# Presentation: 419806

## FSIS Intranet SiteA One-Stop Shop for EmployeesDevelopment Process

- Peter Rhee
*Intranet Manager*
- September 19th, 2006

## Why an FSIS Intranet?

- A private **employee-only** site that focuses on:
- Agency communications, especially emergency or mission critical information
- Contact information
- Employee collaboration
- Community
- Career development
- Document repository

## How Is the Intranet Valuable?

- Improves efficiency
- Accurate contact information
- Correct version of files/information
- Accessible to all agency staff
- Easier team/staff collaboration
- Improves communications
- One agency, one voice
- Available to all employees, all the time
- Sense of community among geographically separated staff

## Returns on Investment

**Most important ROI benefits **
- Improved information sharing: 97%
- Enhanced communications and information sharing: 95%
- Increased consistency of info: 94%
- Increased accuracy of info: 93%
- Reduced or eliminated processing: 93%
- Easier organizational publishing: 92%

**Source:** _[Prescient Digital Media](http://205.189.153.17/client_webmaster/index.jsp)__/__[Katz School of Business at the University of Pittsburgh](http://www.katz.pitt.edu/)__ study _

## Doing It Right Pays Off

**Productivity**
- By webifying business processes and aggregating tools and information on the corporate intranet or portal, employees become more productive as they get what they want and get where they want more quickly with better results. Productivity benefits range from easier and faster content publishing to unlimited access, regardless of location, to company tools and information.
**Benchmark**
- Sun Microsystems usability experts calculated that 21K employees wasted an average of 6 minutes/day due to inconsistent intranet user interface design and navigation. Multiplying lost time by user salaries, the estimated productivity loss exceeded US$10 million per year.

## Measuring Annual ROI

- Average annual ROI of respondent intranets fell just shy of $1 million ($979,775.58)
- —Prescient Digital Media Intranet ROI survey
- Average investments ranged from $1-2.5M for initial redesign for government sites
- —2004 Neilsen Norman Group’s report on the top 10 government intranet sites
- If FSIS saved just **6 minutes/day **reducing the amount of time employees spent looking for accurate information, we would realize **$1.56M year **in cost avoidance. In addition, saved time has a ripple effect, improving employee efficiency and productivity,

## Intentions-Based Design

- Content is King
- It’s all about the user
- Review industry/gov’t best practices
- Perform a content audit
- Conduct visioning sessions
- Perform in-depth audience analysis
- Develop and distribute audience personas
- Refine the agency taxonomy/controlled vocabulary
- Perform card sorting exercises
- Create wireframes
- Conduct usability testing

## Web Presence Design Process

**Consistent standards were developed for look, feel, and navigation using the following process:**

**Wireframes**

**Design Templates **

**Style Guide **

**Documented consistent guidelines and standards in the Style Guide**

**Created design templates and performed usability testing**
**Updated design templates to incorporate customer feedback**
**Developed HTML code for each template**

**Based on audience analysis to assess employees’ informational needs**
**Defined content that would typically be used on employee-only site and created consistent screen layouts**

**Notes:**

The Web Presence team has been working to define consistent standards and guidelines for agencies, offices, and applications to leverage.  To date, the team has created:

Wireframes: Web Presence wireframes are “blueprints” for designing Web pages or application screens.  They provide guidelines for layout and organization of information.

Design Templates:  Design Templates provide recommendations on how to handle graphical elements such as color, graphical text, and imagery in the design of your site or application.  These designs have been formally usability tested.

HTML Templates:  HTML Templates are being created to reproduce the design templates in actual HTML code. These code templates can be modified slightly and reused to fit the specific needs of your agency or application.  

User Interface (UI) Style Guide:  The UI Style Guide provides the standards, specifications, and guidelines that you should adhere to in designing your site or application.  Usability and accessibility guidelines and best practices are also addressed in the guide.

## Best Practices: Development

- Develop a common look and feel
- Use understandable site and page addresses
- Use a good search engine/engines
- Develop a logical information architecture
- Use good design principles; no clutter
- Create understandable headings & browse-able text, not lengthy paragraphs or pages
- Use well-written, clear text; no jargon
- Create fast-loading pages
- Review and apply industry best practices
- Use a content management system

## Why Content Management?  

- Why Content Management?

- User works from Desktop to create content

- Content is stored in
- Content Management
- System

- Content manager publishes
- content to the Web

- “Templates” are used to promote consistency in Web pages
- Automated workflow for entire content lifecycle (creating, approving, and publishing content)
- Automated maintenance of the Web site (e.g. link-checking)
- Consistent categorization of content

## What about Personalization?

- Selected topics of interest are pushed to your pages, allowing you to prioritize content that you wish to see.

- Customize based on your audience group.  Information relevant to that group will be displayed on your personalized pages.

- Access customized pages with your eAuthentication Level 2 Credential.  Your settings are saved and displayed next time you return to the site.

***In later phases, users might be able to customize their Intranet experience. ******This functionality is currently available on www.usda.gov.***

## Best Practices: Award Winners

- Reviewed nearly 200 pages of government intranet awardees for site usability
- Met with some of the winners to gather lessons learned
- Governments of Australia and Canada
- The World Bank
- Federal Reserve Bank (Richmond)
- Focused on how they met the needs of their users and fulfilled their organization’s mission

## What We’ve Learned

- Think big, phase in
- Have a great search engine
- An accurate, up-to-date employee information directory is the #1 item on a site
- Contact information
- Teams
- Subject matter expertise (skills database)
- Training/education
- Include “social” information
- Employee-to-employee kudos
- Personal announcements (births, brown bags, retirements, new employees)
- Make the information topic, not organization based (and spell out those acronyms!)

## Best Practices: Maintenance

- Prevent “web rot”
- Document subject matter experts (SMEs)
- Document workflows and clearance paths
- Hold train-the-trainer sessions
- Publicize!
- Follow style guide
- Monitor customer satisfaction and site performance

## Phased Approach

- Contracted for assistance with development, leveraging long-term knowledge of FSIS and USDA redesign efforts
- Phase I:
- Information gathering and design was bulk of time spent
- Creating a one-stop shop to most agency resources and consolidating current intranet sites/pages
- Initial build-out of major site areas; balance to be converted by subject matter experts
- Phase II and beyond:
- Collaboration tools
- Online employee directory
- Personalization/customization

## Steps and Timeframe

## Begin demo...