CMb 2010–09
Rolling out intranet access from home
Categorised under: articles, intranets
Many organisations have staff who don’t sit at desks or in front of PCs. The challenge is how to give them access to the intranet, so they can easily complete common tasks, such as applying for leave.
Several approaches were outlined in the earlier article Intranet kiosks or remote access?. This highlighted the benefits gained by giving staff access to the intranet from outside the organisation, such as from home.
This enables staff to look up information and do transactions in their own time, as well as making it simple to confer with their partners or family.
In a large organisation, providing this type of remote access may seem daunting. While the technology hurdles have been greatly reduced, there is still a significant change management effort required.
Without this, staff will struggle to master often unfamiliar technology, and the investment in remote access will deliver few benefits.
This briefing outlines a number of practical tips and suggestions on how to roll out access, drawn from real-world projects.
Setting up and testing
- Make sure the remote access is to the entire intranet, and not just to a single app (such as HR self-service).
- Make sure the facility is useful (read-only access, for example, would be of limited value).
- Make it very simple for staff, eliminating as much of the technical complexity as possible.
- Implement the simplest form of secure access that is appropriate for the context (security can get very in depth!).
- Home computers vary greatly in their flavours and configurations, unlike corporate desktops. Find a test group of typical employees and conduct extensive testing at the early stages of the project.
- Spend time getting helpdesk staff prepared for questions and issues that are likely to arise once the rollout commences.
Training and support
- Sell the benefits for staff, and not just the organisation.
- Provide strong support during the initial rollout.
- Create online training materials, including detailed information on what configurations can and can’t be supported, and how-to instructions.
- Communicate the rollout widely, through a variety of channels.
- Provide printed materials for all staff.
- Hold demonstration sessions that employees can attend, in a range of locations if necessary.
- Consider dedicating several individuals in the helpdesk team to addressing issues, and then routing calls to them.
- For larger organisations, double or triple the amount of support that is available for staff in the first three months.
- Provide a help forum and allow users to upload screenshots of their errors as well as share solutions with each other.
Cultural change
- Recognise concerns that staff may have about being ‘required’ to work from home, and address these in a balanced way.
- Work closely with the unions where needed, to ensure that they are comfortable with the approach being taken.
- Progressively eliminate alternative ways of completing tasks, moving these online instead.
- Ensure there is an overlap at the outset, where both new and old ways of getting information and doing tasks are available.
Acknowledgements
Garry Rawlins (garry@mueslibrown.com) and other members of the Intranetters mailing list for their contributions to this article.
Tags: home access, intranets, remote access
James Robertson is the founder and Managing Director of Step Two Designs, a vendor-neutral consultancy located in Australia.
James is recognised as one of the world-wide thought leaders on the topics of web content management and intranet strategy. He has worked with many organisations in both the public and private sectors, including Fortune 500 companies and Federal Government agencies. 
5 Comments:
At our organization, remote access to our intranet has been essential to getting the intranet adoption rate near 100%.
Most of our people are consultants often working at client sites, on the road, from hotels, and so on. Although they could always use VPN to get to our intranet, that extra step is usually not convenient for quick tasks — and sometimes not even possible (incompatible networks at some hotels, for example).
A few years ago we set up access to our intranet from the Internet. We use special client SSL certificates to secure the connection, in addition to the standard user authentication. Since then, we’ve been able to set everyone’s home page to our intranet: when you’re in the office you get a normal http connection, and when you’re outside the office you automatically get a secure https connection.
Bonus: when we acquired another firm last year, before their office could be integrated into our WAN, they could still access our intranet as remote users — so they were connected to our tools, knowledge, and community right away.
At my company, we have also enabled intranet access via the internet and it’s proved a successful method of widening consumption of content. We have 72000 employees, but only 30k have PCs and so it’s critical that we provide alternatives. Our route:
Public Kiosk access in all 550 facilities
SSL access via the internet.
As our intranet is also the primary HR self-service tool, external access was vital.
Key Issues
Unlike company-owned computers, there are thousands of likely configurations of hardware and software. To simply, we did optimise access to IE and Firefox (and low versions of both). This can frustrate more technically minded employees — and Apple fans in particular.
Consider the cultural change. Considerable work was done with Works Councils and Unions to ensure that they were happy with the approach and that it did not constitute ‘work creep’ back home. Presenting the flexibility of the approach, providing kiosks for work time access helped smooth this potentially difficult problem.
It’s great to see SSL provided as a way of accessing the intranet remotely. In the past, IT security often meant physical tokens or complex access prototols, which were expensive to implement and difficult to use. For most intranets, there’s nothing so secure it can’t be covered by the same SSL encryption used in the finance industry for online banking :-)
I recently worked with a company where physical tokens were still in use. Using it, and getting the thin client to work on a Mac, was a pretty awful user experience.
I got there in the end and one of the most inresting aspects was that a Mac-owning employee at the client’s office asked me how on earth I had got it all working. It required some light modification which I had to Google for, but the IT HelpDesk had been typically unhelpful!
To the point of the article, with such adversity to accsssing the systems, few people will actually bother. Remote access has to be super-easy to use, it surprises me that simple sign-on systems are not more common.
James,
Hope you are well. How’s your book coming along?
It is a relief to see that BT has followed the approach you are advocating in your post. This is very useful for any organisation thinking of going down this route or have problems with what they have tried.
In BT many thousands of people work some time from home and, as in my case, are officially homeworkers with phone, broadband and PC provision.
For me it has been one of the best decisions I have made when I decided to be a homeworker over 12 years ago and save myself 4 hours (yes 4!) each day commuting.
BT’s intranet is open, security is keep to what is essential, network speed is quick with broadband.
All of these have encouraged homeworking and saved BT millions of pounds in increased productivity and office accommodation not needed.
My own experience when moving home is given here http://markmorrell.wordpress.com/2009/02/04/intranet-manager-uses-own-intranet-to-move-homeand-work/.
Mark