Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Running a leaner Intranet team

In "Recession-proof your Intranet strategy" I talked about some quick and simple ways to be prepared to show how valuable your Intranet really is, when faced with possible budget cuts or layoffs.

If after all you're done, it looks like budget cuts are coming, you’ll need to redraft your Intranet strategy for leaner times: 

1. Instead of a costly redesign, re-assign budget toward content cleanup, archiving      and targeting dead/broken links. It’s cheaper, and a side-effect will be improving search results.
2. Instead of outsourcing design directions, I/A work or strategic planning, circle the wagons and conduct in-house card-sorts and strategy sessions.  Design may not be something you want to try at home, but leaving costly design changes until better days would be a wise move now anyway.
3. Hire university interns: In busy, budget-rich times, managers may not have time to recruit and train up intern staff. But in lean times, this can be the only way to get more resources for way cheap. Interns are always a really valuable source of labor and future team members, so don’t forget them!
4. Build your resources by recruiting in-house assistance: Offer employees in other      groups a chance to broaden their skills with Intranet management experience. Doing a “swap” or temporary assignment is a good way for employees in other groups to expand their skills while bringing important “line of business” experience into your corporate team. You may need to work through HR or management to work out the details.
5. Clean up and close down: Working alongside the IT department, focus on closing      down outdated sites, cleaning up ancient content, and consolidating hosting environments.

Why face to face meetings are under threat!

Most organisations and business groupings have grown with a cultural habit of physical or face to face meetings. We have all historically travelled distances small or large to sit in rooms with colleagues or peers to exchange words.

For decades no one gave this routine much thought - aside from some organisations that questioned the value of meetings generally from time to time. But technology mediated meetings are now re-casting face to face meetings profoundly. The advent of usable services for talking, sharing content through screens and for viewing each other in some instances, has started to shift our thinking.

• Do we need to meet physically and why?
• Which meetings can and should be online?
• What are the upsides and downsides?

The rationale for NOT meeting physically is clear:

• Saving time
• Saving travel cost
• Saving carbon impact
• Reducing stress

In my own work and that of IBF we have a default assumption that meetings should be online unless there are clear reasons for meeting in person. Reasons to meet in person seem to be:

• Relationship building
• Handling sensitive matters - particularly personal issues
• Concentrating at high levels

Beyond that we struggle to see the need to meet physically. What is interesting is how one face to face meetings can then provide enough foundation for online meetings for up to 12 - 18 months.

Many people still baulk at this thinking, believing we will end up working in atomized worlds where we are left in technical isolation. That is just not true in practice if we start to understand how to select meeting formats based on the above criteria. Timothy Leary, the Harvard Professor and LSD "Guru" who before his death saw the internet future clearly said that "in the future, all physical meetings will become sacred".

What did he mean? He meant, in my view, that when we do meet in person, it will be for a good and compelling reason that gives the meeting real value. It is somehow "wrong" on many levels to sit in a meeting with content that could be easily shared online. It offends our planet and shows a lack of technical understanding.

Face to face meetings and events and conferences are essentially at the end of their shelf life. We have exhausted the medium of face to face meetings. We know what they can do and no matter how good the agenda, no matter how well facilitated and how smart the venue, the value limits are now defined. Most conferences we attend are just an excuse to chat to peers in coffee breaks.......i.e. a chance for relationship and trust building. In my pertsonal view, they are also a brutal and expensive indulgence environmentally and organisations should consider boycotting such events from a corporate ethics stance.

On the other hand, we are in the foothills in our knowledge of how to use online meetings. We experiment, make mistakes, learn, progress - all the while the technology advances. Still most organisations are nervous or at early stages in using these meeting tools but this will advance in coming decades and face to face meetings will counter (as they are now) to flounder.

The interesting area that is virtually never mentioned is the power that comes from seeing how the online and offline meetings can work together. One example we are experimenting with at IBF is IBF 24. This is a 24 hour online global intranet gathering we are hosting for intranet managers and team on 18 - 19 June. We are pioneering a new meeting format with live material, talks etc with several hundred online at any one moment. The intriguing part is that attendees will be located in their own offices with colleagues or other visiting organisations and they will participate together.

The cost of attending is a fraction of attending a conference in person: no travel, hotels or expensive event passes and no carbon impact and no travel stress. But by attending online "together" colleagues can experience the face to face with the online. Other exercises have been conducted on smaller scales in some enterprises but this IBF 24 pilot event will try to innovate in the online space.

Why are we all still investing so much time and energy in the exhausted medium of face to face meetings when meetings enabled through technology offer so much more scope and experience?

Recession-proof your Intranet strategy

Part 1

Determining business value has always been a difficult aspect of any Intranet management strategy, and many Intranet strategies fall short in this area. IBF’s Metrics and Performance quadrant (formerly known as Business Value) evaluates members for how well they track ROI and any intangible benefits of Intranet programs and services. In addition, the importance of this area has prompted IBF to launch a project to develop a financial value tool to assess the total value of a company Intranet. 

Meanwhile, the rumblings of a possible recession in the US and Europe are causing businesses in all sectors to tighten their belts. Now is a good time to make sure your Intranet’s value proposition is well thought-out. Even if you don’t have a fully-baked business value model in place, there are some quick things you can do to help protect your team and your mission:

 

1. Take a quick poll for value: It won’t be a truly scientific measure, but if you can quickly poll employees about their sense of value derived from using any aspect of your company Intranet, now’s the time to do it. Questions should be around process improvement, efficiency, productivity and satisfaction. Any testament supporting those value drivers may help protect your budget.
2. Go to the sales team: Since productivity is directly related to revenue in this part of the business, testaments to the value of key sales applications may be noticed more if they come from the sales team. If client reps are reporting that use of the Intranet directly helps them close deals, that’s a powerful statement for value and should be captured. On the flip side, evidence that show sales-related processes that are hindered for lack of coherence on the Intranet, this too can support your strategy. For example, low satisfaction with the ability to locate customer information via the Intranet has a clear consequence for sales team productivity and revenue.
3. Solicit positive feedback: Feedback is notoriously only about when things go wrong. To get some good testimony from users, consider posting teasers on key application home pages, portal pages and even in an email to build a show of support for your Intranet.
4. Focus on search: Search, and poor search, is the Achille’s heel of many Intranets. Most companies fail to realize the high cost of looking for information online. Use your immediate team members to create simple search tasks to demonstrate any search problems that might be thwarting employee productivity.
5. Track important events: Company buying out a big competitor? Time for quarterly earnings? Make sure to focus in on traffic statistics at these key moments. Spikes in traffic will show senior managers how employees turn to the Intranet for important company information. Trust in the Intranet is an intangible but compelling value driver.

Once you’ve gathered some information about Intranet value, don’t forget to use this information to pitch upcoming projects with an emphasis on cost savings and efficiency gains.

If some of these ideas seem overly simplistic; let me emphasize that these ideas in no way replace a formal and holistic business value model for your Intranet. That is something that will be critical regardless of the economic climate, to support any significant evolution in your Intranet capabilities and to show success.. your success! In this sense, creating a good business value model for your Intranet also plays a part of formalizing a career path for Intranet management roles.

In some cases, there may be nothing you can do to avoid getting budget slashed and key projects cancelled. Next week I’ll post about how to run a leaner Intranet team. In the meanwhile, I’d love to hear about how your Intranet mission is surviving if your organization is facing some belt-tightening measures.