Instant Connect

THE idea of transparency at work is a wonderful concept. Only, transparency within a system rarely emerges the way you want it to. Not because people don’t want transparency (although there is that to consider too), but because foolproof systems are difficult to set up, run and maintain.

Let’s take the case of a school which, some years ago, wanted an intranet where teachers could keep a record of the performance of each student, have programmes running in the background which would throw up comparisons between students, ensure that homework for students could be made available to anyone logging in even from home, where students could post their work and see that of others. The school had a long wish list: the intranet should be able to help students collaborate, find reference material, look up the work submitted by students in the past, have teachers share notes on classes, students and even perhaps track the performance of teachers themselves. Additionally, all postings should be automatically stamped for time and authorship, automatic email alerts sent to relevant groups with every new posting, the ability to search for words, ideas and concepts through every single document, and the ability to add and remove users without the use of rocket science.

This is not an alien scenario: replace the word ‘school’ with that of your company, change ‘students’ to workers and ‘teachers’ to management and you’ll have an example you can immediately identify with. Today, these systems are not difficult to set up and run. Take a look at http://www.rapidintranet.com

(The author is Station Director, Radio City, 91 FM, Bangalore)