Intranet Benchmarking Forum

The hottest topics in the intranet world

Each year IBF covers some of the hottest topics in the intranet world in its Research Programme. Now it’s that time of year when we ask our members to vote on the topics they want to see covered in next year’s programme. I’ve been taking an early look at the results of this survey, which closes at the end of October, to see what topics are climbing up the list. If you’re a member and haven’t yet had your say, you can do so from the member extranet!

So what did I find from that “early look”? Here are a few highlights:

• Usability: always high on the list for intranet teams, I think we’ll be looking into the latest good practice relating to usability. This also follows a recent refresh to our usability benchmarking which will tie-in to give a fresh perspective on this area.
• Inside out intranet: also popular in the early results is the “Inside out intranet”, looking at redefining the firewall and the boundaries between the intranet and website, which Paul Miller IBF’s Founder and CEO, video blogged about recently.
• Intranet maturity: at a recent episode of Intranets Live one of the early results we heard from Jane McConnell’s 2009 Global Intranet Survey was that only 14% of participants said that their online workplace is unified. I know this is a broad issue for our members and we’re looking at some research in intranet maturity models/ roadmaps to help organisations understand where their intranet is at, and how to move it closer to that unified workplace.
• Operational intranets: having managed an operational intranet myself I know that it can be hard to track down specific good practice and advice in this area. So it’s interesting to see that so far there is quite a bit of interest in looking at the impact of intranets on operational areas of the business such as customer services and sales.

With a couple of weeks before the survey closes, things may well change – but my hunch is that the above highlights will make it to the final shortlist of six topics that we cover in the 2010 Research Programme.

Over the years we’ve covered a range of topics and built up a valuable bank of research papers on intranet topics from strategy and governance to social media and sustainability. (I only wish I’d had access to this back in the days when I was managing an intranet!)

From time to time, IBF does make research available to non-members and you can find this research in our Online Shop (including a couple of free reports).

Can implementing social media on your intranet help gain business benefit?

Is your organisation still in two minds about social media? Is it just something that kids play with and where time is time wasted? Or are social applications a way to derive real business benefit from collaboration, innovation and productivity gains?

IBF's “Social Media Guide”, an exclusive report for IBF member organisations, looks at these issues in detail and sets out to help organisations derive benefit from social applications. With the help of real-world case studies from successful implementations and survey data from member and non-member organisations, the Social Media Guide provides practical advice.

Business social media adoption is more widespread than you might think, with IBF's own findings and major research from Prescient Digital Media indicating that as many as one in two organisations now have some form of social application on their intranet. On top of this, credible case studies are emerging that show clear business benefits and returns on investment.

This still leaves many organisations with no social applications and no clear idea about the path to take and what the benefits might be. This report aims to help organisations that have yet to introduce social media on their intranets as well as those who have taken some initial steps down this road. It looks at the common factors in successful social media implementation, the potential benefits of social media and how they can be measured. It includes detailed case studies from BT, BAT and Nokia to provide substantial real-world learning.

The key recommendations from the report are:
1. Be business-led
2. Gain senior management support
3. Get IT on board
4. Use the right language for your organisation
5. Manage concerns over risk
6. Pilot and beta test
7. Enforce the use of real identities
8. Plan for an integrated solution
9. Address usability

Excerpted below is recommendation #3, Get IT on board.

While social media implementations should always be led by core business needs, IT support will be essential to any experiments or long-term plans for adoption inside the firewall.

Perhaps surprisingly, lack of support from IT was named as a major barrier to implementation by 36 per cent of our survey participants. Prescient Digital Media’s Intranet 2.0 Global Survey arrived at similar findings.

The key to resolving this barrier is working with IT colleagues to understand and address their concerns.Do they perceive a risk to the stability of existing applications? Do they see social applications as a threat? Are they having trouble identifying suitable strategic technology (cited by 19 per cent of our survey respondents as a major challenge)? If you can answer these questions, then you can begin planning how to respond.

Of course, some organisations sidestep this whole issue by using third- party-hosted solutions. We do not consider this approach in this report.

IBF members can sign up to a webinar to discuss this research on 20th October, and join other members in London for a Special Interest Group meeting on 29th October for a deeper dive into social media implementation.

This is a guest post from Andrew Marr, IBF Associate and independent consultant. With over 10 years’ experience in online strategy, analysis, development and management, Andrew recently authored IBF’s “Social Media Guide” which is available exclusively to IBF members. Among other things, he managed Bupa’s intranet for three years and implemented a number of pioneering social media applications in that time.

The Green Intranet - It's campaign time!

One of the recessionary impacts on organisational life has been that employees have felt rather neglected and less engaged. Cut backs on "softer" areas have resulted in less time and budget for making staff feel part of their organisation.

