Intranets

1. Social business is a journey not a destination. There is no short cut to social business easy street or a magic pill that can get you there over night, with no effort. Embrace the journey.

2. Social business is still being defined. If you want a text book definition, roadmap and 3-day succinct course on how to be a social business, it may be awhile before you find it. The social ecosystem is still evolving and even those living, breathing and sleeping this stuff are still figuring out exactly what it means to us, what and how we integrate. Check out this post “Definition of Social Business?” where I take a stab at a definition for social business.

3. Thinking is a requirement, not an option.  Nope, you can’t throw the action of “get social” at the new intern and expect exponential results. Best thing you can do is roll up your sleeves and get ready to work.

4. Social media is not just about you.  Think teams and community, not silos, interruption marketing and spam coupons.

5. Perfection is enemy of good. If you wait until everything is perfect, chances are you’ll be waiting a long time.

6. Change is guaranteed. There is only one guarantee with social media and that is change. Just as you learn a new tool or technology, it is bound to change. Accept it and know you’ll be in a constant state of learning and growing. It’s alright as we’re all right there with ya’!

One of the keys to success for retailers such as Dell and Wal-Mart is inventory control. Knowing what inventory or products they have, how much of it, and how it relates to customer demand (e.g. what are they buys, when will it run out, how much do we need to order).

Your intranet or website offers a product: content (either static, dynamic or in the form of a tool or application). And content remains king. It is the most valuable thing you offer your employees or readers. But do you know the state of your content? Is it up to date? Who owns it? How much do you have?

Dell and Wal-Mart offer a practical lesson for the world of intranet: success is partly predicated on knowing what you have.

The challenge is volume. If your intranet is like most, then your intranet portal and/or sites have a lot of content. It’s rare that I work with a client intranet that has less than 100 – 500 pages of intranet content per employee. IBM has more than 10 million known pages (more than 300 pages per employee).

While knowing what you have is important it can be time consuming but highly worthwhile for a number of reasons:

• business continuity – ensuring employees have the right information to do their job
• cost efficiency – stale or wrong information or data can be eliminated
• employee productivity – maintaining and prioritizing information so that the most valued and used information is easily retrieved
• business priorities – determine what content and information is needed to drive an effective business

“Intranets grow and become more content heavy, ownership moves from one department to another, and business processes as well as their user base will change throughout content’s lifecycle,” writes Paul Chin, an intranet consultant and writer, in Taking Stock: Intranet Content Audits. “Over time, content that goes unchecked can be lost, forgotten, or even become a burden on the system. It can be relegated to the darkest recesses of the system never to be seen again.”

Undertaking the audit is the most time-consuming task. We often recommend that a client use a web analytics tool such as WebTrends to identify all the pages and content on the various intranet servers and then visit each one-by-one to identify:

• content type
• content relevancy
• date of publish
• owner/author
• status: save it, update it, or delete it

One client of ours at a 750 person company used two summer students armed with a browser and an MS-Excel spreadsheet to track and document all 10,000 pages on their intranet. It took them one month and a half to document all 10,000 pages (about 3,000 pages per auditer per month). The good news was they identified all the content and found that only 4,000 of the 10,000 pages were of any value. In one full swoop they wiped out 6,000 pages which saved them a lot of server space and maintenance costs not to mention helped preserve business continuity and accuracy of information.

Content is king therefore it needs care and pampering.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Sodexho USA’s successful intranet is home grown – no portal solution, no content management platform. Despite the proliferation of expensive solutions, SodexhoNet (Sodexho’s home page) is a shining example of how intranet success can be delivered and measured without the benefit of an off-the-shelf solution.

SodexhoNet was the featured tour stop on today’s Intranet Insider World Tour, presented by Communitelligence.com and hosted by myself and Sodexho’s Angelo Ioffreda. Comments, questions and discussion are encouraged below…

Sodexho USA is one of the biggest companies you may not know. Sodexho USA (http://www.sodexhoUSA.com) is the leading provider of food and facilities management in North America, with $6 billion in annual revenues and 110,000+ employees. Sodexho runs cafeterias, housekeeping in the hospitality sector, grounds keeping, plant operations and maintenance and laundry services to more than 6,000 companies principally in health care, schools, and the military.

