Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Recession - good or bad for Enterprise 2.0?

The debate is now raging. Is the economic downturn good news for Enterprise 2.0 (Web 2.0 tools used or adapted for use within the organisation)? In today's Financial Times the "good camp" are out in force with strong case study evidence from Procter & gamble, Shell and Airbus - plus a good helping of comments from Forrester, Silicon Valley venture capitalists and assorted consulting houses that the recession is pushing Enterprise 2.0 forward.

"A quiet revolution is taking place". That’s the message from Soumitra Dutta and Matthew Fraser, academics at the Insead business school in France and authors of Throwing Sheep in the Boardroom.

They detail how companies are busy integrating social networking into their corporate strategies. These companies, say the authors, are showing that the use of blogs, wikis, widgets and other Web 2.0 tools “encourages horizontal collaboration and harnesses the power of collective intelligence to boost productivity, foster innovation and create enhanced value". The authors say that they explore, in an objective and rigorous way, "whether the concept of Enterprise 2.0 can deliver real business benefits" and their answer is a firm "yes". 

This is interesting because on a trial run through we had yesterday for the upcoming programme of Intranets Live, we had just that debate with Richard Dennison, one of the world's leading social software experts, responsible for Enterprise 2.0 within BT, and with Angela Huffman, similarly placed within Nokia. When asked how the recession was affecting 2.0 in their companies both said it was having a very negative impact with budgets cut and every new tool having to produce a clear business case- something that 2.0 has always struggled with.

BT are using a "skunk works" type approach to get new applications in under the radar with little spend (no bad thing perhaps) so 2.0 carries on. And the BT and Nokia views correlate with what I have heard in other large enterprises.

Read the FT and you would be inclined to think that any organisation resisting full blown 2.0 right now is treading a lonely path. But dig into the people cited in the FT and all have a vested interest in promoting that stance. Plus knowing the timelines on new books, the authors probably completed their content 6 - 9 months agao when we were in a very different place. I wonder what Shell, P & G and Airbus would say now, given lay-offs at Airbus for example?

The good news is that on Tuesday 3 February 1500 - 1700 GMT we will be looking into this whole issue at Intranets Live, our monthly live global intranet programme, with this episode devoted to Enterprise 2.0. We will see live what Nokia is doing in terms of Enterprise 2.0 and also hook up live with Wyeth, and they are much in the news given the merger this week announced with Pfizer, who are actually hosting a "2.0" day within the company.

If you have not yet sampled one of our shows then you can request a free guest pass here for next week....but these are limited as Intranets Live is only for Intranet Benchmarking Forum Members and Intranets Live Subscribers.

Is yours a recession-strength intranet?

A global organisation has cut costs, improved customer service and released staff from thousands of hours of painstaking clerical work every year in one of its operating companies through smart use of its SharePoint 2003-based intranet.

 

This is just one example of IBF members using their intranets to make their organisations more efficient and effective – an urgent requirement in these straitened financial times.

 

A bit more detail . . .

 

The operating company in question was receiving a high volume of complaints from customers, but its method of logging and processing them was haphazard and ineffective.

 

There were eight separate systems for recording complaints. Many of them were not recorded efficiently (some were even being sent by post), and there was no reliable way to analyse complaints data.

 

As a result, the company found itself paying out large amounts of compensation to customers without being able to determine fault. In addition, dealing with complaints was proving very time-consuming, and the company had no insight into the root causes of problems.

 

As part of a group-wide lean programme, a cross-functional team re-engineered the complaints-handling process. To make the new and much streamlined process work, a single, easy-to-use system was required. And that’s where the intranet came in.

 

The intranet team set up an Issue List in a TeamSite, customising it to turn it into an incident log that opco staff could use to record complaints quickly and accurately. The new incident log also allowed users to drill into complaints data and analyse it by, for example, type of complaint, originating customer, and third-party involvement.

 

The new incident log has brought major benefits:

·       The company can identify and act on the root cause of problems – for example, it has been able to take action to get poor-performing transporters to raise their game.

·       The total being paid out in compensation has been cut – partly because the company is fixing many of its logistics issues at source, and partly because it is now able to tell when problems are caused by customers and no compensation is due.

·       Overall customer service has improved significantly. Complaints are down by more than a third.

·       The time taken to deal with a complaint has been cut from months or even years to two hours in many cases thanks to the removal of wasteful administration and multiple hand-offs. This has freed up thousands of hours every year for customer service staff to spend on more value-adding work.

 

Recession-strength Intranet research

IBF is pulling together examples like this in a research paper under the title ‘The Recession-strength Intranet’. Initially, we’ll release this to IBF members and, shortly after, we’ll make it available to non-members (with examples made anonymous and screen shots removed).

 

The idea is that the paper will give intranet managers inspiration and practical advice for their own intranet programmes, as well as anecdotal evidence they can use in discussion with senior managers who need convincing of the value and potential of intranets.

 

We’re looking for a couple of organisations outside IBF who might have examples we could include. The quid pro quo for your contributing is that we’d send you the non-anonymous version of the report, including screen shots. Plus of course you’d get the kudos of your example being put in front of IBF’s active and influential membership base.

