Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Why intranets will destroy the "corporate website"

I've been talking to numerous owners of corporate websites lately to try and understand where the "internet prescence" of large enterprises is heading in the future.  In my view the future for the "corporate website" looks bleak. Online services in large organisations are gradually melding, with the intranet, extranet and internet growing closer in technology, content and resourcing; due to synergies and efficiencies achieved.

This could be good news for the "internet teams" but it isn't. In fact, the emerging trend is for increasing access to be given to intranets for people outside the firewall; suppliers, contractors, customers, former staff etc. Major companies globally are looking to open up to their marketplaces, customers and consumers. They are also looking to increase their presence and engagement with social media and emerging 2.0 technologies.

This trend was underlined this week by the ever influential John Chambers, Chairman and CEO of Cisco, who in his keynote address at the Cisco Partner Summit said that consumer and enterprise technologies will continue to merge, and no where will that be more prominent than in video, which he said will change the way people communicate and do business. Chambers pointed to Cisco's purchase of the company that made the Flip video as a key advantage for Cisco as it moves into a more video-based future, where he said video will soon account for 90 percent of all network traffic.

Intranet teams are being given increasing responsibility for engagement beyond the firewall and they have flourished during the recession while corporate website budgets have been cut. We always felt that the internet might absorb the intranet; but in looks firmly that the direction will be reversed as areas of the intranet are opened up to investors, media, job applicants, environmental groups and customers.

Where does that leave the corporate website? They are stuck it seems. Caught between the ever increasingly important intranet spaces and the dynamic expanding 2.0 world, they look like yesterday's story with declining funding, static role and no clear future direction.  The corporate website starts to look like the marketing brochures of the past: meeting a need but no more.

This is all good for the intranet teams. For years they have been the "cinderella" of the online world but with lots of experience of optimising with low resource and innovation, the future looks very bright as their remit extends.

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!

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!

"Can't we have an intranet search engine like Google?"

How many times have you heard that said?  If I had a pound for every time an intranet manager quoted their users saying this - I'd be a rich woman...

But what makes enterpise search such a challange?

A recent report by KMWorld describes some of this challange as...

"Unlike Web search, enterprise search makes different demands on an information access platform: for better accuracy;security; more formats; more reporting tools; more language understanding; and better interaction design."

From Best Practices in Enterpise Search

Users want it like 'Google' - but they want it to cover everything that might be stored in the enteprise, whatever the format, they want the results to provide the most relevant and up to date results first (and it probably wasn't indexed very well in the first place!).

At IBF we're currently looking at the biggest 'pain points' for our members in the area of search in readiness for our Qtr4 member meetings.  One mentioned frequently is...

Management Buy-In

One consistent challenge seems to be that the 'management' (or budget holder) doesn’t buy into the notion that search is an iterative process. A common refrain is (guess what) “We implemented Google. Are we there yet?”

• How do we dispel the myth that plugging in tool solves all search woes?
• What are the best metrics to manage/monitor search quality and satisfaction?
• Now that we’ve got [insert search engine], what should we do to deliver high performing intranet search? (i.e., quality, efficiency, findability, etc.)
• Now answer the question on a must-do basis - where and why do we need ongoing resource in this area?
• How do you achieve management buy in to resource this? 

On this last point, Martin White, an industry recognised expert and author in this area suggests the size of the team that should be in place behind GOOD search...

"But the hard work only really begins once the search software has been implemented. On a regular basis search logs have to be analysed.... In larger organisations there may be 10,000 searches a day there may need to be a team of three or four people working behind the scenes"

How many organisations really take resourcing search that seriously? Yet search is often the most frequent complaint from users

For more on this, Martin's book on Making Search Work is a highly recommended read

More pain points next week...

Highlights from Intranet Week 2008

Intranet Week 2008 was held in Boston last week, the Intranet Benchmarking Forum was among the event sponsors for this IQPC conference.  IBF North America Director, Nancy Goebel, chaired the event, and Abigail Lewis-Bowen (an IBF strategist) came along to take part in panel discussions on governance and design.

