Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Mashup - putup or shutup?

The prospect of any user letting loose home-brew applications on a corporate intranet is probably the stuff of nightmares for many intranet managers (don't worry, this isn't a geeky Halloween story). However, several companies are working on mashup tools that allow non-programmers to put together new applications, building-block style. These include Microsoft Popfly (see Microsoft launches mashup tool for non-techies' ) and Yahoo! Pipes. A good example of a mashup is housingmaps.com that takes apartment advertisements from Craigslist.com (a very text based interface) and plots them on a Google map.

Such tools were there in the original vision of Web 2.0, but have yet to achieve the recognition of other technologies ('Web 2.0' currently being almost synonymous with 'blogsandwikis'). The mashup technologies are still immature and require a much more technical mindset than something like a wiki. However, the popularity of applications in Facebook is starting to expose a broader range of people to to the idea of 'disposable' mini applications running on a browser page.

Therefore its highly likely that mashups will begin to permeate the intranet world. Some see the technology as the natural successor to the portal and portlet approach that struggled to take off (or the web-part concept in SharePoint). Currently, most portal environments have strict controls over code deployed on servers to make sure that rogue programming doesn't threaten the platform.

So should intranet managers welcome mashups? I think they should. They fill a gap for niche-need applications that wouldn't have a strong business case if done by a full-blown IT team, and for which there may be greater tolerance for quirks so long as people accept that they're home-grown. Many organisations had Lotus Notes developers that could knock together a custom database application in relatively little time and few intranets have yet been able to replace that functionality. This is one reason why many Notes installations are like the living dead in corporate IT (couldn't resist another Halloween reference) . Mash-ups could fill that gap, and just as with Notes, I don't expect all users will create applications, but instead there'll be a group of people that develop the skills to help their colleagues.

This isn't to say that intranet should become a free-for all though - just that the governance around it should be at the right level:

• interface standards should still be encouraged
• the infrastructure to host these applications needs to be set up so that they can't affect other services
• mashup applications need to carry a health warning so that users intuitively understand that what they're using may not be 'industrial strength'.

Then step back and wait for the monster mash-up ;-)

Improving Intranet Search

IBF have just released a new research report on improving intranet search  by Elizabeth Marsh. Search is one of those aspects of intranets that users consistently seem dissatisfied with. In my experience they have high expectations of success from their experiences with internet search and usually expect intranet search to be easier to get right. In fact I think successful intranet search is a whole lot harder.

Despite usability being a relatively-well documented area, intranet search engines still don't follow good practice. For example:

• Default search has too many options
• Search results are poorly presented, often with lots of headers and whitespace at the top
• Results pages show thousands of hits (a common hazard when searching for a term that's central to your business)
• Results pages make metadata like date and title hard to scan
• When there are no hits due to misspellings, the system fails to give constructive feedback

There's really no reason why vendors shouldn't be getting this right by now, except that search is often just part of a bundle and sometimes not given as much priority as it should be in purchasing decisions. IBF found similar concerns with other out-of-the box interfaces for employee self-service applications (see Usability of Third Party Applications )

The report also highlights organisational issues around search. Website owners pay close attention to search engine optimisation, but few intranet content owners put as much effort into getting their pages high up the intranet rankings.

Aside from getting usability right, the report recommends that organisations should invest in continuous improvement of the user's search experience using features such as best-bets. It also advises that search should not be regarded in isolation, but as part of an overall approach to supporting what users are trying to do.  Make sure that the right content exists, that it is not fragmented across other systems, and that an appropriate taxonomy exists to help get the metadata right.

IBF members can download the full report from the IBF Extranet (pdf 2MB)

 

Intranet Video

A couple of months ago IBF produced a member briefing paper on the rise of internal video as a communication tool.There's a whole raft of different technologies being used to deliver video - from live webcasts, to video on demand libraries to plasma screens in the canteen. The content also ranges broadly - from a strongly top-down CEO broadcast to video in Microsoft (see Channel9.msdn.com for a public equivalent of their internal site).

What seems to work best are very short, uncluttered messages. This is good news for network managers concerned about bandwidth and storage of huge, high resolution files. The bad news for communicators is that video can still be a divisive medium as it's still relatively common to have corporate PCs that lack sound cards and speakers.

