Intranet Benchmarking Forum

What’s the future for intranets, portals and information workplaces?

That’s one of the questions that’ll get an airing on the debut Intranets Live programme on Tuesday November 4 (book a free guest pass).

We’ll be getting the views of Shiv Singh, workplace tech guru at Avenue A Razorfish in New York –  and any of the hundreds of intranet professionals signed up for the programme will get the chance to grill him too.

In a recent blog entry, Shiv contends that “intranets are not intranets any more” because they do not have to be top-down and browser-based. Instead, he says: “The best intranets take advantage of social technologies, desktop applications (like widgets) and mobile solutions to provide greater value to employees where and when they want it. It’s not about the intranet, but about employee productivity using digital technologies.”

Shiv also argues in favour of intranets becoming “consolidated, dashboard interfaces that serve as a true virtual desktop” and suggests a restructuring of intranet departments so they better align with employee expectations.

(The future of intranets is also something we here at IBF have been pondering. We’ve just released a series of discussion papers – exclusively to our members – under the umbrella title ‘Intranets 2015’. In them, we consider how major trends including the rise of semantic web technologies, greater workforce mobility and the growing urgency of the green agenda are shaping the intranets of the future. And our CEO Paul Miller recently wrote an article on ‘Intranet 3.0’ for consultancy Rufus Leonard.)

Shiv isn’t the only big-name guest lined up for the first Intranets Live. We’re also interviewing David Sacks, founder and CEO of Yammer, about the business value of micro-sharing. Yammer is a tool for employees in the same company to share status updates with one another answering the basic question “What are you working on?” It’s just won a TechCrunch50 award.

We’re already using Yammer among the IBF team. There was some uncertainty at first – one of the first posts was from a team member joking they’d given up work to focus on keeping their entries on various networking sites up to date! But a couple of months in, we’re finding it’s aiding knowledge flow, and it’s providing a boost to good old-fashioned team spirit – an elusive quality in a mostly virtual organisation like ours.

David has a fascinating career history. Former COO at PayPal, he went on to produce the Golden Globe-nominated satirical indie movie Thank You For Smoking and to found www.geni.com, recently named by Time magazine as one of the world’s 50 best websites.

We’ll be asking him not just about the value of micro-sharing in enterprises, but also discussing what this means for company firewalls and for intranet professionals trying to manage the ‘intranet outside’.

As if that wasn’t enough, the two-hour show will also feature a live intranet tour by Kellogg’s, who are going through a major re-launch, and a ‘day in the life’ interview with Catherine Murphy, intranet manager at Capital One. Oh yes, and we’ll get an update from Jane McConnell on key findings from her well-regarded Global Intranet Survey. Plus there will be competitions, breaking intranet news and a clinic by our Intranet Doctor, who’s promising to heal your intranet pain!

You can be part of it all on Tuesday November 4 (3pm-5pm GMT, 10am-12 noon EST, 7am-9am PST) by booking a free guest pass to programme one. (After that, you can choose to buy an annual subscription to Intranets Live. This will get you access to 12 more monthly shows).

Get ready for Intranet 3.0

There was a delay of a few months between my writing this Intranet Trends article for UK agency Rufus Leonard and its publication. In the meantime, the final trend about the financial value of intranet services has risen in prominence. But that aside, you may find this article on Intranet 3.0, of interest.

Predicting the future is always a tricky subject so I started it off by tracking against my previous predictions to assess whether or not I had been successful. Let you be the final judge!

Is your intranet meeting the needs of all employees?

I’ve recently been doing some research for an IBF report titled: “The inclusive intranet: Meeting the needs of hard-to-reach staff” – soon to be released to IBF members! So it seemed appropriate that I started this blog post while working in a cafe today, connected up to work on my laptop and mobile broadband, with all the usual connections to the world and my colleagues via email, IBF extranet, Twitter, Yammer, Twirl etc.

 

The ability to work anywhere, anytime is increasingly being demanded by workers across a range of industries, and as we keep hearing – by the time Gen Y enters the workplace this kind of flexibility is going to be expected as a matter of course. But as well as being the product of shifting patterns of work, the ability to connect to the tools and information needed for work is a fundamental issue for some, hard-to-reach groups of employees. For example:

• factory workers
• retail staff
• field engineers
• building inspectors
• consultants
• sales teams
• flight and rail workers
• catering staff
• building inspectors
• call centre representatives
• insurance assessors.

 

Intranet managers looking to bridge the gap and extend the intranet experience to such groups face a number of challenges:

• Work location can mean no computer access or slow connection speeds where access is available, and with the potential unsuitability of the environment restricting options for offering intranet access.
• Mobility can be an issue where staff who are frequently on the move only have limited access to the intranet on company premises – security fears or cultural issues such as trust can hold back moves to extend access.
• Job role can impose constraints such as computer use being seen as detrimental to productivity (for example, in a factory or retail environment), time constraints (for example, in a call centre) or even no intranet access for staff in temporary roles.

