Runways and I-95: Building a Central Backbone for Enterprise Information

Years ago, when I started managing the intranet of a credit card bank, I was convinced that my primary goal should be to get everyone working through the same UI for everything. I had a vision in my head of a single, uniform interface to rule them all.

But, I was 26, so what did I know?

It quickly became apparent this was a pipe dream. The modern enterprise consists of a … constellation of software. Our industry has been trying to streamline this for years with varying degrees of success. The sheer number and variability of systems in use is something like a hailstorm that never ends. It's often just thinly-managed chaos. What I’ve learned in the meantime is that if you can’t get everyone doing everything in the same app (spoiler: you can’t), then you at least need something in the center to hold everything together.

For a lot of organizations, the only constant in this space tends to be network credentials. With any luck, they can at least get everything running from a central login, so that their employees at least have some invariable thread of identity.

But what do we do about managing employment information – meaning the information that employees need to do their jobs? Sure, they all have specific roles and information systems for those roles, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re employees of the organization and that imparts a “floor” of information about payroll and benefits and policies, and even drifts into lines of business, with strategy and organizational updates and all of the other things that cross over role lines and define their identity as an employee.

You can call it a “hub,” a “backbone,” a ”gateway,” whatever. But you need something that provides both practical and symbolic consistency to the swirling mass of enterprise software tools you’re asking your employees to juggle.

And this tool should be a dedicated tool. It shouldn’t piggyback on anything else. It exists in the realm of what we call “internal communications,” which is a space which is literally devoted to employee information acquisition and internalization. The ability to do this well isn’t random – it’s the result of time, attention, and details.

Consider that there's a weird quirk of intranets – they often get named.

I’ve always been fascinated by this. Organizations invariably name their intranets. Historically, it was often something like MyCompany or CompanyNet, but I’ve seen lots of derivations based around what the company does – an airline had one named “Runway,” an electric utility had one named “Watt,” a nursing organization had one named “Flo,” after Florence Nightingale.

These names stick. The BBC has been calling their intranet “Gateway” for 25 years or so. IBM has called theirs “w3” for about the same amount of time.

Trends in tech branding have led us to name other systems too, of course. But I was working with intranets back in the mid- to late-90s, and they all had names even back then. Naming intranets seems to be the most natural thing in the world. Employees refer to them as proper nouns, as if only one of that thing exists.

Colleagues assume knowledge of this thing – it’s a bonafide social construct inside an organization; a thing that new employees learn about on day one and that’s probably still around when they retire.

Why? Because employees are looking for a “backbone” to the information and systems in an organization. There’s so much change swirling around that there needs to be a constant in the background. There needs to be a conceptual framework to which the organization’s information is anchored.

The average organization has so much turnover – especially around information and technology – that employees are desperate for consistency. They want their usage of ephemeral tooling to exist in relation to some other, dependable system that they know they can always find.

When my wife and I took a cruise, I paid for the tour of the crew spaces and “backstage” areas on the ship. When we got below the passenger areas, I found that the interior of the ship was dominated by a wide, industrial corridor that stretched the entire length of the ship – it was something like quarter mile long. Every crew space branched off from this central corridor, and it was a non-stop hive of activity – there were people walking back and forth with forklifts and golf carts moving supplies. The tour guide told me that this corridor is something you can always depend on. No matter where you are, head back to the center of the ship and you’ll hit this corridor which can get you anywhere else. Every knew where it was, and where everything was in relation to it.

Not surprisingly, they named it: “I-95,” after the massive highway that runs down the East Coast of the United States.

The entire experience below decks was anchored in relation to this corridor. It was the conceptional and navigational framework to get anywhere else. No matter where you are or what you need to find, get back to I-95 and you’ll be okay.

And this common knowledge is one of the real joys of working with enterprise IT and intranets. I spent 20 years on the “public” side, working in digital marketing. In those cases, you always have to assume the user is completely ignorant and has no history with your organization or your website.

On the organizational side, we benefit from what I call “the indoctrinated user.” Implementing an (internally) marketing property, your intranet becomes that central corridor through the entire organizational information space. These users can be trained – implicitly or explicitly – on the existence or usage of a tool. They can be indoctrinated to this tool, just like they’re indoctrinated to the social norms of the organization.

There’s a tendency to try and re-purpose some other tool inside the organization, usually to save licensing costs. I maintain this is a mistake. I used the word “constellation” early, but I might have said “solar system,” in that all of your tools should orbit around a central point. The key to long-term adoption of this tool is that it’s dedicated to one purpose: internal comms, employee information acquisition, and organizational wayfinding.

You can tack these jobs onto some other information management or task management tool, and that might work… until you swap that tool out. Information systems have a distressingly short lifespan in a lot of organizations, which is not what you want for the backbone or “system of reference.”

For that, you want a dedicated tool that does one thing well, and continues to do this well, despite the chaos of change around it. Tools designed for transactional use make poor substitutes and tend to flash in and out of existence. The last thing the organization needs is yet another ad hoc usage of something that didn’t stick.

Internal communication and organization wayfinding is too important to ignore or tack onto some other system that no-doubt only been in use for a few years, and will be retired when the organization’s needs change.

What transcends these systems is the need to keep your employees informed and oriented to the information structures they need to do their work. This need has always existed, and always will. Address it with the permanence and exclusivity it requires.