Intranet Benchmarking Forum

Intranet Garden Video Blog: Dec 2009

In his final Garden Video Blog of 2009, IBF CEO and Founder Paul Miller looks back at the key intranet trends of the year - all from the garden of The Engineer pub in London's Primrose Hill. 

 

IBF members share experiences to improve intranet performance at London meeting

As Managing Director of IBF, one of the highlights of my year is meeting so many of our members in one room and really getting into the nitty-gritty of intranet improvement.

At IBF we run lots of online meetings throughout the year, and we do detailed benchmarking of individual member intranets, we share new research topics, but the face to face meetings are still special.  There’s a core group of members who have been part of the IBF community for some time, and there are always new members to welcome, this time is was IKEA who were attending their first IBF member meeting.

In a cold but sunny London we welcomed members to the sixth and penultimate IBF Member Meeting of 2009. We had the chance to browse the various zones of the meeting prior to the welcome.  In the Best Practice area we had screen shots from members demonstrating best practice in this meeting’s theme – ‘Metrics and Performance’.

Our Homepage Gallery gave members an insight into the look and feel of other intranets across the IBF membership, whilst the Intranets Live episodes  (IBF’s online monthly media programme) played in the room over breakfast. 

They also got to see the full intranet benchmarking league tables which always provokes some competitive conversations!

This meeting's theme was around IBF’s benchmarking of ‘metrics and performance’, particularly targeting content to users and measuring the performance intranet sites for content owners.  Some great examples were shared and good debate had.

Following lunch members had the choice of two areas to focus on, Intranet Futures with IBF CEO and Founder Paul Miller and Ross Chestney, BT’s Head of Communication Services or News best practice with Nancy Goebel, IBF Director, North America.

Paul and Ross challenged members to think about where work place technologies are heading in the next three to five years, following Paul's recent article on Intranet 3.0.  The key topics discussed were:

• The Customer Service Intranet – dealing with the topic of the intranet vs business processes and breaking down the wall between what the public and the business

• Mobile devices / applications – are intranets moving into our pockets with location independence becoming key

• Intranet vs internet – consumers are now driving what they want and can see what is available.  Intranets will reuse internet technologies.

• Social Media and the Digital Divide – the digital divide in question being between those who contribute through social media, and those who don’t.  Employees need to shown the value of contributing to encourage further participation.

• The role of IT and risk – Many intranet managers continue to experience difficulties between IT security controls and encouraging increased collaboration.

As always we then had a fun packed evening out, this time watching our food being cooked by the Teppanyaki chefs at Sen Nin in Islington.

Our second day was based at the Aviva Head Office in London City.  Aviva were great hosts with an excellent agenda, an in-depth view of Aviva’s recent SharePoint roll out and lots of hands on across for IBF members, finished with lunch and a fantastic view across the London skyline!

Throughout the two days we saw great examples from BP, Unilever, Aviva, Northwestern Mutual and Maersk to name a few, highlighting items such as search, personalisation methods, demonstrations of delivering proven intranet value and a new tool to really deliver meaningful intranet metrics to content owners.

But the conversations that happened around all of these are always the best bit about meetings, with members exchanging advice, experience and knowledge and further building the IBF community. Although virtual working has come on leaps and bounds (I work from home most of the time) I really do enjoy these face to face meetings, they do so much to further build our intranet community and enable an in-depth exchange of ideas.

Roll on the next one in Houston on December 9th and 10th!

Get ready for intranet 3.0! it's coming, it's real and it will change the way we work

Earlier in the year, Paul Miller - IBF CEO and Founder, wrote a piece on building communities within intranets which has recently been 're-blogged'. It included his 'intranet trends for 2009' - as we approach the end of 2009 - were these the key trends for gloabl intranet managers?  Here is what he had to say...

Something odd is happening. While financial turmoil engulfs large organizations, intranets and related employee-Facing technologies are experiencing a new injection of momentum. Budgets may have been slashed in many central services, but intranet services across multiple sectors are enjoying large-scale investment.

It seems that intranets--and the related online communities within them--are being viewed by senior management as drivers of efficiency and productivity, and as "cultural glue," during turbulent times. Let's get rid of the people handling travel booking and automate the service via the intranet. If people can work from home using the intranet and online communities more easily, then the need for office space declines. And so it goes on.

If anything, intranets are driving services forward at such a great pace that, post-recession, the organization that emerges will be fitter, leaner and more adaptable. Prior to the downturn, the rate of development was already intense, but market conditions have caused a new wave of intranet acceleration to arrive.