Some of the main themes of the two-days of main conference presentations included:

1. More and more about social networking: Everyone seems to be talking about how to introduce some aspect of "social media" into their organization. And most intranet managers seem to be attempting to do this through careful implementations of "2.0" tools, mostly the introduction of discussion forums, blogs, or "myspace" like applications. We heard the compelling story of Blue Shirt Nation, the Drupal-based networking and discussion site created on a shoestring budget by Steve Bendt and his colleagues from Best Buy. Among Steve's tips for success:

• It's important to understand the social contract your company needs
• Be a listener
• Efforts fail from poor community management, deploying overpriced, shiny features
• Never make an investment you are too proud to give up
• Okay to fail, fail frequently, with a low cost implementation you can try, try again

2. Continued move to distributed governance models: We heard a number of different takes on intranet governance, and the general trend in this area is moving away from centralized "command and control" approaches to more de-centralized, distributed author models. Whether by necessity due to budget cuts, or in response to "self-service" publishing trends, it seems many intranet teams are handing content control back over to line of business site owners, SME's and in some cases, anybody who wants to author. This decentralization seems to be facilitated by an increased understanding of the use of templated systems to ensure content quality and UE consistency. The new catch phrase for this approach seems to be the "gardener" role, where community, content, and quality is cultivated carefully and weeds gently removed as needed.

3. Poor content management solutions: Several intranet managers from larger corporations echoed a common frustration: It's difficult to find one good CMS that fits the needs of a larger organization's intranet. Marshall Alexander of Cisco told of more than one effort to deploy a centralized CMS, and Laurel Castiglione of GM told the same story, although she said a common CMS is "coming soon" for GM.  Cisco's story of deploying a hand-built solution to managing navigational consistency without a CMS in place sounded familiar: IBM's Intranet (and Internet) ran without an enterprise-wide CMS until very recently, and parts of the Intranet are most likely still migrating over to the common platform.  The lesson here might be not to wait for the perfect CMS to come along, but instead to focus on content quality and cleanup to improve information discovery.

4. Dumping intranet detritus and improving search: We heard a few compelling figures from presenters on the amount of intranet content they ditched in an attempt to improve search. Susan West from Delta Airlines said their clean-up initiative deleted a whopping 70% of intranet content, while Helen Galasso who heads up Coldwell Banker's CBWorks intranet said her cleanup eliminated 50% of content.  And it's not just large companies that have a ton of garbage on their intranets. In telling the story of how Serena Software dumped their intranet in favor of Facebook, Kyle Arteaga said that a content audit showed only a very small percentage of company content as actually proprietary. Serena puts their proprietary stuff on HiveLive and lets the rest go free on Facebook.

Since every intranet has problems with search, it was interesting to hear Cisco's Marshall report less than enthusiastic on their success with the Google Search Appliance.  Great ammunition for every intranet manager who has fielded endless pleas to “just get Google.”

Clearly the solution to poor enterprise search is not just about the engine, but mostly about content quality, and partly about information structure and meta data. Many intranet managers spoke of their nascent efforts to enhance search results by implementing social results along side traditional ones, through tagging and ranking tools.

5. Improving the off-the-shelf experience: With many intranet managers struggling to retrofit user requirements into off-the-shelf solutions, George Levesque from Staples, Inc. delivered an interesting look at approaches for thinking "outside the box"  and innovating by repurposing an existing products without expensive customizations. These ideas included using a mantra to stay consistent and focused on the goals of the project, while looking to low-tech solutions to basically "fake" information integration in the portal environment without high cost.

Overall, Intranet Week offered a good roundup of valuable experience and insight into many interesting intranets and intranet-related projects, in an intimate setting that allowed for frequent networking and discussion with presenters.

Twittering behind the firewall: the “how” and the “why”

I suppose I’ve kept Twitter at an arms length for quite a while. But as I’ve been busy researching how to extend the intranet to reach different audiences I started to take a closer look at it. I have to say that a great starting point for making sense of all this twittering business is Commoncraft’s video: Twitter in Plain English. But doing is the first step to believing, so I’ve recently started twittering, and was surprised to find myself on a new learning curve in online interaction. I’m used to email and IM (they’re comfortable!) and to blogging – but this is a different way of interacting online. I saw a description of it recently as being the “water cooler for the internet age” – the place where (in a business setting) a whole lot of connections happen and knowledge exchange goes on that wouldn’t usually occur in our more formal channels. It’s the place where I’d chat with someone and exchange the “I’m doing…”, “I’m thinking…”, “I’m looking for…”, “Did you hear about…” etc.

Doing may be the first step in believing, but seeing some benefit is the real clincher! As it happens I saw that a colleague I’m following in another country was tweeting about an intranet topic that I’m particularly interested in, and was able to connect with him to get some more information. Not rocket science, but I wouldn’t have had this opportunity without the “water cooler” effect online. It’s a small (if encouraging) example of benefit, but Twitter stills feels like something else I have to go and do, rather than it being part of the natural flow of my day – so far!

It seems that the potential for using Twitter in an enterprise environment is getting recognised and talked about quite a lot, here are some of the uses I’ve come across or thought of so far:

• Quick updates between virtual team members. One example I've come across is technicians out on the road: “Instead of techs calling in when jobs are running over time, they send a simple 'tweet' that gets relayed through to other techs, and to manager who can then schedule resources more efficiently.” Rather than having to call individual technicians or drivers (for example) sending a single tweet would be a more efficient way to update the whole team at once.


