Intranets are not just intranets anymore

October 21, 2008 at 9:25 am · Filed under Collaboration, Intranets

I spent the better part of yesterday locked in a brainstorming room with a client and my team as we discussed what a next generation intranet should look like. I was struck by how little some business assumptions have changed in the last few years. We forget these assumptions as we strategize, design and build next generation intranets. Here are a few of those assumptions.

 1. Intranets are about Lunch Menus and People Finders. Everyday intranet managers around the world try to make a strong case for why the intranet is a strategic tool. Why its about collaboration and insights and how it can transform an organization bottom up. Unfortunately, many senior managers and employees across the board still think of it just in terms of lunch menus, people finders and human resources information.

 2. Intranets are an HR & and Corporate Communications asset. Intranets are very important to HR and Corporate Communications, but its extremely important to other departments and teams as well. It can be an effective medium for employees to share information and collaborate among themselves. That doesn’t have to happen outside the intranet.

3. Intranets aren’t mission critical business applications. Here’s the biggest misnomer. Intranets can be mission critical and they can and should integrate business applications. Remember the portal craze of the late 1990s? That wasn’t a mistake, it was just ahead of its time. Employees are demanding single, consolidated, dashboard interfaces that serve as a true virtual desktop. Some intranets play that role. Others can too as well.

4.  Intranets are browser based and top down in nature. Who’s to say that intranets need to be browser based. 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. Its not about the intranet, but about employee productivity using digital technologies.

Intranets have a long history in most organizations dating back to the mid 1990s. That’s what drives its current perception. The organizational silos within IT departments that separated intranet ownership from other business applications made sense at the time but don’t anymore. Today, employees demand more consolidated interfaces where all the information, collaboration, self service and business application access needs are met.  Its probably time for the departments to reorganize to more directly align with employee expectations and less by application ownership.

ROI for Social Computing

August 26, 2008 at 3:01 am · Filed under Collaboration, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, KM, Web 2.0

I made a presentation recently in Sydney to local government on intranets and how I think they’re dead.

Around 10 years ago, we held great hopes for our intranets. For our investment [1] we expected the technology would deliver cost savings, working efficiencies, collaboration and best-practice knowledge management. By 1998, we’d spent about $10.9 billion USD [2] on corporate intranets, yet our ideals about collaboration remained relatively unrealised with COIs ignoring the strategic value and assuming that an intranet’s only purpose was to serve as an information repository. After spending billions of dollars we’d received little more than an electronic filing cabinet.

Part of the failure to realise the value of intranets was our misplaced trust that the newly emerging web technology would somehow deliver something that is essentially a people process, because collaboration and knowledge management is about people, not technology. The other failure is in our management practices and a missunderstanding about how people work — that information is somehow a product, a Word document for example, that, like an engine in a car factory, is produced by the end of a hard days work.

There’s no return on investment to be had in this paradigm. As my AppGap colleague Jon Husband writes in his article The Design of Knowledge Work, it reflects a very Tayloristic view of the world, where efficiency is to be had by motivating workers to behave in more efficient ways, rather than to think smarter. Certainly, you can offer better tools like large intranet repositories with a wealth of information inside, but the synthesis of information into knowledge is a difficult task when the person who created a piece of information, or a similarly empowered individual, is not there to help you know where to look, understand what you find, and then assimilate it.

The truth of most modern work is that we analyse data and information and reach out to our networks in order to gain access to knowledge. We collaborate on ideas and then have a burst of work that reflects the sharing of ideas. And, of course, once we have produced something, we then tend to socialise it again within our networks in order to refine the ideas we’ve produced. This is knowledge work in action and people are at the centre of it.

Of course, when I say collaborate I mean individuals engage in a range of activities, from using the telephone or meeting face-to-face, to using Twitter or engaging others through blogs, in order to reach out to people (not technology like traditional intranets), in order to socialise ideas, create new thinking, help refine old ideas and make them better.

This is where modern organisations find their investment in social computing tools is paying off. Tools, like Twitter, give employees instant access to their trusted network of colleagues, friends and experts. Blogs allow people to have access to other people’s thoughts in a storytelling style that communicates in a much more personal and effective way than a clinical report ever can. And then, of course, individuals can comment and ask the author a direct question and have a discussion that leads into the use of other social computing tools.

