Organize Your Business with an Intranet

Originally published in “Graphic Define Magazine“

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Firstborn is well known for our talented roster of designers, developers, programmers, producers, and management team. What most people outside of the company aren’t aware of is that we’ve created a tool that has enhanced our business process and greatly contributed to Firstborn’s consistent growth over the past 10 years: the Firstborn Intranet.
Flashback to 2001. Firstborn was in its fourth year of creating digital design and technology solutions for high profile clients. We’d grown from three founders to 11 employees and needed to maintain a regular flow of projects, as well as enhance our sales initiatives to continue the steady expansion of the company. It was time for everyone to pitch in.
Identify the Need
How could we improve our business development without people duplicating each other’s efforts? That situation might lead to some embarrassing moments and give the wrong impression that we were anything but a very professionally run organization. Was there also a way that we could be more organized than storing our contacts and activities in a massive spreadsheet?
What to Use?
We examined all the worthwhile off-the-shelf products that were out there, including ACT, Salesforce.com, Siebel, and a host of others. But none of them did exactly what we needed it to do. And besides, we realized that since we were in the business of digital design and development, it made sense to create our own intranet.
DIY!
Having educated ourselves on the features of some other applications out there, we collaborated to determine the elements that best fit our needs. It was a joint effort by our sales, project management, and production departments. We treated this internal initiative as if it were a real project, which was challenging because of all the client work that needed to be done. We diligently made the time to meet and discuss what important features were needed in our intranet.
Features and Functionality
The intranet was conceived primarily as a sales tracking tool. Features such as entering and storing contacts, logging activities and tasks, and setting reminders were the core system capabilities we focused on. More in-depth discussions revolved around how these elements all worked together and the details of each function. Some of those details and additional layers were quickly entering contact information, search and sort functionality, and tagging how contacts found us or vice versa.
We determined the major functionality and developed a system of categories, labels, rules, and hierarchy to apply to contacts and activities. These elements were illustrated with sketches (Figure 1), wireframes, and eventually design comps (Figure 2) that took into consideration everything we discussed. All the while we made sure to keep the front-end design simple and easy to implement.

Figure 1. An early sketch.

Figure 2. A design comp.
Development and Daily Use
We rapidly moved into development and began testing within a month or two, with regular reviews and feedback to keep the project efficient and on track.
There wasn’t an official launch of the intranet with noise makers and streamers. It quickly became a functional tool we used in our daily tasks, and we regularly emailed comments to our developers to work out the kinks. (Many companies are taking this approach these days as products are released as public beta versions and benefit from real-world testing and customer feedback.)
Since its inception, the intranet has been a work in progress as we grow and our needs change. Having began merely as a sales contact and activity tracking system, the intranet expanded to include sections to track hours spent working on projects, job lists and status, employee information, invoicing, and many other kinds of data we previously shared through email or by referring to static documents on our server (Figure 3).

Figure 3. The intranet in action.
Now that this data is saved and stored centrally on the intranet, we’re able to connect the dots and come up with reporting functions to track performance, cost analysis, and other factors to be gleaned from the information (Figure 4).

Figure 4. Now it’s easier to get stats fast.
The Next Phase
We’re now in the process of making even more improvements to our intranet to address our current needs, concerns, and issues that come up with daily use. Many enhancements revolve around technology improvements that have become common practice since we built the intranet in 2001, such as AJAX to speed pulling up information and entering contacts.
The most exciting development is the fact that we are now in the process of offering our intranet to clients by licensing the application through a centralized Web-based model with packages that include the specific modules companies need.
Being a successful creative services company requires a well-oiled machine. Over the years, some of the best compliments we’ve received have been when clients comment about how well Firstborn is run as a business. Having our own custom-built intranet has proven to be an immensely beneficial tool that will help us as we move on to our next 10 years.
Ryan is Senior Vice President and Executive Director at Firstborn, a bi-coastal interactive design and technology shop.
Kevin is Executive Vice President at Firstborn, a bi-coastal interactive design and technology shop.