• The “water cooler” effect. Connecting people who wouldn’t have met otherwise, building relationships, sharing knowledge. It could also cut across organisational hierarchies in a way that the traditional water cooler can’t achieve. It may also mean that the home worker population can increase without loosing either the value or the fun of the “water cooler” connections.


• Pop-up alerts for frontline staff – a Twitter-esque application could be a good way of getting quick alerts to frontline staff, with links back to the intranet for more information where appropriate. Using something like Tweetburner, communicators could track how many people click follow up links. It would also enable an instant feedback loop from the frontline which would be great, especialy during a product launch.


• Connecting people around a particular subject – for example, using Tweetbeep I can keep an eye on any tweets relating to intranets. Within a company, I could watch particular topics of interest, project-related terms, or even updates from a particular department such as HR. While the news page on the intranet may offer a more formal stream of information, using something like Twitterfeed could enable communicators to pull together formal news updates, blog posts, and quick alerts into one stream of information – with a built-in instant feedback loop. And using something like Yahoo Pipes, feeds can be translated into different languages.


• An easy way for remote employees to log key information – for example, the time and expense tracking software from Harvest has integrated Twitter to enable employees to log a time entry or an expense while out on the road. The “powered by Twitter” mashup possibilities here are endless...


• To connect conference attendees (and those who couldn’t make it!) – Twitter could be useful both before and during the conference to help shape the agenda and provide live feedback, ideas and questions during. Taking this a bit further… there’s an interesting article about an attendee at Google’s OpenSocial conference last year sending live Tweets to his followers as it unfolded – what happened next was that he started taking questions from his Twitter group and relaying them to the speaker live. With attendance to big employee conferences generally shrinking due to belt tightening, how about connecting employees not in the room with live tweets of what’s happening in the room, and bringing their questions in?


• Informal research or opinion polls – I like the idea of using Twitter for informal research or to gather opinions around a subject. It could be used by HR or even a manager with a local team to get a quick “temperature check” of employee reactions to particular issues, as well as ideas, questions and feedback.

There are of course also lots of examples surfacing of companies using Twitter to keep in touch with customers (for example, product updates, offers and customer service) as well as it’s potential uses for crisis management and discovery. And with commercial uses of Twitter growing, there is speculation about whether they will eventually charge for business users, although how they will distinguish business and personal use isn't really clear. I’ve also come across a few mentions of companies building their own: Jitter (although I don't know if Janssen-Cilag have taken this beyond an initial trial), Prologue, and Trillr (which Coremedia have developed and been using it internally, and are now looking for companies to participate in their experimental platform).

So is Twitter a serious contender for business use, or just another tool that threatens to push us over the information overload edge? The jury’s out for now. I’ll be exploring this topic further, along with other means of extending the intranet to reach remote audiences, in a research paper for IBF members later this year. In the meantime, we are twittering at IBF and you can follow us @ibf.

Intranet Futures 2015

The next research paper coming from the IBF will take a close look at the future of Intranets, based on some identified trends in business, culture, and society over the next 7 years.

We're still working on the final editing tweaks, but we wanted to post this teaser  to encourage early discussion on the topic. As with any "futures" research - there are always so many different and interesting opinions. In this paper I've tried to identify patterns and likely outcomes, as well as take a "big picture" approach to understanding how Intranets will likely evolve in the next seven years.

The paper should be complete in early May, so check back for the whole thing then. Meanwhile, we would love to hear thoughts on the statements below.

Intranet future trends

• Intranets as we know them will cease to exist, as firewalls become porous to allow for open, horizontal and networked environments.
• Enterprise knowledge creation will be fully democratized, creating a “global public commons” of information driven by and for the employee, and any other interested party. Accordingly, traditional controls of company information channels will continue to weaken.
• To succeed at global business, companies will “shapeshift” according to business demand. This fluidity will challenge traditional definitions of employees, work, values, mission, and culture.  Intranets must become more open and interoperable, yet at the same time increasingly authentic and trusted.
• Work will be at once more global and more local, as environmental challenges restrain commuting and air travel but global integration expands.  Intranet applications and work processes will increasingly support mobile, flexible and global users.
• Increased awareness of environmental sustainability will bolster the “ecoprise” and a growth in supporting Intranet-related processes and technologies.
• The rise of the Semantic Intranet  will see semantic technologies applied to enterprise data, enabling powerful new ways of mining, sharing and analysis of massive amounts of shifting global business information.
• Mobile device use will grow dramatically as bandwidth costs drop and interfaces improve, along with mobile Intranet applications that leverage semantically enabled information.
• Accordingly, virtual, collaborative work technologies will thrive and improve, including growth in telepresence technologies and web-enabled integrated application suites.