Headquartered in Gaithersburg, MD, Sodexho has employees spread out across and in all corners of the continent. An even greater challenge than the geographic disparity of its employees is the nature of their work. The vast majority of these employees are hourly workers who are not desktop workers with their own computers – they’re on the frontlines rather preparing and serving food, cleaning, and performing site operations. SodhexoNet is a tying bond that links most of the managers and management of this diverse and disparate group.

“The intranet is a perfect gathering place,” says Angelo Ioffreda, VP, internal communications, Sodexho USA. Companies with many thousands of employees dispersed across great regions and dozens of locations require an effective intranet. Today the intranet serves Sodexho’s managers across the world. Registered users have grown from 2,000 in April, 1999, to more than 14,500 users today.

To access the intranet, each manager pays $39.69 for annual intranet access. Surprisingly, this is not a bone of contention at Sodexho, but expected at an organization with a corporate philosophy for charging for costs incurred. The charge also benefits user managers as the onus is greater on the intranet team to deliver a winning product that is embraced. Finally, the charge also commits managers to use the intranet. If you’re paying, you better use it. 

Like all effective systems, SodhexhoNet has a vision: SodexhoNet is a one-stop shop for all of our managers’ information needs and an indispensable part of a Sodexho work day.”

Accompanying the vision is some practical but key goals:

• Essential business and communications tool
• Robust, timely, relevant, accurate content
• Intuitive navigation
• Quick access
• Easy to search
• Feedback capacity
• Cost-effectiveness

SodexhoNet’s greatest strength however is its management team, lead by corporate communications.

The corporate communications team has five people including an art designer, a communications specialist/writer, the e-communications manager , e-communications specialist , and the VP.  The e-communications manager and specialist are the only ones dedicated full-time to the intranet; the others contribute on a part-time basis. The eBusiness team from IT has a director, a project manager,  two art designers, three programmers, and a technical trainer. They also support other IT projects.

In addition to the contributions of IT and Communications, there are well over 100 content owners-authors. Each business line has a principal content owner (e.g. health care, etc.). Each line has sub-groups (e.g. hospitals, etc.) that also contribute content.

One of the intranet’s key strengths lies in the team’s understanding that the intranet must intimately understand its target audience and constantly measure its performance. By measuring its success, Sodhexho knows where to concentrate its efforts and resources and constantly strive for improvement.

Among the many measures the intranet team tracks (for the last year measured compared to the previous year):

• User behavior and how usage is trending (those never using SodexhoNet dropped from 19% to 1%)
• SodexhoNet as a “valuable resource” to employees (from 74 to 84%)
• Registered users who visit the site monthly (from 55 to 90%)
• Most visited pages (career center, HR, health care, phone book, and search)
• Most searched terms (forms, recipe collection, performance appraisal)
• Return on investment (where possible) 

One of SodexhoNet’s more innovative and successful tools is its SuperSleuth sales lead program. SuperSleuth is an intranet web page and application that encourages employees to submit sales leads and prospective clients via the intranet. The SuperSleuth intranet page generate cash rewards of up to $1000 for the person making the submission. Sodexho says it has contributed to a 100% increase in sales leads in the past year. Let me repeat: a 100% increase in company sales leads. In fact, the SuperSleuth tool has led to US$90 million dollars in managed volume (net client sales including sales by client). Proof positive of a killer application.  

While the site has evolved considerably and its value has grown measurably in recent years, it hasn’t been without considerable effort and some lessons learned, says Ioffreda.