What's less clear is whether we've yet developed a sufficient understanding of how to get the best from this medium. A leader that is not a naturally charismatic speaker is even less likely to grab employee's attention on video. Indeed the whole question of attention remains a delicate one. Video is more engaging, but this very fact means people soon get restless as they can't do things in parallel or 'skim' through the content. Make it too polished and people become cynical and disengage (we've all seen the classic 'Corporate Movie' where an Ibiza dance classic is pumped out as the camera pans round the accounts team drinking tea). Too unpolished and people get distracted by the camera wobble or disjointed edits.

Just as competence in email communication has matured, competence in this area will grow too, but the technology has only recently become widely-adopted, so it will take time.

[IBF members can download the report from the extranet: Video in Demand]

Giving a face to your feedback

There's a story (probably apocryphal) of a woman who was driving to a job interview and running late. To make an already stressful situation worse,  another driver cut her up. Incensed, she swore at him and made a typical road-rage gesture then sped off. She made it to the appointment with just a few minutes to spare and took a second to compose herself outside the door. When she walked into the meeting room she recognised her interviewer immediately... it was the driver of the other car.

I was reminded of this when speaking to a communications manager about why she didn't like discussion boards on their intranet. "People are much harsher online than they are face to face, the whole tone is just more negative somehow", she said.

I think she had a good point - its the anonymity of road rage and discussion boards that make people more blunt. Possibly they're also more inclined to exaggerate a point to make sure they've been 'heard' because theres often no response either.

The same thing happens when an intranet has a link to "feedback@thisorg.com". As a portal manager I had to remind myself that when users didn't hold back on expressing their frustration, it wasn't personal. But then I was keeping it impersonal by just giving them a box to fill in.

We therefore always recommend that feedback mechanisms should make it clear who the real person is behind it. Give the real email address of a site owner, or call the discussion board "ask Jack..." rather than "Your feedback" and make it clear how quickly you will respond.

Do intranets follow the 1-9-90 rule?

My last post Facebook behind the Firewall generated some interesting comments about motivating employees to participate in Intranet 2.0 type activities. About this time last year a popular rule of thumb emerged that said for a typical social media site:

• 1% create
• 9% modify or comment
• 90% just read an lurk

But this is now looking inaccurate (sweeping statements are always inaccurate). A  recent McKinsey report on user-generated content (free registration to get full article) shows a much more nuanced spread for example:

 

 

There is also Forrester Research on contribution patterns that suggest much higher levels of involvement:

 

Admittedly, neither of these are directly about intranets, however, if your target community is only 100 people, they do give some hope that more than one person will create something.

 

Facebook behind the Firewall

What would it mean to have a version of Facebook on your intranet?

The use of Facebook has grown rapidly and soon looks set to overtake MySpace (graph comparing MySpace, Orkut, Bebo and Facebook)

On this blog Louise Ferguson also recently commented on Facebook Use and Abuse by employees using the site during work time. In the IBF we've also been thinking about the next generation of phone books on intranets.

As internet trends are often precursors to intranet trends, I've therefore been wondering if a Corporate Social Network (CSN) would become the new 'Super Peoplefinder' in organisations.

There is certainly plenty of appeal:

• it would potentially allow searches on skills and interests
• people would be more motivated to maintain their profile - the problem with many current phonebooks is that people never look at their own entry
• its a way to propagate updates such as role changes that's more effective than email (too intrusive and disconnected for much of the audience)
• there's potential for micro-blogging where  someone could give several updates a day on the status of a time-critical event. e.g. if a server goes down the IT team could micro-blog status reports and only those who wanted to know need subscribe.

But, I also see some considerable barriers:

• intranet users tend to be less tolerant of multiple tools for the same task. In particular, having conflict between an email client and CSN, as the place to message would create a lot of confusion
• intranet users have a view on what 'completeness' is. That only 0.25% of internet users are on LinkedIn isn't seen as an issue. But it is common to complain about a phonebook that's less than even 80% complete
• CSN's are a lot less fun. Signing up to Facebook has intrinsic rewards and motivations because its social activity. Few organisations would implement a CSN that had such a degree of non-work content, and few employees would feel comfortable having their lunchtime gossip online. This would make the end result much drier. There would still be take-up, as there is with LinkedIn, but much less so.