Intranets

What is it that makes an intranet social and critical? Well this post, rather unsurprisingly called “10 things that make an intranet critical and social” outlines what in the authors opinion are the 10 elements that are critical to the success of an intranet.

1.  New style social intranets focus more on people then content. Although content is still relevant
2. Content is authored collaboratively by anyone and the emphasis is either knowledge sharing or documentation that is useful
3. Anyone can contribute and everyone is involved (from CEO to PA’s)
4. The intranet supports work processes and helps people get their work done more efficiently
5. Publishing workflows and approvals are kept to a minimum
6. The intranet has a mix of key social features: activity streams, authoring (wiki style), networking and  blogging

1. Assess

• Prioritize your business objectives by determining what it is you are trying to achieve: employee retention, boost collaboration, enhance executive visibility, increase speed to innovation or turn your employees into powerful brand ambassadors.
• Map your communication by analyzing  your current information flow and determining how employees engage your intranet or social media tools.
• Determine what your ideal social media ecosystem would look like. What cultural differentiators are you hoping to foster?

2. Align for Design

• Assess your perceived issues and actual limitations by balancing potential risks against projected gains in productivity, collaboration and innovation.
• Develop solid company guidelines for social media use and use metrics to measure how well your engagement
  tools are working.
• Align and train your leadership and get senior management buy-in to create a social networking mindset across business functions.

3. Implement

• Identify the most effective tools for your needs—from wikis and microblogs to robust knowledge-sharing and innovation platforms.
• Work closely with your IT teams to ensure your efforts are compliant with all internal rules, standards and architectures.

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

“State officials launched their investigation after a Feb. 9 Watchdog column disclosed that Best Buy stores had a secret intranet site in its stores — one that mirrored the public BestBuy.com Internet site, but with different pricing. The intranet prices usually reflected the individual store’s price, not the public Internet price, which Best Buy since 2005 has promised to honor.

Since publication of the Feb. 9 and subsequent Watchdog columns were published, hundreds of Best Buy customers have complained to the newspaper about being charged higher-than-advertised prices. They said they looked up sales on bestbuy.com, but when they went into stores, clerks would show them a bestbuy.com site that would not have the sales price.

Customers were told that the sale must be over, or that they had misread the advertisement.

What in reality was going on was that the salesman was accessing an intranet website that was almost identical to public site. According to current and former employees and managers, some workers knew they were misleading customers, other employees were unaware of the duplicate site.

 

Of course, Best Buy employed the worst kind of communications and PR when faced with the accusation – they lied about it.

 

In what could result in millions of dollars in penalties and refunds, Connecticut officials have sued Best Buy, accusing the giant electronics retailer of deceiving and cheating its customers using a secret in-store computer network.

Consumer Protection Commissioner Jerry Farrell Jr. said Thursday that he believes the suit will result in a “multi-million dollar case” against the Minnesota-based chain, which has 10 outlets in Connecticut.”

Employees want to connect with each other, and more importantly, they want to connect with the company and senior management. A study by Towers Perrin found that employees overwhelmingly want to know “that leadership is interested in them.”

Social media on the corporate intranet (Intranet 2.0) presents a unique opportunity for all employees at all levels and geographies to better connect, and share information and knowledge they might not otherwise share or learn. In fact, distance – both geographical and intellectual – between these connections is often significant with little if any filtering from one side to the next; an information gap that is not easily bridged in larger, dispersed organizations. For example, the Towers Perrion study also found that:

• 43% of employees do not feel they know enough about their own customers
• 65% of employees do not feel they know enough about the competition to be fully effective
• Only 39% of employees feel they are informed about the differences between their company’s products and the competition

Social networking allows employees to connect with relevant or related individuals by subject matter, job description, geogrpahic location, and by personal networks to help birdge this information gap. In fact, for those social media doubting-Thomases that question the value of Intranet 2.0, there are increasingly more numbers that quantify the measured value:

• 52% of organizations using Web 2.0 achieved Best- in-Class performance (5% didn’t) (Aberdeen Group)‏
• Companies using Web 2.0 tools achieved 18% increase in engagement (1% of those that didn’t) (Aberdeen Group)‏
• Sabre has already attributed $500k in savings to their employee social networking tool
• Cisco attributes $millions in savings to their wikis

Leading organizations that understand the power of Intranet 2.0 are blazing some incredible trails. Early adopters are finding positive business results by helping employees connect through “internal Facebooks.” By effectively harnessing these new networks, organizations are seeing positive impacts on internal brand building, as well as employee engagement, satisfaction and motivation — which leads to higher levels of productivity, revenue, and profit.

