Perspective. Can you picture taking a flight into a new city, and crowding by the airplane window to get a birds-eye view of the topography? We're all fascinated with seeing the city and its seemingly endless rows of lights and moving freeway cars. Why? Perhaps we instinctively seek out the big picture. At ground level, the world is a complicated place. Up top, everything becomes clearer. We begin to see patterns, processes, and connections that we couldn't see before.

Organizations have a similar analogy. Take a look at some of your functional areas, and you'll quickly see that even small organizations as they grow to medium size are complicated. Sales, marketing, purchasing, materiel services, assembly/manufacturing, design/engineering, information technology, administration, and services are just some of the entities within the group that work collaboratively. In addition to the internal relationships, organizations have clients, vendors, and a myriad of other relationships that keep the group functioning. One common thread among all these parts is information, including the physical product information and the ever increasing collateral information such as directories, policies, price sheets, approved vendor lists, manuals, open job listings, and newsletters.

If you could transform each one of those items, such as the brochure describing your products and the matching IRA or 401(k) plan, you could make even a modest size organization or department appear as rich and embodied as a small city. Does your organization have this kind of a map? This corporate map, or Intranet, would be very handy to your employees and your vendors. It would show how each person's job fits into the grand scheme in your organization. It might be a bridge for new employees to discover the corporate culture, its history, and perhaps hint at where the organization is going. When properly designed, the Intranet's home page is like the view from the airplane where all the departments are like the city streets. Who is employed there? Where can employees find the e-mail directory? What are the open positions? Is there a departmental, divisional, or corporate calendar? How about the benefit and time off policies? Do employees have different retirement options?

An Intranet should include a site map of the website. In the same way a county map helps a reader note relationships by showing all the highways and interstates with a thick line and all the undivided roads with a dotted line, a site map helps visitors get the directory structure of your Intranet. Certainly your Intranet should group similar items together, but offering the "airplane" view is critical to give employees the top-down perspective.

What are other Intranet suggestions? There really is no limit, from the complex — password protected benefit screens where employees can check for unused vacation days or the virtual store where employees can purchase goods electronically — to the simple organization news including recent hires, new products, updated marketing strategies, question and answer bulletin boards, and a place for anonymous suggestions. Those groups that accept the challenge of constructing an Intranet with the "airplane" view in mind will be rewarding their employees with a clearer understanding of their organization, and hopefully enjoy the benefit of individuals who show more interest and commitment to making the company a better and more productive place.