|
Written by Patrick C. Walsh
Today, nearly a million organisations worldwide are accredited to an ISO management system standard. The exponential growth in the number of accreditations to these standards has been fuelled by globalisation. The ISO 9001 Quality Management System standard, for instance, ensures that organisations worldwide meet internationally agreed criteria for managing their businesses. This gives customers confidence in the quality and on-time delivery of their suppliers' products and that the supplier will meet the customers' ethical and legal requirements. Other standards address environmental, health and safety, automotive, software and other management systems.
For most of these organizations, being accredited to a standard is the ante required to get into the game. In many business sectors, it is a customer requirement that accreditation to a standard is achieved before a tender for work can even be considered. It is therefore vitally important for these organisations to ensure that the requirements of these standards are achieved and maintained. This is made even more difficult as in some sectors, such as automotive, organisations need to achieve more than one management standard. In my last company, we were accredited to ISO 9001 (Quality), ISO 14001 (Environmental), TS 16949 (Automotive) and we were on our way to achieving compliance with OHSAS 18001 (Health and Safety).
User centred design
Many organisations now use intranets to store and disseminate standards related information such as policies, procedures, guidance, technical information, legislation and best practice. However, to ensure that their accreditations are not threatened, the internal structure of the standard has tended to dominate their intranets. This leads to organization-wide inefficiencies as staff cannot find information in such an unintuitive structure and they may therefore feel that the standard has little to do with them.
To improve their intranets, some organisations have employed web designers to re-design them using an approach tempered in the cauldron of the Internet. If an Internet user finds a website ugly, "clunky" and cannot easily find what he wants, he is likely to ‘vote with his fingers' and go to another website that serves his purpose better.
User Centred Design (UCD) is an umbrella approach that incorporates user research, usability testing and personas, amongst other tools, to produce vastly improved websites that support users' mental models and goals. This is an approach that will benefit organisations greatly when judiciously applied to their intranets. However, if this approach is applied indiscriminately, ISO standard-related information may become fragmented as each user will only be aware of the part of the standard that affects them. The user in this case will be like the man with a blindfold who feels an elephant's tail and pronounces it to be a snake.
Integrated management
An approach now being used successfully in many organisations is that of Integrated Management Systems. This has been defined as -
‘.. the understanding and effective direction of every aspect of an organisation so that the needs and expectations of all stakeholders are equitably satisfied by the best use of all resources' [1]
This approach can give real benefits especially when an organisation is accredited to two or more standards. Some elements of management systems are very similar. Processes such as internal audit, management review, corrective and preventive action and continual improvement are requirements in most management standards. Therefore it makes sense to reduce multiple similar processes into a single process that incorporates the requirements of all standards. This approach will lead to a simpler, more efficient management system. Integrating processes in this manner will also reduce the human resource required to effectively administer a process.
However, this approach can also increase the complexity of the information structure as common procedures must be linked to each management system page within the intranet to ensure that the content set for each standard is complete. There may only be one internal audit process, for instance, but this may need to be accessed from the quality, environmental and health and safety pages. Multiply these links by each common process and, even without addressing user requirements, the structure is already becoming more complex.
Managing multiple structures
Everyone in an organisation needs to be aware of a standard as a whole content set in order that they can see how they contribute to the overall scheme of things. A holistic view of how an organisation complies with a standard is something that external auditors, customers, government departments and other stakeholders may also require. Users need the intranet to reflect their own wants and needs within the work setting and management may require an integrated approach for increased efficiency and optimum use of resources. So how can we square this particular circle?
An invaluable approach to creating the information structure of intranets is that of Information Architecture (IA). IA has been defined as -
‘The art and science of structuring and classifying web sites and intranets to help people find information' [2]
It can be seen that an intranet containing ISO information will require at least two information structures - one user centred and the other content centred - and somehow these structures need to be integrated into a single overall structure that appears simple and logical when accessed by all users and stakeholders.
How these two structures relate to IA has been best summed up below -
‘The heart of IA (is) the ability to successfully bring together the internal organizing principles of an information set (or task) with the audience's mental model and goals.' [3]
Most intranets will also need to integrate other information that is not standards related, such as human resource, IT support and staff related information, thus complicating matters further.