Amongst the key lessons learned:

• Create a vision
• Partner with IT (“big time,” says Ioffreda stressing the importance of a healthy working relationship with IT) – and HR
• Establish clear standards for the site
• Make end-users the center of your universe
• Incorporate real-time feedback from end-users
• Track user behavior
• Make content ‘king’
• Involve, support, and communicate with your content owners
• Develop an editorial / programming mindset
• Strive for intuitive navigation
• Improve your search and speed
• Commit to continuous improvement in product and processes
• Make your site a business tool
  • Reduce costs
  • Raise efficiency
  • Bring in revenue

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Search is an absolute essential to any successful intranet. And not just a search engine, an effective search engine. If its less than stellar, the search engine will become a distraction and detraction where the most common employee complaint will continue to be “I can’t find anything!”

While the key to effective search is more focused on the rules and processes (effective page titles, strong links, keywords, summaries, meta data, etc.), the supporting technology shouldn’t be overlooked.

Google is now retailing Google Mini at an entry price of $2,995 — a highly effective solution. My company (Prescient Digital Media) now uses Google Mini on a client site (http://www.HealthyOntario.com) and we’re impressed by the feature set and ability to customize results and presentation. Particularly great is Google Mini’s ability to Interpret mispelled words (which you can set and hardcode yourself) and the Advanced Search options.

Google Mini is a definite must for any organization looking at replacing their existing search capability, but don’t forget the emphasis on rules and process…

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

While employee retention and benefits outsourcing continue to be the rage in human resources circles, eHR is also a hot topic.

According to a report on the BenefitNews.com highlighting the research of Forrester (EBN/Forrester Research 2005 Benefits Strategy and Technology Study), nearly one-quarter of companies in a recent survey plan on implementing a benefits portal in the next two years.

Of course the big benefit of HR portals is the big time cost savings on HR administration (i.e. paper pushing). Organizational Diagnostics is a management-consulting firm in California specializing in research in high-tech Silicon Valley companies. Over the past decade, it has conducted research on the effect of employee satisfaction on employee retention.

 They conclude that for every two-percent increase in employee satisfaction, there is a one-percent increase in employee retention. Put another way, to the extent that you satisfy your staff with the resources and services they need, you can reduce employee replacement costs.

 “Employee self-service has well-proven benefits to business—in particular, better service to employees while cutting down on HR’s workload. And the best way to deliver HR services is through an employee portal that gives workers single sign-on access to all services,” writes Drew Robb in Unifying Your Enterprise.

At IBM, e-HR is saving the company more than $500 million a year – $284 million in e-learning alone. But the benefits are far higher than just mere dollars. Since establishing e-HR, employee satisfaction with human resources has risen from 40% to 90%. The financial impact of such an increase must be immeasurable.

As for the intranet as a whole, IBM has some other very important non-financial metrics of more particular interest to communicators:

• Usage and value: 80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily
• Workforce enablement: 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs
• Employee retention: 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3

(source: Liam Cleaver, IBM, From Intranet to the On Demand Workplace)

When employees are satisfied, they stay on longer, their productivity rises and training costs fall. The combination of a higher employee job satisfaction rating, along with improved knowledge and experience, leads to better customer service.

Studies show that employees who were highly satisfied with their intranet or corporate portal also had a high level of job satisfaction. Conversely, those who were very dissatisfied with their intranet or corporate portals were much more likely to be dissatisfied with their jobs. Other research has shown that effective internal communications – often the responsibility of HR – is a driver of job satisfaction. Since the portal functions as an online communications tool, it naturally flows that a significant correlation between the effective portal and higher job satisfaction would exist.

Why should this be of note to communicators? Well the intranet is a collaborative business system. In other words, all groups have to partner together to deliver value to the organization and its individual employees. As such, human resources is a natural partner for communications (and often falls under the same department on the organization chart). Communicators should look to HR as allies and partners in achieving mutual goals and outcomes via the intranet. Achieving wins for each will increase the value of both.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Social bookmarking is all the rage. To borrow an over-hyped term, it’s a cornerstone of Web 2.0. Not surprising, social bookmarking is starting to spread quickly to corporate intranets.

For those who still haven’t used it or only heard about it social bookmarking is a way for users to publicly bookmark web pages and share those bookmarks with others through the use of keyword tags. These tags allow the users to organize and share their bookmarks.  Unlike traditional bookmarks, multiple tags allow bookmarks to belong to more than one category. Users can also search out other relevant sites and pages by tag or author.