But the world of the internal social network is the opposite of command & control. That said, reasonable guidelines, a group of informal influencers, and a posse of community managers who help keep the dialog lively and the network on track.

One place to learn more about internal social networks is from the Intranet Insider on Communitelligence.com which is featuring an upcoming webinar on the topic, Building Employee Branding And Engagement With Internal Social Networks (March 17, 2009 at 2pm EST). Hosted by Lee Aase, Manager, Syndication and Social Media at the Mayo Clinic, with Polly Pearson, VP Employment Brand and Strategy Engagement, EMC Corporation, and Paul Pedrazzi, Vice President, Product Strategy, Oracle. The webinar promises to educate “on what works and what doesn’t in this brave new world of internal social networks from companies that are already figuring out the path to success. “

Reserve for INTERNAL SOCIAL NETWORKS.

Another related, upcoming webinar of note: INTRANET NEWS 2.0: Creating an Intranet News Publication in the New Age of Communication on April 2, featuring Katie Sauer, Monsanto.

Finally, a special welcome to my new co-leader of the Intranet Insider community, Laurel Castiglione, formerly of General Motors Communications, of Bridge The Gap Solutions. 

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

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’!

As I finalize my workshop materials for Intranet Insider Live I am struck by the variety of definitions for intranet governance.  It seems it is easiest to define what it is not.  Having been in the midst of the battle to establish intranet governance (when it wasn’t particularly popular to do so) I have my own thoughts on the subject.  I believe it can be defined as the agreed upon structure, guidelines, policies or rules that stakeholders within a corporation utilize to accomplish a specific set of business objectives through the use of their intranet.  This structure can be as formal or informal as fits the corporate culture in which it is established.

Maybe it is most important to focus on the value rather than the definition.  The value of governance is in direct correlation to the commitment of the stakeholders involved.  Governance can be used as an instrument to build credibility, streamline communications and as the catalyst for interdepartmental collaboration.

I hope you join me for the pre-conference workshop.  I will be sharing a governance evolution roadmap to help explain the natural evolution of both intranets and the governance of intranets.  I will give you some ideas on getting started or invigorating existing governance.  I’ll take a look back at my GM journey to show examples of success and roadblock busters that made a difference.   During the conference there will be a forum for us to share thoughts, discuss issues and engage in ideas on how to enable your organization move through the governance evolution.

What’s your definition of intranet governance?  Can’t wait to meet you.  See you in NY. 

Laurel Castiglione, Pacific Gas and Electric

1-     SharePoint will continue to dominate

All hail the king, SharePoint. SharePoint has become the single biggest, most pervasive intranet platform of all time (present in 50 – 60% of all medium to large-size organizations). While SharePoint is still minimally used for department and team level document sharing and collaboration, more organizations are looking to use it as the enterprise intranet platform.

Toby Ward – Prescient Digital Media

SharePoint 2010, due to market in late spring, is vastly improved over the former version, MOSS 2007. Many, many organizations will be upgrading to 2010, and begin to use the new platform as the enterprise intranet platform. What’s more, the cost of entry for taking on SharePoint has never been lower as Microsoft SharePoint “in the cloud” with SharePoint Online. SharePoint online already boasts more than 1,000,000 users, and unlike the previous SharePoint Online the 2010 version of SharePoint Online promises to “near feature parity” (with only small exceptions) to the install version.

SharePoint’s market share will soar with SharePoint 2010.

2-     IBM will finally become more aggressive with WebSphere Portal

As dominate and pervasive as SharePoint has become, the market leader is WebSphere Portal (measured in license revenue. Although the implementation and services revenue is undoubtedly much higher than what the anemic Microsoft Consulting Services group can conjure). However, unless you follow the portal market, you would think that SharePoint is not just the leader, but a market killer.