The problem with managing an intranet with multiple structures is not only in managing the content but in managing the myriad links that make up the information structure. If an intranet manager is not careful the information structure can become so complex that it can no longer be visualised. When this happens, the performance of the intranet will begin to deteriorate as the system cannot be holistically evaluated and new content cannot be linked as effectively as possible.
The option for some, as has been said, is to keep to a single, simple structure so that managing the contents and links becomes less of a struggle. Overall, this approach is highly inefficient and can end up alienating staff as it does not enable them to access content in a way that makes sense to them.
Another option is to attempt to build multiple structures using distributed editing with no overarching control over the content or information structures. Having editors govern their own little section of the intranet will inevitably lead to information silos, obsolete content, content that clashes with other content and eventually chaos. The structure of some of these intranets might be said to most closely resemble of bowl of spaghetti.
The third option is to ensure that multiple structures are integrated using a suitable IA tool [4] to ensure that all content and links are mapped so that the structure as a whole can be visualised. Where content is crucial to the core purpose of any website a content audit will be the key first activity -
‘...the point of an exhaustive content audit, bottoms-up IA process should lead to - and inform - the creation of site structure, navigation, taxonomy, etc [5]
This inevitably implies that there must be an element of Content Centred Design as well as User Centred Design.
Content centred design
The method I have used in building my intranet is to first look at all of the content discovered in the audit and create the content structure. A tool which will aid in visualising the content structure during design is a "must". Only when the content has been structured is it time to carry out user research. It is now possible to enrich user research by producing content that users may not have been aware of and seeking their views regarding currency, categories, ownership etc. The real trick is then in weighing the important elements of each structure to produce a balanced overall information structure.
For instance, all ISO related information can be accessed from my intranet homepage under the category ‘Highways Management Manual' which contains all my organisation's policies, procedures, guidelines and management structure. This area is designed to contain all of the information required by ISO 9000 and so it is auditor and stakeholder friendly. The procedures can also be accessed by type of activity (maintenance, financial, traffic management etc.) under ‘Highway Works Information', a user research generated category.
In my intranet, there are many cross linkages between content and user structures and these must be effectively managed. The tool that I use is a visual map of the structure in Visio linked to an Access database [6]. This enables me to build the structure and test the concept before creating any web pages and it also becomes my road map when adding new content or structures. The intranet is still very far from perfect, or complete, but being able to visualise the structure enables me to continually improve the way content is accessed. I have found this approach invaluable.
In conclusion, those organisations accredited to an ISO management standard and wishing to make all ISO related content available on an intranet must make a choice.
Have a simple ISO based information structure, which will make it easy to manage but will make life difficult for the user, or provide some resource to ensure that both the user's needs and wants and the content's structure and integrity are adequately addressed. Only if the second option is selected will organisations truly benefit from achieving a management system and ISO standards may finally emerge from the digital stone age.
References
[1] Integrated Management Special Interest Group (IMSIG), Chartered Quality Institute (CQI), Definition of Integrated Management, 2003
[2] Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, p. 4, Rosenfeld and Morville, O'Reilly publishers, ISBN 0-596-00035-9
[3] Weston Thompson, IAI List, 1st May 2008
(IAI members only)
[4] Information Architect Institute, IA Tools
[5] Will Evans, Semanticfoundry.com, IAI List, 12th May 2008
(IAI members only)
[6] Patrick C. Walsh, A map based approach to a content inventory, Boxes and Arrows, http://www.boxesandarrows.com/view/a-map-based-approach
Patrick Walsh has been involved in the automotive industry for over 30 years starting out as a lineside inspector and ending up as a Quality and Environmental Manager within a large group of companies. He became interested in intranets and information architecture through attempting to integrate the information related to several ISO standards and make it available to all staff on a shared drive, an approach which made him a finalist in the Chartered Quality Institute's prestigious National Quality Award in 2003.
Since then, Patrick has become the intranet manager for a large local government department and has founded the national IA group for local authorities in the UK. He is also a member of the CQI's Integrated Management Special Interest Group.
Other related FUMSI stories:
![[Get Copyright Permissions]](http://license.icopyright.net/images/icopy-w.gif "[Get Copyright Permissions]")
Click here for copyright permissions!
Copyright 2008 Free Pint Ltd.
You may also be interested in:
|
FUMSI is for individuals, teams and organisations. Get the benefits of a FUMSI subscription. 
