MITRE’s intranet team stays on top of trends like responsive design. They also keep us responsive to one another so that we can engage in the reachback that helps us answer our customers’ questions. In this post, the authors describe how MITRE’s Organization Pages help us stay, well, organized in a big way.—Editor

Authors: Beth Lavender and Krista Kennedy Groenwoldt

Staff phonebook? Check.

Basic search? Of course.

Projects and task numbers? Yup.

Reports and other customer deliverables? Yes, again.

We could keep running down a list 15 years in the making, but instead of just highlighting 13 items, we’d like to focus on one new design that we are particularly proud of. MITRE’s Organization Pages are a facet of the intersecting relationships among people, projects, and products, and how we deliver them as a knowledge suite to our staff across a range of devices.

The design of the new Organization Pages builds on a long-standing principle: no empty pages. In other words, we minimize the data that require manual entry—and thus might not ever get done, given how busy the staff are.

Organization pages now integrate data from eight different business and knowledge systems. Data pertaining to staff planning, job requisitions, project charges and employee locations are all pulled from different systems and displayed automatically. In addition, these pages allow the leader of the organization to enter information into five easy autocomplete fields to describe the skills and expertise associated with the organization, a feature managers have long been asking for. This reduction in overhead simultaneously improves expertise finding throughout the company. Employees who are searching for help with a particular topic can now find the right staff and departments who specialize in that area.

Staff from across MITRE can also see which programs and portfolios an organization supports and learn more about that organization’s mission and goals. In short, the new pages make information visible so that project leaders and organization leaders can manage more efficiently. The Knowledge Management is embedded in their everyday systems, even to enabling them to get detailed, real-time reports.

All the information is searchable via faceted, or cross-organizational, search. A project leader can type in the term networks and have results from a match on the organization’s name, description, tags, capabilities, or one of the staff tags. Filters offer the ability to narrow based upon attributes such as organization type.

Overall, the new Org Pages enable a highly integrated and mobile view of 350 organizations within MITRE. The Intranet Innovation Awards, a global competition for leading edge intranets and digital workplaces, recognized the new pages saying, “Given how important good staff data is to collaboration and given how often it shows up as a top ticket requirement from employees of their intranet, it’s great to see a company who have actually invested in this topic properly,” commented one judge. “Much to admire!”

The snapshot below features just a taste of what’s on offer.

How does your organization help staff find the right resource for a pressing question or project?