Social bookmarking has been popularized on the Internet by sites and services by Del.icio.us, Digg, and Shadows. The hot rumor in Silicon Valley is that Google could launch its own social bookmarking service within days.

From the intranet perspective, social bookmarking is a taxonomy system developed and maintained by employees. A taxonomy that is always updating and refreshing as a living, breathing business system. You may have heard such a taxonomy referred to as a folksonomy.

Not surprisingly and often leading the pack in intranet innovation, IBM is one of the first out of the gate in rolling out social bookmarking on their intranet, W3. In doing so, IBM has created their own bookmarking system called Dogear (see Social Bookmarking in the Enterprise).

Dogear features, people and process:

• No anonymous bookmarking
• Both private and shared bookmarks
• New content alerts via RSS or ATOM
• Collaborative filtering
• Advanced search by tag
• Bookmark listings by tag
• Bookmark listings by author name

I would think the advancing social bookmarking technology would make taxonomy vendors and uber search engine vendors such as Autonomy very nervous about their revenue streams.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Merril Lynch recently completed a survey of 100 CIOs in the United States and Europe on Internet readiness.

Asking them to rate on a scale of 1 to 10 (10 being ‘finished’), the CIO’s where asked how far each respective company had progressed in implementing its Internet strategy.

The average response: 6.5. That’s 65% complete.

Unfortunately employees take a backseat to customers and the greater public in most companies and not surprisingly the intranet is always plays poor cousin to the Internet.

While not a priority for the vast majority of companies my guess is that if the same question was asked about the intranet the rating would be far less – perhaps a three or a four.

The paradigm is changing for some, but most executives still view the intranet as a cost center and have no understanding or inkling on the potential return on investment for an intranet (see Finding ROI white paper).

A good way to take this temperature reading at your organization is to ask all of your intranet stakeholders (key stakeholders, owners or content publishers that influence the future of the intranet). At Prescient Digital Media we use a rating methodology to formally evaluate and score an intranet. Ultimately, the intranet gets a rating on a scale of 1-10 that can also be used to benchmark the intranet to other intranets. During an intranet assessment I will ask stakeholders at the end of a business requirements interview to also rank the intranet on a scale of 1-10.

I’ve conducted this type of assessment dozens of times and without fail, the average stakeholder rating is never more than .5 from the formal methodology score (e.g. stakeholders rate the intranet a 4 out of 10 while the formal rating is a 4.5 out of 10). The point is that the cumulative knowledge of all key intranet stakeholders (often averages 10 – 15 per organization) is amazingly precise. If the process of gathering, documenting and analyzing that knowledge is sound (this shouldn’t be left to amateurs), then it is not difficult to determine your own organization’s intranet readiness (though if there exists any internal politics or confusion over the ownership of the intranet a precise rating is not possible without the use of a third party assessor).

How does the intranet rate at your company? All good stories and bad stories are welcome!

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

“Intranets get plenty of complaints.  With cluttered homepages, out of date content, poor search engines and information people don’t want, too many employees just don’t have faith in their organization’s intranet.  And on top of this, senior executives can’t see the value in spending so much on something with so little return.  So how can you get your intranet to deliver real value?”

The introduction promoting the new intranet manual, Transforming your intranet, hits the nail on the head. The point is that most intranets are a mess and yet they hold so much potential value – if executed properly. If you’re at all connected to managing an intranet, you need this manual. Written by a number of leading intranet minds – including chapters by myself (on measuring intranet value) and Carmine Porco (on Content Management) – Transforming your intranet is the best how-to-manual you can get your hands on (next to this blog of course J)!

“Written to turn your organization’s intranet into the time-saving, value-creating tool it was always meant to be.  You’ll find out how to take your intranet to the next level by integrating the latest strategies, technologies and metrics, ensuring people can get to the right information when they want it and, ultimately, delivering business value.  You’ll also learn how to prove value to senior managers, with measurement techniques that go beyond simply counting page hits.”