Its this access to people that the investment in social computing tools brings. When considering closing down the walls to applications like Facebook or Twitter, consider the impact on workers inability to access the experts in their professional networks. When considering bringing social computing tools into the organisation look at how they will support and strengthen communication within your internal communities of practice. This is the ROI for social computing and when used as part of an array of tools that help connect people, facilitate communication and collaboration, then it can rejuvenate your intranet and make it live!

M

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1. Melcrum Internet Survey (2001)

2. Computerworld (1999) $10.9 billion spent on intranets. International Data Corp Briefs, 42, 26 July.

Web 2.0 in the Enterprise. From Dilbert to Dude

June 22, 2008 at 12:21 pm · Filed under Collaboration, Communities, Enterprise 2.0, Intranets, Web 2.0

Earlier this week I was on a panel at a Churchill Club event in Silicon Valley. Hosted by Charlene Li of Forrester, the panel discussed web 2.0 in the enterprise and how social media is changing collaboration behind the firewall. On the panel with me were leaders from Best Buy, Serena Software and Oracle. Titled “From Dilbert to Dude: Succeeding with Web 2.0 Within the Enterprise” the panel discussed how grass roots social media efforts take on a life of their own as they move from being “under the desk server” initiatives to enterprise wide programs.

Steve Bendt of Best Buy talked about Blue Nation, a social networking site that connects employees at the retail outlets to the corporate offices and to each other. Now, the employees who are on the front lines talking to customers everyday, have a platform to discuss new products, exchange ideas and provide feedback to headquarters on what products, display formats and marketing strategies are working. It is a perfect example of a company taking advantage of the wisdom of the crowds concepts. Also, interesting is that after the launch of Blue Nation, employee retention has gotten easier as employees feel a part of something special and important. No thank you email from a CEO can compare to the satisfaction that people get when they feel they have contributed to something larger. Turnover of employees who use the site is just 8 to 12 percent while company turnover is much higher. 

Serena Software is another interesting company and I blogged about them a few years ago (on another blog) when they first rolled out their Facebook Fridays initiative. Rather than trying to build a behind the firewall social networking enabled intranet, Serena chose to build their intranet on the Facebook platform. But not just that, they also built tools to allow the Facebook pages to connect with company data sources in a safe and secure manner. So rather than bringing the employees to the intranet, they went to where their employees were spending most of their time – on Facebook. 

In the case of Oracle, what’s most fascinating was how quickly Connect, the internal social network got adopted. Within an hour of launching the site 270 people were using it. The next morning the site had 8,000 people on it. Currently, the site has 10,000 active users who share information, news articles, powerpoint presentations and discuss budgets. This again was an initiative that began with no funding but tapped into the inherent nature of people to connect with each other in a purposeful and productive manner. Paul Pedrazzi from Oracle also discussed the risks. He mentioned that a person wearing a religious head dress like a turban could claim denial of a job because someone saw his profile picture and refused to interview him.

In discussing the Avenue A|Razorfish wiki and some client examples, I highlighted how understanding the motivations for use are important. We’re not on these social platforms just to socialize. Different people have different motivations and aligning those motivations with the social platform and the business needs is key to success. The wiki is viewed as a marketplace of ideas where people share their best thoughts and expect more in return. Sometimes the sharing even takes the form of bookmarks, blog posts and photographs – not just the regular word documents or powerpoint files. Through use of the wiki, natural experts who are the most passionate about specific topics get the attention and the focus that they deserve. 

The panel was also covered in Infoworld. 

Where have all the intranets gone? Long time passing

April 14, 2008 at 8:12 am · Filed under Collaboration, Intranets

Intranets first emerged as recognition that because the web was a great way to communicate with an external audience it must also be just as equally effective at communicating with internal staff and stakeholders [1].

