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In the collection Global Intranets Fighting Poverty in the Global Intranet The Myth of Global and Local Content Culture influences information architecture Building Trust in International Intranets Make-or-break Decisions in International Intranets The Complexity of the International Enterprise: What this means for the Intranet

Fighting Poverty in the Global Intranet

(May 2005, original version published in IntranetsToday.com, Nov/Dec 2004)

The Digital Divide in the International Enterprise

When the intranet is a utility for the way a company works - as essential as water and electricity, it becomes a public service. In developed countries, everyone has the right to public services such as transportation, communication and education.

Likewise, in an international company, all employees should have equal access to intranet services. In reality you often find populations who live above the digital poverty line and others below it  - pockets of wealth alongside pockets of poverty.

To start with, most international companies have chosen one or two working languages. Imagine if neither of those languages was yours. You would read the latest news on the corporate home page every day in a foreign language. Or, you would get the news a day or two late because it took time to be translated.

A victim of geography

Or you may be a victim of geographical or organizational circumstances. Imagine three concentric circles, each one representing a dimension of the user experience. The inner one is the intranet itself: the way it is structured, designed and sign-posted. The middle one is your technical environment: computer speed, screen size, speed of the network or internet connection. The outer one represents resources in your local entity: help desk and IT support, budget and people to produce content, build and update sites. The middle and outer circles can vary dramatically from country to country.

I know a company that announced with great pride on the home page that the computers in headquarters would soon be replaced by faster machines. The old machines would be given to a local charity organization as part of the company’s social responsibility program. Emails flooded the web master from employees around the world asking for the old machines, already more powerful than the equipment they had.

Different countries, different complaints

I once conducted an audit where people in the headquarter country complained mainly about the home page design and the fact that the site map was not up to date. In contrast, people in distant locations complained about basic gaps. They could not listen to the CEO’s speeches because they did not have multimedia PCs. They often waited long minutes for files to download only to discover they were out of date. They often received documents from headquarters such as user satisfaction questionnaires and content audit spreadsheets to fill out. Yet they never saw the basic changes that would make their situation better.

Act on the simple things first

Coming back to our three circles of user experience, the intranet teams will probably be able to act directly only on the first circle, the intranet itself. However, you can “ease the pain” for the second and third circles. For example, make sure your graphic guidelines are based on simple, light-weight design principles that work well on fast and slow machines, big and small screens, high speed and slow lines. Ensure that downloadable files are described sufficiently (summary, type, size) so that someone in a country with low bandwidth will know if it is worth downloading.

Include recommendations in your style guide on how to write simple, internationally understood English or whatever your corporate language is. Define a policy about what content should be in what language(s) and develop a process for getting key corporate content to all employees in languages they understand. Include rules in your CMS to first display content in the preferred language, but to replace it by corporate language content if it is not available. This decreases the time lag for critical information.

Educate people to fight poverty

Like in the real world, the way to fight poverty is through awareness and education. Do your part to make all levels of your company aware that unless all employees have a reasonably equal level of user experience on the intranet, the company as a whole suffers. Just like governments and world organizations, every international company needs to define its own digital poverty line and how it intends to bring all employees above it.

(May 2005, original version published in IntranetsToday.com, Nov/Dec 2004)

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