Regardless of how you measure success, SharePoint is a massive success, and so to is WebSphere Portal, but you would never know it by wading through the surface of most technology news and blogosphere punditry. WebSphere Portal however is arguably a more sophisticated, certainly more mature, product than SharePoint. And while IBM is happy with the WebSphere’s success, there undoubtedly more than just a few ruffled feathers by all the hype and attention SharePoint gets. Never a company to sit idly by, and as innovative as ever (IBM received 4,914 U.S. patents in 2009, the highest for the 17th consecutive year), the IBM marketing machine is not as aggressive as Microsoft’s. Nonetheless, WebSphere is due for a marketing makeover and may get more attention and marketing dollars in 2010.

3-     Social media will become mainstream at the enterprise level

Social media on the intranet – collectively referred to as Intranet 2.0 – is now present on about half of all intranets (in the Western World). Once a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream.

Despite the low cost of entry, most intranet 2.0 tools are merely experiments, pilots or limited to a very small audience. Social media has only been deployed at the enterprise level in about 25% of organizations (see the results of the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey Intranet 2.0 becomes mainstream).

Many of the experiments and pilots, the department and team level tools will be rolled-out to the rest (or most of the rest) of the enterprise in 2010. Still, more organizations that are sleeping through the social media revolution will jump on the bandwagon. Look for an explosion of user-generated content on the corporate intranet.

4-     KISS – Keep It Simple Stupid

The “kitchen sink” design approach to the intranet home page is standard, but it’s stupid. The more you throw on a page, the more you confuse and distract users. It might work for Amazon.com, which relies on brand and SEO, at the expense of user-friendly design.

People like Google for a reason – it’s dead simple. I’ve had the pleasure to test dozens of intranet home page designs, in many dozens of focus groups. The highest rated and appreciated home pages, are the simple ones. The least popular designs are the busier designs that are best exemplified by IBM and Cisco (very good, and popular intranets, but for highly web-savvy audiences).

I’ve seen a trend towards simpler intranet home pages, just as we’ve seen on the Internet, and the trend will really start to proliferate in 2010.

5-     Outsourcing the intranet to the cloud

Although it is only the beginning, some companies will finally begin to realize that professional hosts (ASPs) are better at hosting and security than their IT department.

The “cloud” refers to cloud computing that, at the risk of over-simplifying, is simply hosting – computer, server, software, and other hardware and infrastructure hosting. You’re already a cloud customer, probably many times over (someone is hosting your email, website, blog, etc. In fact, 56% of internet users use webmail services such as Hotmail, Gmail, or Yahoo! Mail – hosted email in the cloud).

Microsoft is aggressively pushing its cloud services. MS already hosts the gigantic 200,000 user SharePoint intranet for GlaxoSmithKiline (and it estimates that the hosted solution has delivered big ROI and reduced “IT operational costs by roughly 30% “).

Very few organizations have their intranet hosted in the cloud today, but perhaps as many as 5% of medium to large organizations will look to outsource their intranet to the cloud over the next year or so.

6-     Death to the portal

Microsoft stopped calling SharePoint a portal solution sometime ago. To Microsoft, and most of the rest of the technology world, SharePoint is a web development platform.

Oracle killed all of its portal solutions. Now there’s just simply “WebCenter Suite.” Ditto with eXo which is no longer eXo Portal, it’s now eXo Platform.

Now the word portal hasn’t disappeared from the marketing literature or the feature sets: all of these platforms and suites still have portal functionality and features. Compared to five years ago, however, there are very few companies left selling portal products. They’ve been gobbled up by other products, other companies, or swallowed by the platform.

The only big name left with a standalone portal product is IBM, with WebSphere Portal. Per my second prediction above, look for IBM to give WebSphere Portal a marketing makeover that might include the dropping of the ‘portal’ name from the product label.

Jane McConnell, whom led a Communitelligence Learning Academy Webinar earlier this year (Making Your Intranet Essential – CD) has summarized some online conjecturing about what to call an intranet in her article: The intranet – what is the elevator pitch?

