Intranet Value

The last post

2009-04-09T09:30:00.002+01:00

It is with a little sadness that I have to close this blog. My career is moving on and I have accepted a fantastic new opportunity at my company to lead a brand new team in an exciting area.

Over the past couple of years several people encouraged me to write this blog and having written it for a while I have been surprised by the quantity and quality of feedback - there are certainly some lively minds out there in the world of intranets!

To all of you in the intranet world, good luck with your projects and, above all, have fun!

Are publishers' needs opposite to users' needs?

2009-02-24T04:39:00.003Z

When talking with publishers they often talk about their aspirations for their site along the following lines

1. Different

2. Interactive

3. A place to put all of the relevant documents

4. All of the content related to my project in a single place

5. Ways to get users to look at things that I want them to

Compare that list to the typical things that users say they want from websites

1. Consistent

2. Simple

3. Not just a list of PDFs

4. Content arranged by what I am doing - without having to know the organisation structure

5. Don't let anything get in the way of what I'm trying to do - don't make me wade through irrelevant links

Okay, I may have slightly stretched the point, but it is certainly interesting to compare our drivers as intranet publishers and managers with those of the user.

Do you have any examples of the tensions between users and publishers needs? I would love to hear them.

Should we call it web 2.0?

2009-02-02T16:48:00.006Z

The other day my boss challenged me to really get some energy behind web2.0 on our intranet. He is an enthusiast for all things web and really wanted to get going with this web2.0 thing. I agreed with him and said I would get going at once. I went back to my desk and listed out some of the things that web2.0 included and how it might be used in our business. Every time I came up for a use for web 2.0, we had already implemented it or were already working on the idea. In fact, most of the issue with existing implementations was either lack of management engagement or lack of relevance to mainstream users.

This was quite a breakthrough as I spend quite a bit of time (as you probably do) in meetings with people who just WISH we were doing web 2.0

This need to ask for web2.0 reminds me of the old story of a man who was stranded on a desert island. He prayed to god for help and soon after a rescue boat arrived. He told the rescue team to go away as he was sure god would save him. Later, a helicopter came over and he told the pilot the same thing. A passing boat signalled to him and he signalled back that he was waiting for god to save him. Of course after a little while the man died. Arriving at the gates of heaven he asked god why he had not answered his prayer and saved him. God replied 'Of course I answered your prayer - I sent a rescue team, a helicopter, a boat...'

My learning from all this is that sometimes we need to step back from the buzz and deliver projects and intranets that just work. In intranet circles so much energy is put into the 'redesign' or the 'relaunch' and so little into the basic hard work of running something that is based on needs of the user and the company. By calling something web2.0 we are setting ourselves an impossible challenge that will never go away even if everyone in the company has a blog.

What do you think - should we ban the phrase web2.0 on our intranets?

How to prioritise intranet developments

2009-01-10T08:10:00.004Z

The top 3 dimensions to prioritise intranet developments. Benefits, Reach and Influence.

If you are anything like me you have an ongoing long list of people in your organisation who want something on the intranet. Whether it is a new workflow or some new content there is a never ending stream of demand to develop. This is a good thing, but your time and resources are limited so how do you make decisions about what to do first?

I use 3 simple tests when discussing new opportunities. First, does the development have a direct benefit to the bottom line - and to support this are all of the right people (finance, procurement, senior management) in support of the cost savings that will be achieved. Are the cost savings built into local business plans and are they clearly measurable. If you can't pass this test move on to the next one.

Secondly, does the development significantly increase reach of your intranet. If you are like me you have a strategic goal to weave the intranet into a way of working around your organisation. To achieve this you need a critical mass of users and must-have features. Is this new feature going to extend the intranet to a new set of users (who are not currently using it) or drive increased repeat usage in a community that are already using your intranet. This one is a bit harder to judge than the previous one as every stakeholder who is looking for a new feature will usually be enthusiastic about the likelihood of every person in the company using their page on a regular basis. However, this test should be obvious - if everyone has to book their leave on the intranet and there is no paper alternative then it will obviously increase traffic for the affected groups.