See Transform your intranet into a time-saving, value-creating tool for more information and a sneak preview of the Table of Contents.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Never build or redesign an intranet without understanding best practices. Understanding what your competition does is even better.

A good source of case studies and best practices is the Web itself from sites like this. Conferences can also be good; so too are intranet consultants (but they’re a little more expensive). An even better place for leading and in-depth case studies is the Intranet Insider’s World Tour webinar series.

Previous webinars on the Insider’s look at leading intranets include IBM, Sodexho and most recently General Motors. Next webinar is HP.

HP’s intranet portal, hpNOW, was launched in 1997, serving primarily as an archive for Employee Communication’s electronic newsletter and for selected articles from the company’s print publication. Over time, online communications became more and more critical to communications at HP, eventually reducing the electronic newsletter to a push reminder to visit the site and serving as the replacement of the worldwide employee print publication, when it was discontinued in 2001.

Since its launch, hpNOW has been on a mission to become a first-class news service and the preferred site of HP employees around the world. To reach this goal, the Employee Communications team has focused on three things: developing quality content, using new technologies and working within a huge and complex system.
This is a good case study webinar for building a business case to redesign your own intranet (see Leading an intranet redesign). During this webinar you’ll learn:

• History/evolution of hpNOW — and what happened to print vehicles at HP along the way
• The art and science of getting good content (real consumer product reviews, monthly photo contest, employee letters, products on a page, preserving HP’s Legacy (garage restoration project)
• Editorial process, finding stories: balancing the “need to know” with the “want to know” (it’s never perfect)
• RSS for internal and external news: taking a grassroots approach, the challenges of working with IT
• Chat forums and blogs: They are all over the intranet, but not on hpNOW (reasons, challenges, plans with social media at HP)
• Use of video and webcasts
• Experiences of moving from static intranet to portal — consolidation of sites, integration of Compaq, staffing, homepage design and personalization
• Measurement and marketing tools: tracking pages, rate this feature, surveys, quizzes (using database to manage)
• Technology: proactively looking for new ways to communicate using technology; example: the poor man’s video (Flash animation)
• Ask HP: HP’s unique intranet feature that allows employees to ask any question “anonymously” and get an answer from a qualified person
• Customers inside: How internal communications worked with customer Disney, PR and advertising to create the biggest internal sweepstakes ever — entire campaign on hpNOW
• How we are organized: being in the Marketing organization and reporting into HR; the two schools of thought
• Other features: Peoplefinder, alert banner, role-based sites, such as Managers Central Governance, staffing, next evolutions

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Jakob Nielsen is a smart guy. The godfather of web usability knows his stuff. You only need to read his column (www.useit.com) to know that he knows he’s smart. He tends to where it on his sleeve, but he’s earned it – and I enjoy reading it.

As far as usability goes, he’s the king. He’s trying to be a real intranet guru, but he really has not proved he can move beyond usability. He over-emphasizes usability – which is an important aspect, but not the most important.

In my years of working on intranets, I have calculated the value of usability at about 15% of an intranet’s value – with content and planning & resources (governance, process, publishing, funding, staffing, etc.) representing 30% each.

Usability however has its place and Dr. Nielsen has written a great piece on standard deviation and the number of users to test when doing usability testing (see Quantitative Studies: How Many Users to Test? at ww.UseIt.com). In short, Nielsen says that testing “20 users typically offers a reasonably tight confidence interval.”

I’m no expert in usability testing (I leave that to Nielsen and to Terry Costantino and gang at Usability Matters), but I’ve done usability testing enough to know that 10 user tests is plenty for the vast majority of sites. Not all, but the vast majority. After 10 user tests you’ll likely learn very little – there’s a great deal of diminishing returns after 8 tests. Try it you’ll see.

So, if I’m right (just pretend), and an intranet’s value is mostly content, as well as planning & resources, then performing 30 or 40 minutes of usability testing with 10 employees has extremely little value. In fact, try preparing a business case to redo your intranet based on 10 or 20 usability tests.

