Intranet Content Tug-of-War

There are many challenges we face as Intranet/Content Managers. I have two in particular surrounding Intranet Content that I am facing now and so I appeal to you, the wider Intranet Community, what are your thoughts and experience in these. I will attempt to clarify my thoughts and articulate them as concisely as possible…

1.  Push for Corporate news & info prominence

Traditionally intranets were a place where internal coms, marketing and the like would push out corporate news and information and we as employees were merely consumers forced to read the facade of information that was made available. Intranets today are shifting from this and are more of an even ground that allow information to flow both ways, with social media and user-centric designs taking the lead and changing the way work in very big ways. And, in an ideal world, if I could be so bold to propose, we would all have micro-blogging streams to help us keep track of what our colleagues were doing, what projects they worked on and what our leaders wanted to say.

From recent intranet tours and screenshots that I have seen through events such as IBF24, WIC Case Studies (you need to be a WIC member to access these) and nSynergy seminars I see a growing trend where the formerly dominant internal coms, news and info are taking a back seat to features that help employees connect with each other and facilitate the way they work.

So the question that I am posing is how necessary is it to still have information such as “About Us” on an intranet, when a large portion of that information would be available via the company’s external facing website?

If it is important to still cover this info, how much effort should we be spending on creating or re-creating it for the internal audience? Are there better ways to do this using newer more social intranet features?

2.  Driving forces behind the wheel

My second challenge stems from the above and goes into how much should individual teams like Marketing, Internal Communications, HR or IT influence the intranet in terms of content and architecture? While intranets are maturing and need to become multi-faceted, many still sit within one of the above mentioned business units, resulting in siloed approaches to driving and developing the intranet. The likely outcome would be a lopsided solution to function, design and content.

My approach to this was to establish an intranet steering committee, and I have an even representation from Marketing/Internal Coms, HR and IT all grappling for the steering wheel. It will be interesting to see if the parent business unit still carries enough weight to steer the intranet in the final direction.

Who will win the war?

My frustrating predicament leaves me pondering… what is the future for intranet professionals? Where do we fit in an organisational structure? Will we remain under the strong and often biased influence of our parent business unit (often IT, Marketing/Coms or HR) or will we break free and flourish – influencing and innovating the way we work?

Things to consider when developing an Intranet Strategy

What things do you consider when developing an Intranet Strategy? I was looking over our Intranet strategy and took note of the elements that were addressed:

• the technology our Intranet runs on (SharePoint 2007)
• the intranet’s core objectives (what the main want to achieve and pointing out how this is aligned to the business’ overall objectives and strategy),
• our target audience – pointing out the type of content that is being delivered to them and how we aim to improve end user adoption and engagement
• general governance and overall maintenance
• recommendations for improvements
• development roadmaps for the strategy’s deliverables

I wondered if there was something that I missed? Is there anything else that should be considered when revising the strategy next year? So, I put my feelers out and got some useful advice from fellow Intranet Professionals.

Scott Hitchins from Odyssey Interactive offered his thoughts:

“It sounds like you’ve covered most of the key elements when designing an intranet strategy.

My only advise would be to consider different phases of roll-out particularly if you’re looking at implementing new intranet solution as part of your new strategy.

Phase 1 being core elements of the software supporting the points you raised, and Phase 2 and 3 being a clever introduction to new Enterprise 2.0 features that drive collaboration and knowledge management to really enhance user adoption and engagement.

For the phased approach to work really need to get under the skin of your audience and understand what will (and won’t) work in the real work. This can be achieved using staff interviews, workshops, and surveys.

We at Odyssey Interactive, the company behind the successful intranet product ‘Interact’ (www.interact-intranet.co.uk) have vast experience in working with our customers across Europe to help develop such strategies.”

Alasdair Stuart-Bell offered:

“I’d advocate that a good Intranet strategy considers: Role and Vision, Governance, Client/Audience Needs, Analytics, Content Management and Publishing, Usability, ROI, Business Processes and Performance Measurement. Based on your original post I think a number of these pieces might be already included, but thought I might share what I consider a bit of a table of contents for a strategic direction.”

What I haven’t touched on is how far ahead should an intranet strategy be planned for – 2 years, 3 years, 5??? With technology and trends changing at a rapid pace it would seem that planning too far ahead could result in not achieving everything you originally planned for. It could mean not implementing features needed to support your organisation, leaving you trailing far behind in your industry and general intranet trends. Yet not planning far ahead enough could leave you reaching the end of your strategy without further plans or developments in the pipeline, potentially leaving your intranet in a stagnant state from an end users’ perspective, while you are left to write and plan for the next strategy.