 

We’re not necessarily looking for enterprise-wide, high-profile uses of the intranet – instead, we’re expecting examples will be much more nitty-gritty and small-scale, but will nevertheless demonstrate the power of the intranet to cut costs, boost employee productivity, improve customer service etc.

 

If you have an example you think we could include, please contact me, Paul Johnson, at paulj@ibforum.com

How can the effectiveness of intranets be measured?

Last week, a member of the Intranet Professionals Group on LinkedIn recently posed the following question:

”How can the effectivity of intranets be measured? Of course it's a matter of tasks that have to be defined individually and relatively. Apart from that: Do you know about already existing standards, maybe even programmed routines for the measurement of intranet-success? And in general: what variables would make sense to gain insight in intranet-measurement?”

Upon reflection, I posted the following reply…

When the topic of intranet metrics arises the conversation often starts with in one of two questions, namely:

1.    What stats do you capture? (i.e., how many page views, how many users, who had clicked on what and so on – the data typically captured in log files.)

2.    Which reporting/analytic tools are you using? (Google Analytics, Web Trends, Site Catalyst, etc.)

In a recent gathering of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, we contemplated three main points that every Intranet Manager should be prepared to demonstrate at any time are:

1.    State the current investment levels and business as usual costs

2.    List current intranet services and deliverables including their benefits to the organisation

3.    List additional beneficial intranet services that can be added at low cost to help the organisation improve or cut costs

Examples of things that should be on the list for items 2 and 3 (and their likely benefits) include:

• Travel Booking (saves transaction costs)
• Online Meeting Tools (saves time and travel costs)
• Live chat (employee engagement; email overload avoidance)
• Leadership online (as above)
• ‘One Source of Truth“ (can reduce risk and error, increase reputation)
• Room Booking (saves manual labor)
• On Boarding Services (enables new hires to work efficiently faster)
• Off Boarding Services (enables to minimize knowledge drain)
• HR Self Services (saves transaction costs and manual labor)
• Web Library (saves distribution costs and time on finding books, reports, etc.;  avoids duplicate buying/subscriptions)
• Sell advertising space on the intranet to external organizations (actually generates income and provides benefits to employees)

So how would you go about building your intranet measurement strategy? Here are some initial thoughts to get you moving along the right path.

1.    Design metrics that support your intranet strategy. Think about what you want your metrics to say and why. Ideally, your metrics will serve as a backdrop for discussing on how to take what you know now about the intranet and raising performance to provide greater business value. James Robertson has written two excellent articles that point in this direction.

•                     25 reasons why saving time on your intranet is a bad metric

•                     Intranets: measuring before and after

 

2.    Bite the bullet. Put in the effort to produce good metrics. If you need to collect data by hand initially, allocate the resources to do just that. Also invest time on the visual presentation too! Consider a dashboard format that guides your reader to key wins, issues or decision points. Once you’ve whet stakeholder appetites for critical information, you can leverage dashboard production stats to lobby for more automated solutions.

 

3.    Contextualize results properly.  Provide a contextual narrative to support metrics. This should include developments inside of the organization during the reporting period. The internal perspective will help flag correlations and draw out insights, but it will also help stakeholders understand value drivers instead versus basis traffic statistics.

 

4.    Add depth by highlighting how your intranet is performing relative to industry peers. Take the time to do thorough external research and benchmarking. Tap into sources such as the Jane McConnell’s Global Intranet Survey and the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, which provides league tables for its member organizations as part of annual benchmarking.

 

Although your aim is alignment with internal company strategy, understanding the (often huge) differences between intranets and the reasons for these can really open your eyes to the possibilities and allow you to take a step back and assess your own company intranet more objectively.

 

5.    Be transparent about intranet metrics. Carry your intranet dashboard around with you at all times. Incorporate a review of key performance indicators (KPIs) and key operational metrics into intranet governance meetings. Discuss intranet metrics openly – warts and all.

 

Further reading:

• 12 ways to use your intranet to save costs
• Recession-proof your intranet strategy

What are the New Year resolutions from Intranet Managers?

What are intranet managers planning to do during the 2009 recession? From the January 2009 episode of our monthly Intranets Live show, it was fascinating to hear about the New Year resolutions from intranet managers around the world.

We had more than 500 intranet professionals listening to our live show on 6 Jan from 25 countries and drawn from 273 companies and organisations globally and their plans had a similar tone to them:

• Use the "downturn" as a chance to cull and clean up content across the intranet space
• Take stock on technology investments but don't postpone upgrades too long - there are technology vendors deals to be done in tough times
• Look seriously at piloting open source and "software as service" technologies rather than large scale systems (alternatives to SharePoint 2007 gaining attention)
• Get your intranet into strong shape so that when the upturn comes (and it will) you are not left lagging behind the competition

The start of 2009 was a great time to have our first Intranets Live show this year and those involved in running intranets globally are certainly in a generally confident mood - which is in marked contrast to some other business areas.

You can see clips from the first two episodes of Intranets Live here. Watch this space for regular updates from the Intranets Live media channel!