 

So, why bother extending the intranet to these audiences? As part of the research I interviewed five very interesting case studies - from ArcelorMittal, Boots, Centrica, CoreMedia and Nokia – to find out about the benefits they’ve realised, and which included:

• Better communication – for example, fast and effective communication to factory workers via intranet kiosks.
• Increased productivity – for example, eliminating re-entry of data by enabling data entry from the field via mobile devices.
• Better engagement – for example, enabling staff on the move to build relationships and make connections with colleagues.
• Cost savings – for example, automating key processes via the intranet and making them available to all employees.
• Improved customer service and sales – for example, enabling retail staff to track performance via in-store PCs and tills.
• Attraction and retention of talent – for example, providing mobility options to employees in the sales force.
• Improved business continuity – for example, mitigating the impact of a disaster by enabling remote access to critical business functions via mobile devices.

 

The report also offers recommendations on how to overcome the challenges and realise these benefits, also looking at the technology options for extending intranet access in innovative ways. Highlights of the advice and best practice covered in the report include:

• Not delivering what the intranet or communications team think that a particular audience need! Getting stuck in locally can be very revealing for a head office team who may have no previous experience of (for example) how a call centre representative or field engineer works. Even if this isn’t possible due to travel restrictions, much can be done to get a real insight to local needs.
• Getting senior management backing, often from a local senior manager of the audience in question. For many companies, extending the intranet to (for example) a field sales force or large factory population may be seen as an essential progression for the business, rather than having a hard and fast business case.
• Helping users who may be less familiar with computers to get up-to-speed by offering appropriate training and support options such as a helpline, encouraging use by migrating key procedures online, or training a core group of champions/ managers to help others. A gradual approach seems to work best in most cases and also allows for any cultural barriers to be brought down.
• Establishing rigorous governance – once a previously hard-to-reach audience gets intranet access it can be a case of the floodgates opening and head office (unintentionally) bombarding them with information. In a way it’s a “champagne problem”, showing that the new tool has really struck a chord. Nevertheless it will require rigorous ongoing governance to protect such audiences from overload, and help head office get the best of the new channel. Having managed a call centre intranet myself, I know that this challenge shouldn’t be underestimated!

 

The report is packed full of practical examples which I hope will help other intranet managers successfully navigate the road to extending their intranets to hard-to-reach staff... coming soon to the IBF extranet.

J&J Collaboration: SharePoint migration plans

Last week I spent some time putting together a document outlining best practices for migrating content over to the new SharePoint platform.

J&J will be moving off their existing Documentum e-room platform and over to SharePoint over the course of the next year or so.  Right now, as we begin to communicate to teams about the SharePoint features that enable and facilitate collaboration, the immediate question is most often "so how do I migrate my e-room?"

The challenge is to facilitate the easy migration of business-critical information without recreating the same static dumping ground on the new Teamsite. And while business groups are asking for help from automated e-room to Teamsite migration tools, the IT Services organization in charge of the program has decided that such tools will only serve to move the large piles of outdated stuff from one place to another. So they are taking the position that a manually-managed migration is the only way to ensure a good Spring cleaning of the e-rooms.

Since there is a bit of consternation, and not a small amount of confusion around this whole process, I needed to quickly figure out an approach that would meet the requirements of the procurement teams while supporting the use of the collaborative capabilities of SharePoint that is the whole point of the platform.  It would be a pity, after all, to just use the thing as a document library, and that's it. But I fear that this is very much a possibility with SharePoint, unless care is taken to guide the creation of the teamsites carefully, and monitor, encourage and push for collaborative, event-driven activity around work flows and processes.

Sounds easy!

Well, to start with, I came up with a few ideas that could be useful to others who are faced with the same challenges (regardless of the orginal platform):

Think about work activities, not document folders:
Since SharePoint offers a lot of opportunities to integrate work information with work activities - such as contacting team members, responding to questions or problems, or collaborating on a document, a problem, a project, or an event, the crux of the whole effort is going to be getting people to start looking at documents not just as pieces of information, but as elements in work activities that can be managed through the Teamsite:

This way, team can start to discuss, edit, share or review not only documents, but next steps, tasks, activities, events, meetings, etc all around a specific project.  All this information can be pulled together into a view that the business owners define.

So, as you upload documents and folders, consider the following questions, then consider associating the information with the capabilities and functions available on your teamsite:

What are the work activities around this information?

• Who needs to act on this document? Who is part of the work activity? (permissions on the document, or the teamsite)
• How is it created, edited, reviewed and improved? (Create a wiki view of the document)
• When and How do you discuss the document contents? (discussion forum, events calendar)
• Who needs to reference it? (visitor permissions to the document or site)
• How can it be found? (test for search, add to general Intranet site)
• Does the data change? (KPI, data tracking web part)
• How long does the document remain active? Where are old versions? (archiving/naming schemes)

We are all still very much in the "learn as we go" phase here, so I'd be interested in thoughts from others who have handled the SharePoint migration challenge before - did everything just end up in a new pile of documents on SharePoint? Or was anyone successful in actually getting work-related activities and collaboration active around these former, static repositories of information?