Infrastructure: looking beyond technology

December, 2001

Why is it taking so long for intranet managers to recognize the need for a nontechnical publishing infrastructure -- e.g. editorial staff, bibliographic standards, partnerships with external information providers? Maybe it's because they don't see themselves as publishers. Instead, they view themselves as knowledge base administrators, information architects, or e-commerce managers. Maybe it's because the language they use -- e.g. "capturing" knowledge or managing "white space" -- has no obvious parallel in the traditional publishing environment.

But publishing is fundamentally the same, whether it's subsidized out of corporate overhead or paid for by subscriptions, delivered in print or over a network. It's still a matter of providing a specific audience with information they want to receive. In this article we suggest some elements of the traditional publishing infrastructure that intranet managers can use to address five problem areas:

1. How to identify knowledge assets
2. How to capture knowledge
3. How to manage white space
4. How to increase productivity on the desktop
5. How to value infrastructure investments

The article is divided into two sections:

Part 1: Traditional publishing vs. intranet publishing
Part 2: Integrating the traditional publishing infrastructure

Symptoms of an inadequate infrastructure
Once companies get past the initial euphoria of Internet e-mail and web publishing, they begin to see some problems:

• Quality control -- a quality control process is needed to eliminate documents of questionable value and check the others for accuracy;
• Knowledge sharing -- good writers, reporters, and editors are needed to ferret out the good stuff that isn't making it onto the intranet;
• Information retrieval -- indexing systems, taxonomies, and thesauri are needed to make it easier to find information;
• Desktop productivity --individuals and teams need training and editorial services to help customize the work environment and make it easier to process information.

Traditional publishers have developed a system of people, processes, and institutions to deal with these issues, but they are entangled in print production processes. When companies get rid of file cabinets, library shelves, and three-ring binders, the humans that managed them -- editors, indexers, technical writers, and catalogers -- often go too. Technology can only go so far in fixing the problems. It's not just the skills that are missing; it's the whole human publishing infrastructure.

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