizat ions

The Importance of Leadership:The Role of School Principals(September 1999)

Paul TeskeMark Schneider

Leadership for Change: Case Studies in American LocalGovernment (September 1999)

Robert B. DenhardtJanet Vinzant Denhardt

Managing DecentralizedDepartments: The Case of the U.S. Department of Health andHuman Services (October 1999)

Beryl A. Radin

Transforming Government: TheRenewal and Revitalization of theFederal Emergency ManagementAgency (April 2000)

R. Steven DanielsCarolyn L. Clark-Daniels

Transforming Government: Creatingthe New Defense ProcurementSystem (April 2000)

Kimberly A. Harokopus

Trans-Atlantic Experiences in HealthReform: The United Kingdom’sNational Health Service and theUnited States Veterans HealthAdministration (May 2000)

Marilyn A. DeLuca

Transforming Government: TheRevitalization of the Veterans Health Administration (June 2000)

Gary J. Young

The Challenge of Managing Across Boundaries: The Case of the Office of the Secretary in theU.S. Department of Health andHuman Services (November 2000)

Beryl A. Radin

Creating a Culture of Innovation:10 Lessons from America’s Best Run City (January 2001)

Janet Vinzant DenhardtRobert B. Denhardt

Transforming Government:Dan Goldin and the Remaking of NASA (March 2001)

W. Henry Lambright

Managing Across Boundaries: ACase Study of Dr. Helene Gayleand the AIDS Epidemic (January 2002)

Norma M. Riccucci

SPECIAL REPORTS

Government in the 21st Century

David M. Walker

Results of the GovernmentLeadership Survey: A 1999 Surveyof Federal Executives (June 1999)

Mark A. AbramsonSteven A. ClyburnElizabeth Mercier

Creating a Government for the 21st Century (March 2000)

Stephen Goldsmith

The President’s ManagementCouncil: An Important ManagementInnovation (December 2000)

Margaret L. Yao

Toward a 21st Century PublicService: Reports from Four Forums (January 2001)

Mark A. Abramson, Editor

Becoming an Effective PoliticalExecutive: 7 Lessons fromExperienced Appointees (January 2001)

Judith E. Michaels

The Changing Role of Government:Implications for Managing in a NewWorld (December 2001)

David Halberstam

BOOKS*

E-Government 2001(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001)

Mark A. Abramson and Grady E. Means, editors

Human Capital 2002(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002)

Mark A. Abramson andNicole Willenz Gardner, editors

Innovation(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002)

Mark A. Abramson andIan Littman, editors

Leaders(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2002

Mark A. Abramson and Kevin M. Bacon, editors

Managing for Results 2002(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001)

Mark A. Abramson and John Kamensky, editors

Memos to the President:Management Advice from the Nation’s Top PublicAdministrators (Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001)

Mark A. Abramson, editor

Transforming Organizations(Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc., 2001)

Mark A. Abramson and Paul R. Lawrence, editors

* Available at bookstores, online booksellers, and from the publisher (www.rowmanlittlefield.comor 800-462-6420).

To download or order a copy of a grant or special report, visit the Endowment website at: endowment.pwcglobal.com

For additional information, contact:Mark A. AbramsonExecutive DirectorThe PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for The Business of Government1616 North Fort Myer DriveArlington, VA 22209(703) 741-1077, fax: (703) 741-1076

e-mail: [email protected]: endowment.pwcglobal.com

About PricewaterhouseCoopersThe Management Consulting Services practice of PricewaterhouseCoopers helps clients maximize theirbusiness performance by integrating strategic change, performance improvement and technology solutions.Through a worldwide network of skills and resources, consultants manage complex projects with globalcapabilities and local knowledge, from strategy through implementation. PricewaterhouseCoopers(www.pwcglobal.com) is the world’s largest professional services organization. Drawing on the knowledgeand skills of more than 150,000 people in 150 countries, we help our clients solve complex business prob-lems and measurably enhance their ability to build value, manage risk and improve performance in anInternet-enabled world. PricewaterhouseCoopers refers to the member firms of the worldwidePricewaterhouseCoopers organization.

About The EndowmentThrough grants for Research and Thought Leadership Forums, The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment forThe Business of Government stimulates research and facilitates discussion on new approaches to improvingthe effectiveness of government at the federal, state, local, and international levels.

Founded in 1998 by PricewaterhouseCoopers, The Endowment is one of the ways that PricewaterhouseCoopersseeks to advance knowledge on how to improve public sector effectiveness. The PricewaterhouseCoopersEndowment focuses on the future of the operation and management of the public sector.

1616 North Fort Myer DriveArlington, VA 22209-3195



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