One way to remedy this at low cost is to exploit your intranet environment as a means of building sustainability and green practice among staff. Why not use your intranet as a "green motivator" by running a campaign through the intranet.

A "how to" guide is contained in a new IBF Green Intranet briefing paper that provides 10 tips for organisations seeking to use the intranet to combat climate change.

Intranets have the opportunity to play a front line role in corporate efforts to combat global warming. Through a host of real-life examples from IBF member organisations and others, IBF present 10 ways for an organisation to use their intranet to build environmental practice and capability:

1. Automate administrative processes
2. Use web meetings to cut travel
3. Convert travellers into online collaborators
4. Use the intranet to enable telecommuting
5. Enable car pooling
6. Make more efficient use of office space to enable reductions in real estate
7. Migrate printed documents online
8. Engage employees in greening the organisation
9. Provide environmental performance data
10. Provide visibility of employees’ availability and whereabouts

Available exclusively to IBF members, ‘The green intranet: 10 ways to use your intranet to build sustainability’ briefing paper provides a host of real life examples from organisations including IBM, Aviva, BT, Highways Agency, Nokia, Yahoo! and Sun Microsystems who are using their intranets to do everything from enabling telecommuting to engaging employees in greening the organisation.

Find out more about the IBF research programme.

Video use, social media policies & networking in tropical London

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.

Is your intranet ready for interactive communication?

At each IBF member meeting we have a stop press section to demonstrate and swap notes on members' current intranet successes and challenges.  At last week's IBF member meeting in London one of the subjects which generated much discussion was around the use of the intranet as a communication channel in these current turbulent economic times.

 

Whilst some member organisations have opened up news stories and senior leader blogs to open comment from intranet users, others are finding managers still nervous to do this. 

As we discussed, in the current climate many organisations have some large scale communications to do, and it's not always good news.  Open and two-way communications can help, as was demonstrated by one member organisation on the day. So is this a time to open up your one-way communication habit and encourage more feedback, discussion and comment online?

One the key success factors hinges around whether the company culture is ready for it.  If you have a culture where employees are encouraged feed into plans, face-to-face Q&A with leaders etc, then they'll feel happier to do the same online.  If your communication culture is very one way, just opening up a comments option online probably won't suddenly provide a solution and change things.

Although it might feel risky, most of those IBF members who have embarked on open two-way on-line communications have had very successful results.  One example regularly shared outside the IBF group is BT. 

So questions to ask yourself - does your intranet support your current communication culture?  Is it ready for the next one?  Is it adapting to changing times and changing communication cultures?  Will it be ready when it's really needed, or if a new leader comes along with a different style?

Improving employee involvement on the intranet

In a post last month, Sam Marshall talked about some recurring patterns in intranet strategy and governance. Having  recently joined the IBF benchmarking team, I’ve been digging around in the archives to see how members fare in another area of the IBF benchmarking model: communication and culture. This looks at how well the intranet supports the culture of the organisation and functions as a two-way communication channel.

Looking at how organisations score, one of the weakest areas within communication and culture is how effective the intranet is at making employees feel informed about what’s going on and that they can contribute to the organisation.  The themes arising here where scores are weak include:

• The intranet is seen as a one-way channel to push information and communication to employees, with other channels (often email) used for getting employee input and feedback.
• A lack of visibility of senior executives online and, even where they are visible, a lack of opportunities for employees to engage in two-way discussions with them.
• Surveys and polls may be run from time-to-time, but a lack of ongoing opportunities for discussion.
• Where two-way communication does happen it is carefully managed and edited by internal communications.
• Corporate strategy is not clearly communicated via the intranet.

Recommendations for improving employee involvement on the intranet depend very much on the culture of the organisation, and include:

• Making sure that senior leaders are visible online and enabling employees to interact with them (e.g. – via online chat or Q&A sessions)
• Introducing less formal two-way communication options, such as the ability for employees to comment on news articles and internal blogs.
• Facilitated discussion boards that allow employees to discuss business-related issues. Discussions may be pan-organisational, or focus around a particular event or area of the business.
• Gathering feedback from internal cascades or team briefings via the intranet.
• Where employee questions and concerns are answered via email or in face-to-face sessions (e.g. – town hall), posting them, along with the answers and any additional follow-up material, to the intranet

Are your users always right?

One of the things we ask in an IBF Benchmarking exercise is how well connected the intranet team is to its users. The best companies have feedback tools on the intranet, work closely with the IT helpdesk and with the publisher community to listen to what users want.

However, this doesn’t mean you always get good advice by listening to what users say. There are potential limitations such as:

• Users tend to ask just for incremental improvements to what they already know
• Comments may be from a vocal minority and not be representative of what most people need
• Often people can’t visualise the hypothetical scenarios accurately and have rose-tinted expectations (see, for example, the earlier post on this blog "Can't we have an intranet search engine like Google?")
• The request may be at odds with your organisation’s strategy

For example, a commonly heard message when talking to users about  information-seeking is that most people say they would prefer to ask a colleague than search a system such as an intranet. This has been shown  even as far back as Tom Allen's work in 1977 (pdf).

