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Early Intranet In 1988, we designed and engineered our first intranet. Domino’s Pizza wanted to link team members in all of their distribution centers across the country. We created a system that simplified the company business processes, and allowed easy updates for reference material such as employee records, training materials, internal newspapers (like ‘Dough Digest’), and classifieds (Dominos sold everything from Cummins engines to pizza pans between departments). One of the most elegant parts of this solution was a set of simple templates for team members to enter information into the system. For example, weekly performance data was entered by individual centers, then automatically grouped and ranked by performance and then displayed in each distribution center. Because Domino’s founder, Tom Monaghan also owned the Detroit Tigers, the graphic metaphor for the project was baseball. Each team member appeared on a stylized baseball card with personal ‘stats’. Since the project was done in 1988, well before the days of the World Wide Web, we used the Geisco bulletin board system as our technology foundation. Geisco was the platform of choice for many large corporations at the time, including Kodak and Apple. AOL ran on Geisco in its early days as well. The design challenge here was to create a system
for users who were ‘computer hostile.’ We did that by
creating a very easy-to-use interface, and by designing personal
incentives into the system. Team members could calculate their personal
bonuses to date and look up the baseball cards of themselves and
their team mates. Once they started using the system, they were
sold. |