Lastly, if the initiative doesn't pass the previous two tests is it going to significantly increase your influence. In a situation where you have been working to co-operate with a stakeholder for some time it does not make sense to turn them down when an opportunity finally arises. Equally if the CEO calls you and asks for some content or online process it makes equally little sense to refuse. Importantly I would use these opportunities to make a trade. If you have to agree to some vanity publishing against your judgement then make sure you negotiate time to come and explain intranet strategy and benefits to the people who are asking. There are all sorts of things that you can get in return if someone wants something.

What do you use to make priority calls?

What is the value of your intranet?

2008-12-15T10:45:00.002Z

The top search term that visitors used to arrive at this blog in November was 'value of intranet' So it is obviously a hot topic out there among intranet managers. If you get the chance I'd be interested to know why you think it is such a hot topic.

I'm going to split the question into 2 totally different starting points
1. You've got an intranet and you are asked 'what is the value of the system that we have' i.e. can you justify the ongoing cost and expenditure
2. You want a new system function and you need to justify the future work.

I'm going to leave point 2 for a future blogpost so let's take a look at situation number 1.
It may be counterintuitive to some of you, but I would suggest that you should not start with 'the numbers'. I would ask yourself the question about how much agreement there is in your organisation that the intranet is an intrinsically useful thing. A business case, especially in a large organisation, is the outward manifestation of an agreement to do something - and that agreement goes way beyond what the numbers on the spreadsheet may or may not say about your payback period, internal rate of return and overall ROI. The bottom line is - do you have the right supporters across the organisation?

Some practical consideratioins
Are you measuring what people do on your intranet every day? If you are, then start putting a value on that stuff. When someone is viewing a page they should be completing a task (we should come back to task completion in a different blogpost) and that task must have a value. Let's take a practical example - making travel plans.
Firstly, this isn't a new task, just because it is online now doesn't mean that it wasn't done before so you can compare the cost of doing it before to the cost of doing it now. You can do this by using timings i.e. 3 minutes to do it on paper versus 2 minutes to do it online, multiply by the total number of times the transaction takes place per annum and you get a saving. More powerful though is looking at the intrinsic value of the task and claim a proportion of that. In this example the procurement benefits may run into very large numbers very quickly, and in a large organisation putting a task online is the only way to get control of it.
What about tasks that have a very fuzzy intrinsic value? Well, perhaps that is telling you someting. After you have put your 75th blog on the intranet and added your 120th RSS feed you probably ought to be pretty clear on how you are going to measure the value of it.

Do you have a known, current value for your intranet? leave a comment below if you have.

Having a great relationship with your IT dept

2008-11-28T10:28:00.002Z

It's great fun. Sitting with your cilleagues and opining how the world would be sweetness and light if only the IT crowd knew what they were doing. The cms is slow, and those new feature we hanker for are just not coming, in fact you have no idea when you last got anything useful out of them. And while you mention it, when was the last time those awful people last came to talk to us!

But while your relationship is the pits you are missing out on a potential partner who could help you achieve your goals.

Whoever it was who said that looking in the mirror was a great way to start solving a problem may have been on to something. If you think those things about your IT crowd then what do you think they think of you?

My team has a relationship with the it people that has its ups and downs, but we are always working to improve it.

1. My top advice would be to keep talking. Not jsut once a year, set up a monthly session where you keep track of progress, discuss plans, identify issues - you know the sort of thing.

2. Be open. If you do start talking then you may notice the it people want to talk about different things than you do. Of course you need to separate your accountabilities clearly, but let them get involved.

3. Move up the food chain. Some of you may have had some bad experiences with the IT team in the past, but i have consistently found that the people at the top of the IT organisation aren't actually planning for you to have a poor experience. If you have an opportunity to get more value from it then most CIOs will be champing at the bit to help.

4. You may have to change too. Acknowledge that you may be part of the problem - and get over it.

By sharing ownership and actively involving the IT team in your intranet you are bound to move further, faster than you can without them.

Comment below on the quality of your IT relationship.

Make your intranet 2-way using ideas

2008-11-16T18:59:00.005Z

About a year ago someone showed me what Dell were doing at ideastorm.com.