And as the internet boomed, we saw many other opportunities to capitalise on. Not only did we expect that intranets should be the main vehicle for internal communication, but we also began to expect them to help us share knowledge and collaborate on ideas [2]. Unfortunately, studies suggest that we have failed to capitalise on these opportunities. [3]

What has resulted from our investment in our intranets has been little more than the paper equivalent of a filing cabinet. Business divisions publish information on themselves with very little care for their audience, in both communication of information and the services they provide in a way that has meaning to their internal audience and in categorising it so that others are able to easily find it later. Some analysts suggest that the reason intranets have failed to meet our expectations is because information is never well structured and they just are so hard to use. As a consultant and an Information Architect working in Australia, this is what I see all the time – websites that reflect those who publish information and structured in a way that reflects their internal processes, functions and organisational structure, rather than the needs of the target audience. While I try to advise that in the creation of websites that the owners and authors consider a user-centred design approach, it often fails to achieve real traction when intranets are concerned.

What ever the reason why intranets fail, CEOs now consider intranets little more than an information tool [4] – about storing and retrieving information. With the excitement of wikis and blogs in the corporate space, people like Charlene from Forrester are advising executives to ” throw out your Intranet and replace it with a wiki” [5]. And it’s a message that is being listened to because:

“Regardless of the type of innovation undertaken, over 75 percent of CEOs indicated that collaboration is very important to innovation. One CEO described its importance on a scale of one to five as “enormous. I’d give this a six if I could.” [6]

Unfortunately, the road to knowledge management hasn’t been a smooth one. Many vendors in the 90s touted their products as providing ‘knowledge management’ without regard to the true and underlying issues for effective knowledge management – that sharing knowledge is a social activity, not a technology-based one. When we have news to tell friends and colleagues we usually meet them for coffee or pick up the telephone and have a conversation. When we need to share ideas about how to make a process work more effectively we meet in a little room for a little while and brainstorm ideas. When a project finishes we often have ‘lessons learned’ in a hope to tell others about the successes and failures in order to learn from them. Enabling these activities to occur easily and encouraging them is real knowledge management in practice. The only problem is that the people you want aren’t always around and we’re not good at recording the truth and meaning behind these activities adequately because processes the processes for recording what we have in our heads is typically just too slow. When publishing information and sharing knowledge through our intranets we usually have policies that mean content requires approval, editorial attention, and so on. The same goes for records management processes. You need to title the file in a special way, with special metadata that only trained records managers know about, before you can store your information away for posterity. While these policies and procedures are to ensure that official corporate information is the ’source of truth’ handling it in the same way as we communicate information through our internet sites just isn’t productive.

Ultimately, the way we typically govern our information repositories hamper an individual’s ability to share their knowledge. And this is the thing that social computing tools have over our intranets – instant gratification.

Wikis have soft security models: anyone can create new content; change content; correct spelling mistakes made by others; correct facts; expand the ideas; and interlink content all without a formal approval processes. Ultimately, it means that those who want to create content and contribute are free to do so without the hurdles we’re used to seeing with intranets.

Blogs are pretty much the same. In it, people share their personal thoughts and ideas and self-publish their information without the proverbial chains of the information gatekeepers. If we look back to the rich oral history of many of our cultures, blogging is a reflection of the need to story-tell, carrying with it important information not only on the what – the facts like the reports we typically store in our recordkeeping systems – but also the meaning behind the why and how.

And this is where our intranets have gone. It’s not so much a suggestion that intranets are out-of-date, but that as technology grows, we have new tools that are better suited to the ways in which we want to share knowledge and information at work. So long as our CEOs and CIOs understand that these tools won’t deliver knowledge management themselves, but help to enable it, I don’t think I mind so much if traditional intranets fade away.

M

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[1] Lawton, S. ( 1995) Intranets fuel growth of Internet access tools. Dgital news and review, 24 April, 1995

[2] Melcrum Intranet Survey (2001)

[3] StepTwo Designs (2001)

[4] Manchester, A. (2007) Intranets: getting senior management buy-in. The Melcrum Blog. 27 August.

[5] Leib, R. (2008) Wiki-ize Your Intranet. ClickZ. http://blog.clickz.com/080309-131558.html

[6] IBM Institute for Business Value, The Global CEO Study (2006), March.