However, if you dig deeper, this doesn’t appear to be true of all situations. Older generations may have an ingrained expectation that databases rarely have the right answer because they used to require complex search syntax; teenagers seem to assume Google can answer everything (limitation 2). Some types of information are much more likely to be available from a system than a person. If you wanted to know film times at the local cinema, would you have more success asking a friend first or use the web? (limitation 3).

Finally (limitation 4), one reason why intranets are attractive is that they can reduce internal service costs. You may not want highly-paid staff answering the phone all day for routine queries, no matter how much the caller may prefer that mode. You want to keep them free for the high-value, non-routine work that really needs people to people interactions. Each query has a cost, but asking a colleague in an organisation doesn't usually expose the requester to that cost. If your staff were a premium-rate helpdesk, its unlikely they would be troubled so readily if the alternative was to get the answer on an intranet for free.

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?

Enabling enterprise collaboration at J&J

I was glad when IBF asked me to blog this week:  It’s been three weeks since I began my new role as Manager of Portal and Collaboration at Johnson & Johnson, and in that time I’ve been working hard to get a picture of the current environment; evaluating Web sites, IT infrastructure, culture and organizational makeup as I begin to pull together a strategy for driving collaboration across this highly decentralized function.

To begin with some background; J&J recently transformed their Procurement function by realigning the organization. One part of the transformation clustered procurement activity into major categories. In J&J’s highly decentralized and global organization, this means that folks who worry about finding sources for good packaging, for example, can now connect globally and across the J&J family of companies to find better packaging sources – increasing quality and lowering costs.

After realigning the business, the function turned its attention to figuring out how technology and culture could facilitate the global and cross-company collaboration needed to achieve this vision, identifying a new role in the function to help make this happen.

Meanwhile, J&J’s IT organization is in the midst of a shift into the SharePoint environment. SharePoint 2007 sites and migration programs are springing up all around the company.  Some parts of the organization have been using Documentum’s e-Room technology, so e-room migrations are also a hot topic for user groups and teams looking at the new SharePoint platform.

My biggest challenge is to keep focused on the “big picture” while still identifying all the moving pieces involved in a Portal rollout, including identifying how much governance to wrap around our deployment to help guide users into the new space.

For the high level stuff, my approach is to focus on some basic collaboration concepts:

· Create a “2.0” mindset

· Equip the Workforce

· Lead by example

· Grow from the bottom up

This is an approach that has been seen before – many tales of successful collaborative initiatives focus on the “top down, bottom up” approach, while the topic of how to create a “2.0” mindset is all over the collaboration blogosphere. The concepts may be basic, but the details required to achieve each one are more complex.

So, after identifying these concepts, I zoomed in on the immediate challenge of deploying a new Portal, identifying on capabilities that will facilitate or enable collaboration in the Portal environment. A lot of these are no-brainers, but I found it useful to create a sort of “checklist” of collaboration features to help remind us of our goal, especially as we can easily get sidetracked by the minutia of more traditional site migration and management activities:

Portal features for enabling collaboration
Presence: Creating a sense of “people there” in an online space can be accomplished in a few ways:

1. Real time presence through chat/awareness indicators

2.  Pictures and profiles of real employees in the community

3. Names and contact information on pages and documents - who to contact about this information, for more info, etc.

a. Organizational charts with pictures and profiles connected

Communication:  Collaboration can happen when traditional communications channels are enhanced:

1. Allowing 2 and multi-way communication among employees and between employees and leaders through discussion boards, blogs, Q&As.

2. Multimedia: Providing video and audio communications for key messages and meetings. Also providing traditional material (any document, training, etc.) in downloadable formats for iPods or other mobile media device.

3.  Live polls and surveys: Keeping an active pulse on the community and providing a draw for return visits.

4. Use of Wikis to empower employees to be active communicators on the Portal - not just “listeners”

Enabling work: The Portal can offer active, useful spaces for managing projects, programs and events as an integrated part of the online space. This is the promise of Sharepoint - integrating a “traditional” filing cabinet web site approach with spaces that enable day-to-day interaction, document store, tasks, schedules, events, email.

2.0 and Social networking:  Here we look at technologies that provide a lens for the collective activity of the community. Examples include:

1. Ranking and rating and “like minded” tools (“People who liked/used/saw this, also did this)

2. Share tagging/folksonomies (i.e. del.icio.us)

3. People who know people

In a few weeks I'll blog more about how I'm forming a multi-faceted collaboration approach that goes beyond the Portal to facilitate collaboration and drive culture change throughout this organization.