This new wave can be loosely described as "Intranet 3.0." The term describes the integration of a range of employee-facing services delivered via technologies that are melding into the fabric of the organization. This amalgamation of deep-lying services, applications and communities is reshaping where work is done, how it is done and the ease by which it can be completed. Any "intranet road map" must take into account the current reality for many innovative large enterprises, as their present-day practice and performance anticipate the future of your organization. Get ready for Intranet 3.0, because it's real and it will change the way we work. Just look at these examples from Sun Microsystems, IBM and Nissan.

Sun: Realizing the intranet of the future

Sun CEO Jonathan Schwartz is well known for his blogging. Keeping him company are around 5,000 Sun employees blogging externally on a range of topics (http://blogs.sun.com). Inside the company they refer to it as a "social movement," and it's driving exciting, groundbreaking changes to the intranet.

When asked about the impact of the intranet on the organization, Sun's senior director of employee communications, Terry McKenzie, says, "I can't overstate how important it is." And with the release of its next-generation intranet, Webnext, later this year, the intranet looks set to provide a whole new level of usefulness and integration.

Known as Project 90/10, Sun is turning over ownership of the intranet to employees (that's the 90 percent) instead of corporate communications (which will become the 10 percent). The intranet, they say, will become an aggregation point like a Netvibes or iGoogle page on the Web. The borders between internal and external are coming down too: Employees will be able to aggregate external content such as Facebook alongside internal content such as corporate news.

For Sun, it's all about orienting the intranet toward the employee of the future. "The type of employee we'll be seeing in five years, and are already seeing a lot of today, will be very familiar with social tools. They will want to get corporate news but also to share and play, to have fun and connect," says McKenzie. Social media are at the heart of this vision, but where most companies struggle to come up with meaningful measures of ROI, Sun is introducing the Community Equity tool. This tracks both the level of participation and the value of contributions by employees. "It will be a powerful tool for us," he adds. "For example, as a manager deciding who to promote, I can see who is contributing and participating.

IBM: Developing the interconnected intranet

From its origins back in the 1990s, W3, IBM's global intranet, has played a key role in helping to build an integrated IBM, and has become an essential part of life for its workforce. "The intranet is so deeply woven into daily life at IBM, it's part of every employee's day to use it," says Ethan McCarty, editor-in-chief of W3.

The starting point for this level of usefulness and penetration is in the mundane tasks that every employee needs to do on the intranet, such as managing expenses and searching for information. The difference on W3 is that social and collaborative elements have been built into these tasks: Opportunities to learn, connect and read news blend seamlessly into the experience. "You take a very mundane task and turn it into a social activity," says McCarty. "Collaboration isn't separate from work."

As new tools and features are developed, they are integrated into W3 in such a way that they are woven into the existing way of working. Developers across the company are encouraged to pull the functionality of these tools into the places where they will be useful, so instead of users having to go to the tools as a separate experience, the tools are taken to where users are already working and collaborating.

Nissan: Democratizing communication

At Nissan, the intranet is a central hub providing employees with access to the information and tools to do their jobs-from workflow and processes to project management and virtual meetings. The vision for Nissan's intranet is straightforward: to enable employees to connect and engage in a dialogue. "I think that without the intranet it would be almost impossible to run the organization," says Simon Sproule, corporate vice president of global communication.

Nissan's internal social network, N-Square, is bringing fundamental changes to the way of working at Nissan by breaking down hierarchical, functional and regional barriers. Interactions that would not have happened previously-such as dialogue between senior executives and employees, or across functions--are now happening in a way that employees are comfortable with and find convenient.

"In the same way that you may watch the inauguration of Obama on CNN and then go and visit other news sites and blogs to get a different perspective, so internal communications needs to become a trusted brand within the company," says Sproule. He sees the internal communication brand, N-Com, not as being in competition with the democratized dissemination of information via employee blogs and profiles, but as adding value by providing a timely, relevant and trusted news service.

Intranet trends to watch for in 2009

1. Access to online services will be managed through "identity" controls-intranet, extranet, Internet (no one cares much anymore). Staff, contractors, suppliers, customers, etc., will be able to access a range of intranet (and extranet) services based on the organization knowing who you are. Your identity will define your access. If you are a senior manager, your identity will allow you free reign across all online services offered to staff, suppliers, customers and partners.

