Many thanks to Mark Morrell for hosting a very interactive visit to BT Centre last week for IBF members.
30 members had a chance for some hands on time with the BT intranet, the highest performing in IBF's benchmarking process so far this year. BT delivers intranet content to all it's varied workforce, from office workers and home workers to engineers out on the road.
More about some of the things Mark shared are visible through his own blog.
Yesterday saw this year's 2nd IBF member meeting in the UK and 5th member meeting globally this year. Thankfully our great new meeting space had good air conditioning because we have untypically hot weather here in the UK at the moment!
A record attendance of 50 members made for a buzzy exchange of intranet news, ideas and plans for the first day, followed by a lovely evening out and a packed visit to BT centre near St Paul's cathedral. BT's intranet is currently top of IBF's benchmarking league tables in all 4 of our benchmarking areas.
Over the two days we heard updates on intranet changes from various members, a success story from Aviva about rapid Sharepoint 2007 implementation and intranet relaunch, heard and saw the use of videos and flip cams at Abbott Pharmaceuticals, discussed best practices demonstrated by members across communication & culture benchmarking and worked on practical social media policies.
We'll be picking up some key themes from the meeting over the next few blog posts, and for IBF members all the slides and documentation will be downloadable from our extranet next week.
This could be good news for the "internet teams" but it isn't. In fact, the emerging trend is for increasing access to be given to intranets for people outside the firewall; suppliers, contractors, customers, former staff etc. Major companies globally are looking to open up to their marketplaces, customers and consumers. They are also looking to increase their presence and engagement with social media and emerging 2.0 technologies.
This trend was underlined this week by the ever influential John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, who in his keynote address at the Cisco Partner Summit said that consumer and enterprise technologies will continue to merge, and no where will that be more prominent than in video, which he said will change the way people communicate and do business. Chambers pointed to Cisco's purchase of the company that made the Flip video as a key advantage for Cisco as it moves into a more video-based future, where he said video will soon account for 90 percent of all network traffic.
Intranet teams are being given increasing responsibility for engagement beyond the firewall and they have flourished during the recession while corporate website budgets have been cut. We always felt that the internet might absorb the intranet; but in looks firmly that the direction will be reversed as areas of the intranet are opened up to investors, media, job applicants, environmental groups and customers.
Where does that leave the corporate website? They are stuck it seems. Caught between the ever increasingly important intranet spaces and the dynamic expanding 2.0 world, they look like yesterday's story with declining funding, static role and no clear future direction. The corporate website starts to look like the marketing brochures of the past: meeting a need but no more.
This is all good for the intranet teams. For years they have been the "cinderella" of the online world but with lots of experience of optimising with low resource and innovation, the future looks very bright as their remit extends.
Last week I had occasion to participate in a leadership conference at Ernst and Young. Its purpose was to bring communications executives together to understand the latest trends amongst advance intranets and to parlay that information into a strategic roadmap for a next-generation intranet.
The day and a half meeting was set in Secaucus, New Jersey. Meeting delegates flew in from across the US and Europe. Several delegates came from as far as New Zealand, Australia and Japan. They were an inquisitive, sharp and attentive group. I couldn’t have asked for a more engaged audience!
Guest speakers included IBM and Human Factors International in addition to IBF. Each of us in turn had an opportunity to speak to intranet trends and best practices for 60 minutes. We capped off the day with a 60-minute panel discussion that lasted nearly 90 minutes. Committing the extra time punctuated the idea that the Ernst & Young leadership were an inquisitive, sharp and attentive group!
Building on recent IBF research, my presentation sampled practices amongst advance intranets along with emerging trends.
Trends Among Advanced Intranets
Trend number five was based on IBF’s recently released briefing paper on the Recession Strength Intranet, which is now available for download. This is a must-read for intranet managers – especially those who embarking on annual planning. (IBF members can access this paper via the document library on the extranet.)
Looking to Next-Generation Intranets
The panel discussion late in the day served as an opportunity for Ernst & Young executives to put what they heard that afternoon into context; to explore organizational readiness for such topics as
I certainly look forward to hearing about the strategic priorities and actions laid out during day two of the agenda, which was reserved uniquely for Ernst & Young colleagues. Perhaps that will be a story for another day!?!?!?
We’ve focussed a lot recently on what we’re referring to at IBF as the campaign for the recession-strength intranet. Watching the intranet news and blogosphere I’m noticing this getting more coverage which is encouraging as intranet managers need all the support they can get as the economic downturn continues. In a post this week Jane McConnell sums up the risks of sidelining the intranet sparked by some of the responses to her pre-survey quick poll:
This point is also emphasized in a timely article by Rachel Lei published on CIO.com this week on Leveraging the Power of the intranet:
It goes on to mention some of the other ways that the intranet can help to provide cost savings such as moving printed materials online and enabling employee collaboration. These kind of cost saving initiatives on the intranet are key to its survival in the times we’re in. If you haven’t read it yet I really recommend the free research paper we released earlier this year “The Recession-strength intranet” with its real life examples of how smart intranets are “finding ways for the intranet to release previously unexploited value and make a major contribution to the organisation’s bottom line.”
But what about intranets that are already providing value but this value isn’t being measured and importantly acknowledged at the highest levels of the organisation? With intranet metrics often falling off the bottom of the intranet team’s to do list, this is a real issue. A recent poll at Intranets Live showed that people tend to underestimate the value of the intranet compared to what IBF has found through the Intranet Financial Value Benchmark - as a live tweet from the session sums it up:
In a timely article on Ragan.com aptly titled Without metrics, intranets languish Toby Ward comments on this issue:
Demonstrating value can range from a baseline of having a clear “elevator pitch” on intranet value, through a more fully fledged metrics program, right through to the full-blown Intranet Financial Value Benchmark that IBF recently launched. All three levels have been looked at in recent posts:
The bare essentials or “elevator pitch” in Measuring the effectiveness of intranets:
Developing a more fully fledged metrics program was the topic of a recent Special Interest Group, the highlights of which appeared in Demonstrating intranet success using metrics which looked at practical ways to measure and report metrics (including low cost methods):
And the full blown analysis developed by IBF that is the Intranet Financial Value Tool in What is the financial value of your intranet? Now we have the answer... which quantifies the exploited and unexploited contribution of an intranet in terms of financial cost savings, revenue gains and reduced risks - and in a way that will certainly make the CFO sit up and pay attention.
Wherever you start, demonstrating the value of the intranet is certainly coming to the fore in the current climate. Intranet managers can take encouragement from the recent Watson Wyatt survey which found that since the start of the economic slump 72% of employers have increased intranet use, signalling an acknowledgement of how the intranet can help (and again emphasising the importance of being able to make sure this is recognised at senior levels).
Is your intranet recession-strength? How are you demonstrating its value in tough times? It would be great to hear your answers to these questions as we’ll be continuing to dig into them moving forward.