My point is not to call out Jakob Nielsen for his shortcomings – his value to the web profession is profound and rarely challenged by few others – but to highlight the overstated value of usability. I’ve seen far too many RFPs in the past year that focus on usability testing as a means of redesigning a website. Usability testing is for enhancing and improving site navigation and information scents – often best used during the prototype phase. It is not a tool to lead the redesign of a website or intranet. This requires careful assessment and planning and attention to content and information architecture.

Save the usability testing to refine your navigation and key information paths – 10 user tests is usually more than enough. Don’t emphasize usability too much – particularly if you’re building a business case for a redesign – but don’t overlook it either; usability is a critical component, but it shouldn’t get more than its fair share of the budget.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Most of our fellow web heads use Internet Explorer to browse the net. However, more and more are using Firefox, the free open source platform. In fact, there have been almost 200 million downloads to date. In Germany, 45% of web users use Firefox.

IBM has embraced open source with both arms. Red Hat is a billion-dollar company that focuses solely on open source integration and implementation (namely the Linus operating system). With $300M in annual revenue and a profit margin of nearly 27%, Red Hat has proven the financial viability of riding the open source train.

One company watching the open source content management and intranet sector closely is Optaros. An Optaros survey released last Christmas highlights the potential value of using Open Source.

The study was conducted in August and September 2005 with responses from 512 U.S. companies, government agencies and other organizations. The study found that the clear majority of organizations (87%) were using open source systems, software often available for free and built by communities of software developers. The most frequently-used open source software was the Linux operating system, the Apache web server, and web browsers, used at some level by more than 70% of the companies represented by the survey participants. About half the respondents were using open source database management systems and application servers in a single business function.

Read The open source revolution

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Not only has it not lived up to the hype, but personalization via the corporate intranet portal is massively expensive to implement.

In The future of portals at the turn of the year, I espoused the need for portal vendors to make it easier for organizations to implement personalization. All portal products offer user employee personalization options. However, very few organizations have actually enacted or properly implemented user personalization once they’ve purchased a portal product. Most employee portal implementations feature customization (e.g. choose the type of color or position of a content portlet or gadget) or role-based personalization that is pre-configured by the administrator (e.g. sales role page or site).

More portal companies should try to make it easy for organizations to roll out and implement role-based personalization – something that largely relies a lot on offline planning and process. The technical implementation will be better and be augmented by enhanced consulting services not previously focused on by the portal vendor.

Martin White is a leading intranet mind in the United Kingdom and offers a similar opinion of personalization in his EContent article, Portals Show Sign of Sanity:

“I am highly skeptical about the value of personalization at an individual level, whether on a website or an intranet. My experience, which is entirely anecdotal, is that after the initial excitement of being able to manage the flow of information to the desktop, the user refreshes the personalization profile on an increasing ad-hoc basis, until the time comes when they abandon it altogether. The result is that from that point on, the user is no longer seeing all the information that is relevant to his or her needs, and is likely to make seriously flawed decisions.

What I do see is that organizations can provide a lot of benefit in customization at a role level. So, for example, all marketing staff would see an intranet desktop that contains most (and I emphasize the word most) of what they need, derived from an intranet manager having developed personas into scenarios and tasks. Their view would also provide ready access to other sections of the intranet that complement the marketers’ specific information. SAP is very adroit at this in its portal implementations, but it does not need portal technology to deliver customized pages.”

Find a company that has implemented a personalized portal for their intranet and you’ll find a company where a majority of employees don’t use the personalization feature. In fact, when I talk about personalization at conferences and I ask web people – often a mix of communications, HR and IT people – how many people use My Yahoo! or My MSN or one of the other personalized portals – less than 5% put up their hands. And these are very web savvy people – far more so than your average employee.

The bottom line on personalization: it requires a phenomenal amount of time and money to implement and it is rarely used and therefore delivers very little value. In fact, it might be one of the biggest intranet money pits available. If you’ve got money to burn, then personalization is something to consider.

Personalization will continue to flounder and deliver very little value until it is easier to implement – with an emphasis on role-based personalization (customization).

