The Big Picture

... written by a lot of people at ArsDigita

The faster the pace of change in an industry or business, the more time and effort workers have to spend on coordination. Consider Adam Smith's pin factory. The boss has to stand up in front of the workers once per year and say "Thank you for your fine work last year. This year, I want you to make lots of pins. They should be really straight, blunt on one end, and pointy on the other. See you next year." In a university literature department, you need to have a meeting once per semester. Perhaps some of the curriculum should be revised? In a business facing innovative competitors, you need to have a meeting once every month to think about required responses. In a complex organization that is try to change and adapt, meetings and other forms of coordination may consume 20-30 hours per week.

Why is this a problem? People still have to work 40 hours per week to get anything done. The result is that people will have to spend 60-70 hours per week at the office in order to coordinate and work.

What's the solution to this social problem? A computer program of course! (You didn't expect anything better from three MIT graduates did you?)

A modern organization exhibits the classical problem at which Web-based applications excel: people separated in time and space. We can thus use the same toolkit that we developed for helping people work together and teach each other over the Internet to work together within an organization.

For What Kinds of Organizations Is This Best?

What kinds of organizations can get the most out of this toolkit? Ones just like ArsDigita, of course! We built this for ourselves. ArsDigita currently (May 2000) has approximately ten offices, 140 busy highly-paid people, and rapid growth (revenue doubling every six months). Coincidentally, it also works great for groups within larger companies. Consider Jane Manager at Hewlett-Packard who is forming a team to build a new product. Within a couple of weeks, she might be managing 100 people spread out among four physical locations in Japan, California, the Pacific Northwest, and Spain. That's much faster organizational growth and change than any startup company will ever experience. It would be awfully nice if Jane could go up to a Web browser and ask "Who works for me today? What are their names? What do they look like? How do I get in touch with them?"

The Medium-Size Picture

We assume that all the employees are users in a standard ArsDigita Community System. We keep track of employees, customers, project, salaries, and deadlines. This enables us to ask questions like

How many people work in this organization and how much money are we spending each month on salaries?
Who works for whom? (fun with Oracle tree extensions)
What are our upcoming deadlines?
What is John Smith working on?
Which people are on the CNN project?
How much time did that project take?
What current issues and problems we are facing?
What has this project involved so far?

For companies that operate an Internet service based on our toolkit, a side benefit of using our intranet module is that employees who develop skills in maintaining the intranet can then apply those skills to the public Web services. Novices have to start out somewhere and they might as well start in a place where an error isn't observed by customers.

One of the key components to any intranet is keeping members of the company up-to-date. The intranet makes it easy to spam the entire company, a specific office, or employees working on a given project.

mbryzek@arsdigita.com