My thoughts are to write your strategy plan 2-3 years ahead, but review every 12 months and amend as technology and organisational trends shift.

Share your tips on what you think helps to create a great intranet strategy!

WIC Case Study – Part 2: Driving Intranet Improvements

Last month I posted a case study on WIC results received in regards to employee contribution and publishing on the Intranet. While this case study is on how visible improvements are in your intranet, I still think it an important aspect of our WIC results as it indicated how much attention our users paid our Intranet and whether they noticed the changes and improvements we delivered.

Check out my related post: WIC Case Study – Part 1: Employee Publishing on the Intranet.

Driving Intranet Improvements Case Study

Click on any of the graphs below to view our results in detail

Overview

Over the past 12 months we have done considerable developments to our site including:

• redeveloped 4 of the major department/team sites, including IT and HR;
• created a new major section to house orphaned/floating information and generated a mass of new content;
• developed a blog for the Managing Director
• delivered a rewards program using an eCard system
• re-introduced the company newsletter online (as opposed to the original email version)
• ensured that the homepage news feed stays alive and current
• promoted company fundraisers through a dedicated online space
• introduced custom workflows to replace manual procedures

 

Process

There has been little promotion on developments on the Intranet and any promotion that has been done is all linked in with the intranet (ie article in our newsletter is online, homepage news announcements).

Regular auditing and user satisfaction surveys have recently been introduced and will continue to be conducted annually as part of our Governance. We also have a functionality metric** that we use to rate each section of our Intranet, as well as using usage tracking software to identify areas that are underutilised.

All of these will help us identify areas that are underperforming, track how our improvements and changes have been received and where we need to focus our attention.

Benefits/Value

Visible change is quite critical in gaining your end-users’s trust and confidence in your Intranet. If they are able to easily see when content was last updated they feel more confident that it is relevant and up to date. It is also encouraging for them to realise that feedback they have given about our intranet is acted upon (where relevant of course)

Tips

Intranets need to be able to respond to user and business needs in a timely manner otherwise they can quickly become obsolete. Always make sure you are gathering feedback on how your intranet is performing and then develop a roadmap to prioritise and action the needs that arise from that analysis. Regular auditing and user satisfaction surveys are a great starting point.

Future Plans*

I once read that you should aim to improve your intranet by 20% each year. I think this is a good baseline. We have slightly more aggressive and ambitious goals than that for the next 18-24 months but I think they key point is to aim to drive improvements each year.

** The direction and structure of the Brightstar Intranet have changed substantially since this case study in April. We are now looking at restructuring our intranet into two separate online spaces: one of collaboration and one for communication to better support the business longer term. Training is still quite a big part of this as we will be expecting our collaboration space site owners to take full control of their sites’ permissions, publishing and maintenance with less reliance on the Intranet team who will be focussing their efforts on the more structured communications orientated Intranet space and other support areas.

** The functionality metric is being updated to reflect our new intranet spaces and will be adjusted to assess and track our collaboration workspaces.

WIC Case Study – Part 1: Employee Publishing on the Intranet

In February this year (2010) I was required to conducted a survey on Brightstar’s Intranet, the InfoCenter. Before constructing the survey I decided to do a little research online and discovered that all the hard work had been done for me by CIBA Solutions and so we decided to take the Worldwide Intranet Challenge (WIC).

To my relief our intranet faired quite well against the other (then) 32 organisations that had completed the survey and we rated just above average across the board. A little to my surprise, we actually rated #1, #3, #4 and #6 in a few areas. Due to the #1 (how often employees publish content) and #3 (improvements to the intranet) rankings Andrew Wright of CIBA Solutions asked if I would mind answering a few questions on these topics as a ‘WIC case study’ for top ranking Intranets.

Doing the case studies was actually quite good as it got me to take a closer look at why we rated so well in these areas and what the benefits and pitfalls were. I was then later asked to present on “The value of getting your employees to contribute to your intranet” at an event for the WIC in October and have uploaded the presentation I gave, with a more detailed blog post to come:  Publish or perish – Intranets that work

I encourage anyone who is interested to take the WIC challenge. It is free to register and the information you receive is very valuable to any organisation with an intranet.