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

I don’t know of a single communications manager or executive that doesn’t want to introduce blogging to some segment of the employee population. There are undoubtedly some, but these cautious folks are in the minority. And the cautious ones are the smart managers.

Web 2.0 or social media such as blogs, wikis, podcasts, social bookmarking, etc. is all very interesting – and potentially incredibly powerful. I’m all for it and, as you probably know since you’re reading this blog, I’m a big advocate of social media.

Most organizations, however, have a sub-par intranet. I’m being kind of course because many, many companies have horribly dreadful intranets. If your intranet is anything but very good, you shouldn’t be wasting your energy dreaming about blogs and podcasts. A successful intranet requires far too many well thought and executed ingredients that should always be a far greater priority than blogs. Such mission critical priorities should include:

• A well-defined governance model
• Strong support from executive management
• Interested and motivated users
• Defined strategic directives and measurable goals
• Standards and polices for page development and content management
• Content publishing system (CMS)
• A solid search engine supported by a detailed taxonomy and meta tagging strategy
• Effective information architecture
• Strong, well-written, focused and meaningful content

Anecdotally, I have to tell you, I don’t know a single person that listens to podcasts except for one or two people. And I know and meet a lot of like-minded people who are hardly luddites. They’re technology savvy and have iPods. But they have no interest in listening to an amateur broadcaster talk about their favorite (fill-in-the-blank).

Consider this statistic according to the technology experts at Forrester from this spring, that only 1% of U.S. households regularly listen to podcasts (Podcasting Hits the Charts reveals). What percentage of employees do you think actually care to listen to podcasts? Your guess is probably right.

Blogs and wikis are in fact more pervasive and extremely powerful. However, if you can’t put a checkmark beside each of the bullets above then forget about Web 2.0 – invest some time and money into the mission critical imperatives.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

It all comes down to parenting. An intranet’s success is less dependant on technology than those individuals tht manage and steer the intranet. In fact, there is no more important quality and care for an intranet’s upgringing than the support and involvement of senior management.

This conclusion is echoed loud and clear in Jane McConnell’s superb study on intranets (“Intranet Strategies Today & Tomorrow”).

“Senior management perception of the intranet is out of sync with reality on the ground,” says Jane, a French-based intranet consultant and author of the NetJMC Blog blog.  “They are largely unaware of the usefulness of the intranet for employees for their work. 55% of the respondents say that if the intranet were unavailable for 1 to 2 hours, employees would be disturbed in their work, yet only 13% of the respondents say that senior management perceives the intranet to be “business critical.”

No surprise there. The weakest intranets have the lowest level of involvement and active support from senior support. The best intranets have incredible senior management support.

Read more Infant intranets need executive loving (http://www.IntranetBlog.com)

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

Verizon is a big, big communications company. In fact, about 140,000 employees spread mostly across the continental United States. If the challenge of communicating with all those people is not enough, most of those employees, about 80,000, are what you would call traditional “offline” staff including call center staff (online but not connected to all tools) and field workers such as service, repair and central office staff.

Verizon’s biggest challenge therefore is bridging the ‘digital divide’ of those with access and those without. The answer: break down the digital divide by creating the ‘digital workplace.’

More than just the intranet or home page, the digital workplace is the new place to meet and do business. The Digital Workplace is Verizon’s “umbrella” term for all online systems, tools, information channels regardless of geographic location for “anytime, anywhere access to the information and tools employees need to get their jobs done.”

At the heart of the digital workplace of course is the intranet portal, eWeb. But the key to success that is driving much of the visible added value are some of Verizon’s cutting edge communications tools.

Voice Portal

Voice Portal is a voice recognition portal service that allows voice-activated access to intranet functions and information using any telephone. The information accessible through voice portal includes:

• intranet information
• email
• jobs
• mandatory training
• employee directory information

The portal can be accessed from any phone. For example, the employee dials the phone number of the Voice Portal – yes it has its own number – and then simply instructs the voice system by saying, for example, “call John Smith in Dallas, Texas.” The system recognizes the request and speaks back the answer. Voice Portal will provide options or choices if there are multiple listings (e.g. “do you want the John Smith that works on Main Street?”).