2. Staff, particularly younger ones, don't care what they use--they just want stuff that works! Creating an overarching technology solution that delivers information and process integration in a "big band solution" will prove a fruitless journey. Workforce demographics require a range of Web-based providers that meet specific needs depending on who people are, where they are located and who they work with.

3. Access will become low cost for everyone, using the devices they already have. It has always been a struggle to give intranet access to manufacturing staff, frontline retail staff or those working in the field in developing countries. But instead of providing devices, intranet services will be made accessible to staff using whatever technology they do have. Why not deliver news, pay-slip information, location information, etc., to the mobile phones of your workforce, or have them log on to a mobile version of the intranet ?

4. Dedicated resources will be in place to handle "search" and "findability" across the enterprise. PricewaterhouseCoopers has one person who just handles internal "search" effectiveness. As organizations become ever-richer knowledge banks and information containers, helping staff find what they need to do their jobs becomes an essential efficiency driver.

5. Optimized employee directories. Finding people and connecting with them will accelerate and grow richer. Nokia uses GPS so that you can not only find people's details but also see where they are right now! Presence information and social software style connecting will operate so the employee directory becomes the hub for your organization.

6. The desire to open up will be tempered by risk management and control. The technology and Internet trend is to connect, share and liberate content. But against that is the need for organizations to know and manage their risk for legal, compliance and financial control reasons.

7. Intranets will drive a low-carbon/ low-travel/low-cost agenda. Intranets will offer richer online meeting and collaboration These tools will be part of the intranet environment. In a low carbon/low travel corporate world, such offerings will be increasingly valuable to staff.

8. We will discover the financial value of large intranet environments, and this will reshape the intranet career and status. As a financial value is placed on intranets and accepted at the CFO level, the status of intranets and the people who manage them will rise markedly. If you are the manager of a mature intranet at a Fortune 500 company, typical compensation will be at least US5250,000 annually, with a likely annual investment of less than US55,000.

Paul Miller is chief executive officer and founder of the Intranet Benchmarking Forum, executive producer of My Green Film and the author of the knowledge-management handbook Mobilising the Power of What You Know.

Intranet Garden video blog: Nov 2009 - World Usability Day Special

Improving the usability of third party intranet applications

“Have I left our intranet and gone into someone else’s website?” This is the kind of thing Intranet Benchmarking Forum (IBF) experts hear quite often when benchmarking large scale intranets in different regions. Users feel they have somehow travelled from an online environment they know and can navigate to a place that “feels different”.

The effect of this shift in user experience is to disorientate users and cause them to lose confidence in where they have arrived. They leave the intranet they know and find themselves in the world of major HR systems like People Soft or other enterprise systems like Oracle and SAP. At IBF we are mounting a campaign to try and surface this issue and have it taken on board within the large scale third party application vendors.

We started this journey in 2007 – initiated by one of our IBF Members BT and specifically Mark Morrell, BT Intranet Manager – and we produced  an IBF Member report called “The usability of third party applications” which had an extensive checklist of usability features that could be used by procurement teams when contracting with large technology vendors.  The idea was start to get the likes of Oracle to build these features in to their applications and so improve user-experience across the board.

It has been a slow process and frankly not a great deal has improved in the last two years. IBF is mounting this campaign to try and get this vital topic on the agenda again by linking the campaign into World Usability Day on 12 November.  The theme of that day this year is around “Sustainability” and while we have promoted “Green Intranet” earlier this year actively, it is the overall concept of upgrading the ability for third party intranet apps that attracts us to World Usability Day.

As Mark Morrell has said poor usability leads to poor productivity; so build the usability standards in from the start. This issue has now taken on wider importance as intranets move outside the organisation and with us likely to see intranet services being experienced and used across mobile devices in “iphone app” style formats where the usability is essential.

Interestingly Apple allows a wide range of apps to be developed for the iphone but they must meet a certain level of user experience standards to do so. That is the thinking and practice that is required.

IBF is making its checklist of standards within this IBF Report freely available to be adopted by those on the “customer side" – i.e. large and medium size enterprises and also on the “vendor side” – i.e. large technology vendors. It is not perfect but it is a solid set of shared expectations.

What we notice is that small technology vendors seem to place a higher regard for usability perhaps because they cannot take their marketplace “for granted” or perhaps because getting changes made is simpler in smaller companies. It seems that if you talk to people at Oracle and SAP they “get the message” but somehow that does not seem to translate into upgraded standards. Over the next week IBF will use a variety of routes to raise this issue and try to make further progress in what has been a frustrating issue for the intranet industry.

You can download the checklist for free from IBF’s Online Shop.