Intranetters: Transport for London and London Underground

Two excellent presentations at yesterday's Intranetters event: Rod McLean of London Underground spoke about the challenges he's faced and what he's achieved with LU's intranet since joining in January, while Brian Dobson of Transport For London showed a slightly more mature product in TFL's "Source".

Arriving five minutes into Rod's introduction I noticed a lot of new faces. I considered blaming the tube but guessed someone might already have done that gag - and as Rod pointed out, it would be easy to find out whether I was telling the truth from LU's real time update system.

London Underground

First up Rod McLean talked about the work he'd done on London Underground's intranet since joining in January.


The intranet had grown through the use of Frontpage with little organisation or governance. Rod's initial audit resulted in the deletion of over 50% of the existing content (with surprisingly little protest), amounting to some 6GB in volume (check Rod's presentation in the attachments section for a full breakdown). Rod spoke of using Webtrends, Google Search Appliance and PowerMapper to get a sense of "what's out there", but said they had to write their own tool to find out what was on the servers.

As an example of the remaining work, Rod points out a 496 page PDF titled "Jargon Buster" which he notes is a prime candidate for a wiki.

The biggest problem, says Rod moving on to the demonstration, is navigation which he demonstrates by pointing to the tabs across the top of the screen which open different applications, all in new windows. The breadcrumb bar provides isn't as effective at orientating users as it should be and sites are intensely cross-linked, which compounds the problem.

None of this seems to have dulled Rod's enthusiasm for the job ahead. Instead you get a sense of pragmatism at work, dealing with the problems you can in a logical order without becoming overwhelmed by the size of the task.

Transport For London

Brian Dobson has been working on TFL's intranet, Source, since 2005.


Source's navigation is more mature, dispensing with the organisational hierarchy navigation still favoured by LU for more user-orientated titles relating to people's work and needs as employees.

Source's choice of imagery is based on people, London and travel rather than specific transport systems, so there are no pictures of trains or buses, which gives Source a slightly more human face.

Brian says every employee visits Source, though he experiments to engage people interactively with forums have disappointed, most lapsing into "whingeing".

An interesting warning for expertise location tools: "Don't ask people to put in their own expertise: you'll end up with 500 web developers..!"

Brian notes the challenges he still faces, including replacing lots of PDF forms which are printed out and filled in.

Thanks to Rod for organising the visit and to both Brian and Rod for enjoyable demonstrations. Check the Intranetters community for news of forthcoming visits.