Voice portal also allows employees to send e-mail by voice. The employee phones Voice Portal and dictates their e-mail and the system then sends a dictation of that message to the end user’s e-mail inbox with a .WAV audio file. Not surprisingly, usage of this voice portal has sky-rocketed particularly amongst employees who travel or commute a lot. The voice portal even allows the user to phone in and get the latest job postings or training modules!

On the flip side the portal also allows the user to check all of their messages including voice mail and e-mail through a single online Message Center (via the PC). Not surprisingly the portal allows employees to receive and initiate calls through their computer, or to route calls to other phones such as their home number. The Message Center also allows for instant messaging and conference calling.

Collaboration

Verizon has all of the collaboration tools most organizations would dream about – new and old including:

• Webcasting
• Video on demand
• Online forums
• Wikis
• Blogs
• Instant messaging
• eMeetings
• Web conferencing

Despite their availability for years, many organizations have never implemented discussion forums, or have given up on them. They do take work. Verizon’s Digital Workplace (DW) features 40 self-regulating forums (authentication and names required). Self-regulated meaning employees are empowered with the responsibility of their own posts; Verizon doesn’t have the staff nor time to monitor all posts. Despite executive fears of profanity or brazen language, there the forums have never been a problem even in such a large organization.

“We’ve never had a single problem in the 4.5 years it’s been active,” says Verizon’s Donna Itzoe, Digital Workplace Communications Manager, during the Intranet Insider World Tour featuring the Verizon Digital Workplace (presented by Communitelligence.com). “We’ve never had to remove a single post.”

Of course, making employees responsible for their own actions and posts frees up the DW team to focus on other priorities – such as social media tools. This past summer (August 2007), Verizon launched employee wikis on the intranet. Ten in all have been launched and they’ve been a huge success.

“They took off like wildfire,” adds Itzoe. “There was tremendous interest and tremendous use.” There’s a wiki for DW, and others for engineers and developers.

Despite the proliferation of these tools – including 47 employee blogs which started launching in August – there are no heavy handed policies that govern their use. Employees are treated like adults; and they behave in kind. The tools have disclaimers but employees are expected to adhere to Verizon’s Code of Conduct. A Code signed by each employee every year. In other words, if they abuse the tools they’re likely violating the code and therefore no additional monitoring or policies are necessary.

Another leading-edge productivity tool is the DW Toolbar. DW Toolbar is like a Google toolbar that rests at the top of the browser and is tailored to the individual employee. Powered by the Google toolbar appliance, the toolbar is personalized to the employees particular preferences including options for favorite links and news. The toolbar includes a search engine that searches the entire intranet – more than just the intranet portal and home page. Being a regulated company, the employee’s search results are also limited to those company areas the employee has legal regulatory access to (based on employee directory profile).

Change Management

Promoting it and encouraging use however required significant marketing and education. “It required a huge communication campaign,” says Itzoe. “The tools represented a huge change management endeavor. We knew we had to find creative ways to get people’s attention.”

One such tool is “Inside the Digital Workplace” – an online user guide with tips, FAQs, etc. Inside also includes stories on ‘life in the digital workplace’. Verizon also formed a cadre of DW volunteers: The Digital Workplace Warriors. The Warriors are volunteer testers or guinea pigs. When Verizon plans a new collaboration tool or application, the warriors get to play first – testing the tools and providing feedback for changes and improvements.

The formation of the Digital Workplace and the key representative tools took 2.5 – 3 years plus about 8 months of planning. The eWeb intranet portal has been in place for 4-5 years. Regardless, persistent communications was required to get employees to use the new tools. Prior to promoting the new voice portal, the portal received about 200 calls per week. This jumped to 10,000 in a day when a voice mail was sent to all employees promoting the new voice portal. The promotional voice v-mail highlighted a contest that awarded 1 in 25 callers with a prize. Traffic exploded. Voice Portal now enjoys a couple of million calls per year.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media