The concept is a great, practical development of web 2.0 - let anyone in your community create an idea and then let anyone else vote and comment on it. Then promise to do something about the ideas that get voted to the top.

Before I tell you how we got on with our implementation I'd like to point out why I think this works so well in the enterprise.

1. Get staff to tell each other how bad (or good) their ideas are
2. Get staff talking about ideas - people want their idea to get voted up (just human nature), this starts people discussing your business issues in the coffee shop
3. High visibility - management have to get involved and do something
4. Post some management ideas anonymously - you'll get real feedback on what people think
5. Promotes an adult-adult relationship with your staff

I implemented something similar inside our company and found some great learning points:

1. Middle and senior managers may be more open to the concept than you'd think
The downsides are obvious - you are suggesting to a manager that we should have an open exchange of ideas that everyone can have an equal vote on. Strangely enough, in my experience most management did not fight this concept. Not necessarily because they loved the idea, but rather we had been running, suggestion boxes and idea schemes for quite a while and it had some serious downsides. In our particular situation it created conflict because managers had to evaluate ideas and if the idea was no good then the process ended up with a manager having to politely tell a member of staff that their precious idea, the one they nurtured for months, was not good enough. How's that for employee engagement. Worse still, managers across the airline dreaded receiving ideas as they had to spend the time evaluating poor ideas. Employees were unhappy because the system rarely worked and when it occasionally paid out (there was a bonus involved) there was a lot of suspicion about the quality of the ideas. We had to do something better.

2. Your people don't realise how much you are doing already
We ran an idea exchange with a trial group of 2,000 staff in the IT department. Over the half the ideas were under way already, and of the rest, nearly all had been evaluated at some point or other. It was a chilling reminder of how hard you have to work to get your people to understand what's going on in any case.

3. Most ideas are not that good
Just because you have thrown down the challenge to everyone in the organisation doesn't necessarily mean that you will suddenly identify hundreds of fantastic ideas. In fact, our experience was that we got 1 or 2 really great ideas. I think, and here's where I'm out of my area of expertise, we raised the average quality of ideas - and since most people (in life in general) only occasionally come out with a sparklingly adroit comment, so it is in the realm of ideas.

4. It's obvious, but you have to implement something
Once everyone knew that we were running the thing (we got over half the staff to use the system within the first 3 weeks) then we faced the challenge that they all wanted to know what happened to their ideas. At least those that did not get voted into the top twenty had dealt with themselves, but we still had some hard work getting those top ideas going.

Comment below if have you ever tried something like this in your company.

Is it worth asking people what they want on your intranet?

2008-11-09T18:09:00.005Z

How's that for a controversial question? But I really mean it.

When you go to the doctors does he ask you what drugs you want? Do you tell the tv repair shop just how to fix your tv? I thought not. So why is there no end of people telling us how we should be designing our intranets.

I read a great book on holiday, Bad Science by Ben Goldacre, and one of the chapters is all about flaws in the experimental method. What has this got to do with intranets?

All of us are trying to use evidence to improve and optimise our intranets and using flawed evidence leads to bad decisions. For me, the classic example of this is asking people how they would like the intranet to be rather than what they need it to do. Even if you ask them what they want it to do you may find they don't tell you the truth.

A great example of this bias in surveys was when British Airways was designing its new 'Raid the Larder' concept in Club World. The team involved did the right thing and got together some focus groups of regular customers and asked them to name the type of food they would like to have available to snack on during a flight. The respondents were pretty clear - mineral water, apples, maybe a light salad. In due course the larder was stocked with these kinds of things. However, when real customers used the larder they tended to leave the fruit and salad and head straight for the chocolate and cakes.

What does this tell you about how to go about surveying your users.
Just like in the Club World example, it is well documented that people are generally very poor at understanding the way they behave (check out the book for numerous further examples) so you need to treat surveys and demands from users very carefully. The other most biased person you have to watch out for is YOU. Gerry McGovern does a great presentation about people who look like their pets - and that is all about removing your own bias to develop an intranet for your users not you.
For me, observation of real users is one of the top ways to get great feedback. Be prepared for the deflated feeling when they gloss over your great taxonomy, miss your signposting and can't see that text in BOLD RED that you were sure they couldn't miss.