For more information about the IBF Research Programme please visit the services section of www.ibforum.com

The potential of the Employee Directory...

I was reading the article yesterday about the launch of Motorola’s new intranet, iMoto. One of the highlights of this launch is reported as being the new employee directory:

"I can pull up a person’s directory listing and not only do I see information about the part of the organization in which they sit, who they report to, but I also see the communities they belong to" - Mary Owens, Director of Internal Communications at Motorola

The features described in the article aren’t rocket science, but it demonstrates the impact of a good employee directory as well as it’s potential for richer, more collaborative features. These features take their inspiration from the popular social networking sites beyond the firewall, enriching the more formal aspects of the Employee Directory. It’s something that’s been the topic of lively debate at recent IBF member meetings!

We’ve seen the evolution of the directory from it’s earliest and dustiest paper-based copies, that were then uploaded to the intranet, through to a robust database driven application that has rightfully earned the nickname of “the killer application” on the intranet. So what’s next?

As I mentioned the newer wave of employee directories incorporate elements of the popular social networking sites, and as with all things 2.0 they're lighter and nimbler than knowledge management type expertise systems that tried to do a similar thing. Building on the basic directory...

• Static and formal employee information expands into a profile page that includes more personal and diverse information and multimedia.
• This interactive “hub” becomes a key social and business tool, enabling employees to build an internal network.
• Multi-faceted search means that people can be found by a variety of criteria (e.g. - skill, location)
• Linkages are built with collaborative tools such as communities and blogs

Ok, so a social network behind the firewall is never likely to generate the same excitement as on the web, but it is certainly creating excitement both in organisations that are doing it (or thinking of doing it) and vendors both big and small racing to provide solutions (for example, Lotus Connections, ConnectBeam, Nakisa, to mention but a few).

At Oracle, a few developers decided to explore this and built their own internal social network late last year, which they marketed virally inside the organisation with great success. It certainly seems to have hit the right note at Oracle. You can hear them talk about it online.

With so much exciting potential, it’s important to bear in mind the challenges that many organisations still face in getting “the basics” right:

• Ensuring that the information in the employee directory is accurate and up-to-date (both via central and self-services updates)


• Employee profiles often only provide quite basic details about staff, which limits the usefulness of the directory.


• Frequently, organisation charts are neither dynamically generated (meaning they go out-of-date quickly) nor are they properly integrated into the employee directory.


• Another challenge, is the integration of all the relevant information sources into the directory. It can even be the case that a well-intentioned effort such as an expertise directory gets developed in isolation from the main employee directory, compounding this issue. (I’ve seen this recently in a Professional Services firm, and it has caused no end of confusion!)


• Lack of promotion of the directory, and any self-service functionality.

Getting these basics right is a huge win in itself for this “killer application”, and then provides the perfect springboard for some creative and useful advanced features that can help connect people together in a more fluid and dynamic manner.

Look how far intranets have come.....

It was in 1995 that I sat in a meeting room in a major pharmaceutical company and showed a primitive demo of what the phone book could be like if it was rendered in this new system called HTML. Goodness how the executives in the room loved what they saw! Give it to us now, this could be great etc........

Like most demos, there was a good distance still to go between the practical capabilities of the technology externally - particularly in terms of what the company could tolerate internally - but the intranet journey (for that global organisation) had at least begun.

At the start of 2008 we have already seen a good deal of trends and predictions from the intranet industry (myself included) but it strikes me that before the year gets into full swing, this is a good time to reflect on just how far intranets have come in the past 10 or so years.

Intranets (probably because they are used by so many people) seem to attract high levels of generalised criticism. What we do less frequently is reflect on just how far they have progressed and how deeply they have become immersed in the fabric of organisational life. Imagine a medium or large scale organisation without an intranet? They are everywhere.........for goodness sake, even my children use them at school!

It has been quite a slow passage from that demo in 1995 to the scale of presence and penetration that intranets have today. But we appear to be entering a new maturity stage where the initial intranet chaos has been tamed and the value generation from the ever more usable online assets behind the firewall is rising at a steady pace.

Intranets will and are changing the shape of how we work. What else can we point to that can say that with confidence?  Did all the "change management" of the past decade deliver a fraction of the substantial re-structuring of where and how work is done, that intranets bring?

I can hear the cries of protest from those in organisations still trying to manage the chaos. Certainly, when you see hundreds of major intranets a year as I (for better or worse) do, then you inevitably extract and focus on those that are further ahead than others but we are all at different stages on what are fairly similar intranet journeys.......spring forward to 2018 and imagine where we will be then!