Runways and I-95: Building a central backbone for enterprise information

Years ago, when I started managing the intranet of a credit card bank, I was convinced that my primary goal should be to get everyone working through the same UI for everything. I had a vision in my head of a single, uniform interface to rule them all.

But I was 26, so what did I know?

It quickly became apparent this was a pipe dream. The modern enterprise consists of a constellation of software. Our industry has been trying to streamline this for years with varying degrees of success. The sheer number and variability of systems in use is something like a hailstorm that never ends. It’s often just thinly-managed chaos.

What I’ve learned in the meantime is that if you can’t get everyone doing everything in the same app (spoiler: you can’t), then you at least need something in the center to hold everything together.

For a lot of organizations, the only constant in this space tends to be network credentials. With any luck, they can at least get everything running from a central login, so that their employees at least have some invariable thread of identity.

But what do we do about managing employment information — meaning the information that employees need to do their jobs? Sure, they all have specific roles and information systems for those roles, but the one thing they all have in common is that they’re employees of the organization and that imparts a “floor” of information about payroll and benefits and policies, and even drifts into lines of business, with strategy and organizational updates and all of the other things that cross over role lines and define their identity as an employee.

You can call it a “hub,” a “backbone,” a ”gateway,” whatever. But you need something that provides both practical and symbolic consistency to the swirling mass of enterprise software tools you’re asking your employees to juggle.

And this tool should be a dedicated tool. It shouldn’t piggyback on anything else. It exists in the realm of what we call “internal communications,” which is a space that is literally devoted to employee information acquisition and internalization. The ability to do this well isn’t random — it’s the result of time, attention and details.

Consider that there’s a weird quirk of intranets — they often get named.

I’ve always been fascinated by this. Organizations invariably name their intranets. Historically, it was often something like MyCompany or CompanyNet, but I’ve seen lots of derivations based around what the company does — an airline had one named “Runway,” an electric utility had one named “Watt,” a nursing organization had one named “Flo,” after Florence Nightingale.

These names stick. The BBC has been calling their intranet “Gateway” for 25 years or so. IBM has called theirs “w3” for about the same amount of time.

Trends in tech branding have led us to name other systems, too, of course. But I was working with intranets back in the mid- to late-90s, and they all had names even back then. Naming intranets seems to be the most natural thing in the world. Employees refer to them as proper nouns, as if only one of those things exists.

Colleagues assume knowledge of this thing — it’s a bona fide social construct inside an organization; a thing that new employees learn about on day one, and that’s probably still around when they retire.

Why? Employees are looking for a “backbone” to the information and systems in an organization. There’s so much change swirling around that there needs to be a constant in the background. There needs to be a conceptual framework to which the organization’s information is anchored.

The average organization has so much turnover — especially around information and technology – that employees are desperate for consistency. They want their usage of ephemeral tooling to exist in relation to some other, dependable system that they know they can always find.

When my wife and I took a cruise, I paid for the tour of the crew spaces and “backstage” areas on the ship. When we got below the passenger areas, I found that the interior of the ship was dominated by a wide, industrial corridor that stretched the entire length of the ship — it was something like a quarter mile long.