For me, there is one other thing - have a vision of your business outcomes and goals and stick to it. By using your measures as a control and constantly adapting to achieve your goals your intranet can only get better.

How big is your homepage? - in this case small is better

2008-11-02T08:18:00.002Z

I've been on holiday this week to somewhere with not much bandwidth and it struck me how annoying unnecessarily heavy pages are.

In response to the poor availability of bandwidth at many worldwide locations my company's intranet has a page weight limit of 30kb in place. Of course some of the pages go over, and the homepage definitely does, but most don't.

In these days of broadband everywhere (and I would suggest that all of your employees have broadband at home to access your intranet) this does seem like a rather old fashioned idea. Trouble is the really advanced users are using your intranet on a mobile device or connection. If your experience is anything like mine even 3G (when you can get it) pretty much creeps along. This means that lightweight pages are going to work best for everyone.

Even better, when you start constraining the 'creative' souls around you with a bandwidth limit (and definitely no banners and flash) you suddenly start working out what is really important and useful on that page.

Great to hear any opinions on this one. In particular, leave a comment saying how big your homepage is if you can. Can someone also leave a post telling us all a quick way to know how big your page is?

Why web 2.0 doesn't work in the enterprise (yet)

2008-10-24T17:37:00.003+01:00

Be prepared. This is my first controversial post and you may find that you disagree with my views.

Let me say upfront that I love collaboration, I love connecting people, I love doing it so that people in our company can deliver what's important. blah blah blah, but is web 2.0 really the best way of helping our people do that?

Firstly, I'm going to assume the definition of web 2.0 as the ability for anyone to publish and create content (and a bit of people connecting with others)

With that in mind here are my reasons that web2.0 doesn't work in the enterprise

1. Not enough people in your company understand it
You would not believe the number of people who I meet who don't know what a blog is, haven't tried facebook, or used a wiki (although I'd have to admit that nearly everyone I meet has used wikipedia). Even if they did understand those things, I would suggest that it is not these things that define web 2.0, they are examples of possible web 2.0 executions. If you can't understand something at a practical level, how are you going to exploit it? - which leads me to point no. 2

2. it needs to support your strategy
I don't mean the strategy that says we 'need to communicate openly' and so on, I mean the basics of your business - deliver car parts on time, get the right products to market, reduce costs, increase quality. Until you can connect web 2.0 concepts to those things then I would doubt that you can make much impact.

3. It challenges existing structures
When the web arrived into the mainstream big companies had to learn how to do e-commerce and existing structures were challenged and changed. This change had to be sponsored from the top and had to have major investment in all kinds of things. Some companies haven't quite worked it out even now. If we are hoping for web 2.0 to 'just happen' from the ground up then I think you are being overly optimistic.

4. Just because something is popular in life in general doesn't make it worthwhile in business.
I love watching TV soaps. I don't do it at work - neither is there any value in it if I did.

So what hope for all our web 2.0 projects? I fear that most of them are doomed, but if we can address these kinds of challenges and ensure alignment between opportunity and capability then new and exciting ways to exploit the web will surely appear. I'm just worried it's going to take a very long time.

The importance of metrics

2008-10-17T15:52:00.005+01:00

I met up with some intranet managers the other day and there was a lot of talk of metrics. How many page views, how many users, who had clicked what and so on.

The conversation swiftly turned to which software each of us was using. However, I am sure that this was missing the point of metrics.

Here are my thoughts and experiences of metrics

1. In dealing with your stakeholders you always need to think about what you want your metrics to say. At first this seems counter to logic. Surely if we produce some standardised numbers then the 'truth' will appear before us? I would argue contrary to this and say that you need to use your site stats to support your strategy. If your intranet is about costs then show graphs about cost, if your intranet is about communications show graphs about communications. If you are forever getting into unproductive debates about something then use your stats to put a lid on it.

2. Design your stats to support your arguments. If you are doing this then it is unlikely that a standard stats package does the job. One of the things that I needed to do in my role was convince stakeholders that using the intranet was something that our staff did do. Back then nobody believed that the intranet was a viable platform for our business. I selected a metric that would convince those around me of this and also had some likelihood of success.

