Nov 2-7

Nov 16-21

Overcoming a Legacy System's Curse

Interview with Karen McCauley

A desire to overcome the pain caused by a legacy knowledge system is what brought Karen McCauley to the Nielsen Norman Group Usability Week conference in San Francisco. As the intranet and knowledge management specialist at Avanade Inc., in Seattle, she maintains a database of solutions submitted by other employees of the 6,000-person global consulting firm so that, as she put it, “Other people won’t have to re-invent that wheel, and so that the firm will have something to leverage.

“Basically,” she explained, “The company became so big that it has become really hard to manage what’s there in the knowledge base. We are going to a new platform, so we will re-do the site with the new technology.”

The new platform she has her eyes on is Microsoft Office SharePoint Server (MOSS), described by Microsoft as a collaboration system and foundation for Web-based business applications. McCauley, who previously managed back-office systems at MSNBC and, before that, at a newspaper, noted that MOSS also includes a content management system, a publishing system, and a workflow processes manager, among other things.

The choice of a Microsoft product is no accident, she added, since Avanade is itself a seven-year-old joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, the world’s largest consulting firm.

In addition, “Apparently, a new intranet is something that they have wanted for a couple of years, and it was approved, but other projects with more business value kept coming up. But by using the new Microsoft product to build the intranet, we will be able to show off our expertise. Our intranet will become a selling tool, and become a business opportunity for selling intranets to clients,” she explained.

Regardless of the technology in question, however, the present system has to go, she said. “Currently, a lot of people are putting content on our intranet when it is not their full-time job, and they are not coders, so it is difficult and intimidating for them. I help them, but I’m a one-person staff.”

Basically, there are nearly 300 people who supply content, she said, currently producing between 75 and 100 new items weekly.

With the planned system, “There will be more user-friendly tools for inputting information, with templates and a global library of content that will make it easier for them to create pages. The interface will be more drag and drop, as opposed to creating code. Also, with MOSS, you can reorganize and re-architect. We want a system that we can scale to the growth of the company and add things to seamlessly,” she said.

As for the current system, “You just have to learn it—there is no persistent navigation. A lot of problems could be solved just by fixing that. And right now, anyone can publish anything—there is no approval process,” she said.

Worse yet, the system has a flaw: it will publish a user’s saved—but possibly unfinished—file if another user in the same department site publishes a saved document, she explained.

When the current system was set up, the contributors were given two templates: one for a one-column layout, and another for a two-column layout, she noted. “There was nothing beyond that, and no guidelines to follow. But I will use what I have learned here to set up templates in the new system that can be followed all the way through the publishing process,” she said. Additionally, she plans to add a permissions process, where files sent in by content providers will be edited by the appropriate content owners.

As for her decision to attend the conference as part of her solution to the problem, “I had seen a copy of a report that the Nielsen Norman Group did about the top 10 intranet sites, and I liked that report—I thought it provided a lot of information. Then I saw an advertisement for the upcoming conference, and thought it would be good for me. The boss knew about usability, and had a conference budgeted, so when I asked they said ‘You bet!’

“I want to study usability, and particularly how to properly lay out an intranet site. I’ve learned a lot already,” she said after attending one day. “For instance, I thought that images were tremendously important. But it turns out that they have found, from eye-tracking studies, that people don’t even look at a lot of the images on a page. So, it’s silly to add a picture just because you think it’s cool, since people may not even look at it. I look at every image on a page, so I guess I have a pro-image bias.

“Also, it was interesting watching the video of people using sites that I thought were fairly simple, yet they were making mistake after mistake,” she recalled.