She started an interesting discussion with her suggestion that the word “intranet” should be changed to something more relevant such as “web workplace” (which came from a brainstorming session inside NetJMC & Co on Linkedin).

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

Employee Communications is being called upon to soften the blow, calm the troops and prepare the news that is impacting employees in every business sector. This is a difficult time but also an exciting one. It is a welcome change to see the appreciation and dependence on the Communications staff. The opportunity to shine is more than just in your writing. Getting the words that are appropriately informative and compassionate without getting cross wise with Legal is an art in itself.
This is an opportunity to instill some good processes into the minds of your leadership team. Take this as a chance to identify the value of planning the communications to redirect the team to focus on productive activities. The intranet can be a valuable tool to provide not only access to gold sources of information about potential layoffs and corporate economics but also to provide a means of directing resources to ways they can contribute to the future viability of their companies.
I am not talking about obvious links to information and tools. I believe that most of you have examples of success in this area. At General Motors we used the intranet to link to product information, to provide data on the variety of hybrid vehicles they offer and links to products that get over 30 miles to the gallon. Before GM started this activity many employees didn’t know that GM had more vehicles with over 30 mpg than any other manufacturer. Over the past couple years if you wanted information on the restructuring of the company you knew where to get it. This was great and continues to be a valuable resource. Keep this up but do more.
Do your homework. Find out what each of your key leaders feels is most important for his team to focus on and dedicate some time to building a communications strategy for achieving the critical deliverables. What is it he/she needs done? What is it the team needs to know or remember to be successful? Build a plan to stage information to get them focused and moving in the right direction. Become integral to their process by demonstrating the power of knowledge, the importance of communicating expectations, implications and results.
This is the chance for you to be remembered as the key resource who took the extra step to get the troops moving by building their confidence in themselves even while providing bad news. Use your intranet, post links to processes and other helpful information. Provide charts showing expected deliverables and timing of events. Let leaders blog about key deliverables and steps to the future. What is the next generation of Communications going to be like? Does the future start now or after the crisis do you go back to normal? I’d like to hear where you think this leads.

Laurel Castiglione, Pacific Gas and Electric

Intranet professionals are often plagued with the question of how to create a uniform user experience that is not only intelligent, but also meaningful for all users. While an intranet’s visual experience must be well organized, user tested and user accepted before it is deployed, so must the language and vocabulary you use to describe people and content. One way of ensuring the language your intranet uses is to create an enterprise taxonomy.

3 biggest challenges to implementing enterprise taxonomy:

1.      User acceptance – constantly reviewing with users and implementing formal user-testing design standards

2.      Integration – with other controlled vocabularies and their management

3.      Subset management – delivering personalized versions of enterprise taxonomy to all end-users/applications

IBM’s intranet personalization experience is driven by our enterprise taxonomy. The enterprise taxonomy serves, first, as a dictionary of preferred terminology that can be created or adapted for the business environment; second, as a structured hierarchy of relationships of terms and concepts to support the businesses information needs; and, third, as a navigational aid for classifying people and content.

IBM’s personalization uses a common profile, which is made up of multiple taxonomies and controlled vocabularies. Librarians describe the technique of using multiple taxonomies and controlled vocabularies for classification as a faceted scheme:  Parallel controlled vocabularies that create both a broad and deep classification system. IBM uses a faceted scheme so users can select multiple attributes, which enables users to describe their work environment, their knowledge and their interests. Based on the user’s profile selections, content is delivered to the appropriate profiles because the content has been organized by a rules based classification system using all of the taxonomies and controlled vocabularies.

The goal to create a usable intranet is to understand your user’s needs, build a system around user’s requirements and deliver what user’s need in a consistent and well-organized way. By using the controlled vocabularies for personalization applications, an organization will create a more uniform and meaningful personalization process.

Tips for how to create a controlled vocabulary in a global company:

1.      Ensure you have the correct skills, experience and expertise on your taxonomy team

2.      Ensure that the change management process and cycle (updates) is published and communicated to all stakeholders

3.      Involve users and stakeholders from the beginning

4.      Create rules before you build structures

5.      Listen to your users