3. Put in the hard work to get the stats. If you need to collect stats by hand and process them in long convoluted ways then allocate resources to just that. Spend time in the presentation and rigour of your charts and graphs and perhaps prepare a dashboard.

4. Spend time communicating. Use your stats as a regular part of your governance meetings and carry them with you at all times. My dashboard is always with me and I find I use it in half of all my meetings.

By doing a good job of your metrics you will keep focus on output measures of success rather than random opinion of 'what makes a good intranet'.

Using Community Forums to create business value

2008-10-10T10:33:00.003+01:00

We were privileged to be awarded the steptwo gold award for innovation for the use of community forums on our intranet. The system is being used for real business value and has rapidly become part of the way we do things around here.

James at steptwo recorded the following video

Comments welcome!

Save me from amateur web designers!

2008-10-06T10:14:00.001+01:00

You know them don't you. They open the meeting by saying "We need something different for our site. I've drafted something in powerpoint and need you to put it up". After asking a couple of questions you realise that this person is wedded to their new website design and it has become their life's work to publish it on your company's intranet.

You make some comments about user centred design, design standards, usability testing and then having debated the pros and cons they land their killer argument as to why none of these apply to their design "I have used hundreds of websites and I know what makes a good one".

Aaargh! This drives me crackers. Over the years I've listened to many songs by Paul McCartney, I know none of them have more than 4 chords, (how hard can it be?) and yet I'm pretty sure I'll never write a song as good as a Beatles classic.

If things go badly you meekly counter with some mumbling about how the content management system can't handle that layout and blame the IT people.

You can avoid this situation though. Get together some successful publishers in your organisation. Jointly develop some design guidelines and principles. Make them as open as possible and use some of the latest research to support it. Create an approval governance for non-standard designs.

Give people reasons to follow your guidelines (DDA compliance, Search engine friendliness - everyone wants their page high up in the rankings, Browser compatibility, etc.)
Get your governance to support it.

What are your best tips for getting new sites to integrate with your design?

10 ways to kill your intranet

2008-10-06T10:04:00.003+01:00

Just read a great presentation by Sam Marshall called '10 ways to kill your intranet' (1mb pdf) - it made me laugh, and created a great opportunity to have a discussion with my team.

Why do people use your intranet?

2008-09-29T08:31:00.001+01:00

It's a question we don't ask ourselves often enough. What makes someone fire up that browser and look at the intranet? I have been in a lot of meetings where people think of the mythical user appearing, as if by magic, gazing at their page. I suspect that this never happens in the real world.

They came from

a search result

a link referring them there

a returning user based on a previous good experience

I don't want to be pessimistic, but I would propose that real people only use the intranet when they have to. You know the situation, you turn to your colleague and say "Do you remember how often we are supposed to submit those performance reports to finance?" and they answer "No idea, have you tried calling John in the accounts team?". Having tried to call him and failed you reluctantly go to the homepage of your intranet. You type 'performance reports" into the search box...hmmm loads of answers...try "finance performance reports"...you call out to your colleague "do you know where on the intranet...?". Need I go on?

I would propose to you that hardly anyone is on your intranet 'browsing' - they are way too busy - and nobody ever read the HR policy on maternity leave for fun. The reason they are on your intranet is to find something out to help them do something.

I recommend asking yourself 'why would they use this?' every single time you put a page together.

Comment below if you agree - and if you disagree!

My top 10 rules for a great intranet

2008-09-29T08:29:00.001+01:00

The other day I was thinking about the principles that make a great intranet. Here are my suggested golden rules for your intranet. What do you think? Comment below with your agreement or changes.

1. Never go below the fold - 1024 x 768 is big enough

2. Always know what the homepage is for and use it for that

3. Decorative graphics take up less than 10% of the pixels on the page

4. Never make changes that have not been tested on real users

5. No attachments

6. Vanity publishing is not allowed

7. Your users prefer standard design and consistency over 'something different' in each section

8. Set success measures for every new site or section you implement

9. Use your metrics to drive decision making at every governance meeting

10. Get every one on your governance group to sign up to the golden rules