Employee Publishing on the Intranet Case Study

WIC results for user interaction with the Intranet

Overview

Our Intranet was implemented based on a distributed authoring model as we believe content is best managed by its owners and having a single point for publishing creates an unnecessary bottleneck. As the core team for supporting and driving the Intranet is quite lean (at the beginning only 1 person and now just 2 people to support the Aus/Pacific region) we needed departmental areas to be actively responsible for the content produced on their sections. The structure of the Intranet was largely built around our business and support services and this reflected the way we work as a business.

Process

Originally the Intranet grew without a clear development or adoption strategy to encourage usage and uptake within the business. Development was driven by the needs and enthusiasm of a minority of teams. Control measures have always been in place to maintain reasonable consistency between sites, appropriate homepage content areas and access rights but there’s a lot more that needs to be done. Recently we have begun introducing greater governance and supporting this with training and style guides.

Benefits/Value

The obvious benefits of a distributed published Intranet are:

• It reduces the need to have a large Intranet team, allowing their efforts to be focussed on driving improvements to support business requirements, functionality and improve design
• Increases end-user awareness of Intranet amongst teams as most teams have a dedicated Intranet publisher
• The user/publishers of the Intranet have greater interest in the intranet and its content – particularly if their work is recognised in work plans and performance reviews
• Learning how to use a Content Management System (“CMS” is used broadly here) provides empowerment and a good development opportunity for publishers
• Theoretically, and you might find research to support this, people who are actively involved in creating something are more likely to see the value in it and to use it.

Tips

I would recommend having support materials that explain the importance of following set guides (based on W3C standards of course) in place from the beginning. The biggest advantage being that people understand why they should do things a certain way, and it avoids the need to retrain when such methods are eventually implemented once the Intranet reaches a certain level of maturity.

Also it is important that any dedicated publisher to the intranet is recognised for their work. It shows that the company (and hence management team) support the Intranet and are invested in its development. If your publishers don’t have their publishing duties incorporated into their KPI’s any related work won’t be on their high priority list.

Future plans

Over the next 6-8 months we will be rolling out training and information sessions on our intranet with a focus on educating our end-users on it’s capabilities and how they can both contribute and personalise it (ie create personal views) to meet their specific needs.

** Future plans of the Brightstar Intranet have changed quite a bit since this case study in April. We are now looking at restructuring our intranet into two separate online spaces: one of collaboration and one for communication to better support the business longer term. Training is still quite a big part of this as we will be expecting our collaboration space site owners to take full control of their sites’ permissions, publishing and maintenance with less reliance on the Intranet team who will be focussing their efforts on the more structured communications orientated Intranet space and other support areas.

Measuring your Intranet’s success

At some point of time an organisation is going to want to measure the success of their Intranet. A robust approach to this would be to combine an analysis of usage statics and user feedback and compare this to your Intranets goals and objectives.

Usage Statistics

There are many web analytic tools available and generally the tool chosen by an organisation will be used for both their Intranet and any websites or extranets that they also have. Whichever tool is used the process is fairly straight forward. All the information is there, it just requires filtering and analysis against trends and activity on the Intranet.

Intranet usage is generally directly correlated to specific activity. When I say ‘activity’ I am referring to actions that either direct traffic, for example an RSS feed of eNewsletter releases, or that attracts traffic, for example completing tasks or forms online. Either way it is important that when analysing your usage to keep cause-effect relationships in mind and to avoid jumping to conclusions of what the cause-effect relationships could be, but to rather point out the possibilities and acknowledge definitive conclusions cannot be made.

User Feedback

Don’t jump to conclusions. Unless you are directly interviewing your users you cannot assume the feedback provided is as black and white as it may look. Interviewing, however, is a very time consuming laborious tasks that few organisations will commit the time to.

So the next best thing would be to survey them. And asking the right questions is just as important as leaving plenty of space for additional comments. Now you could go about developing your own very specific survey which will give you valuable insights into your intranet or you could opt for a slightly more generic survey that has already been developed and can be benchmarked across other organisations globally, enabling you to see how your intranet performs against others. The WIC (Worldwide Intranet Challenge) by CIBA Solutions is one such survey.

Metrics

Of course, it goes without saying that you need to have something to measure against. Depending on your strategy and objectives, each organisation will be measuring their intranet against a different set of metrics. It is important to understand these metrics as the results from the above two methods will mean very different things when put into perspective and give you differentiating areas to focus on for improvements.

In all the most important thing to remember about measuring your intranet’s success is that it your results won’t mean the same thing to another organisations intranet, and that intranet’s are ever evolving. They are never in a state of being complete, whole or perfect. They are meant to change and grow to fit the culture and strategic direction of the organisation they live in.