Contact us for more information if you are interested and if you are an intranet manager.
I talked to Catherine Grenfell of Step Two Designs a while ago about an article she published on the Step Two Designs web site: What do successful intranet managers have in common?
It's clear that Catherine has a lot of experience working with intranet managers and her insights are both useful and inspiring.
Some key points:
You can listen to our conversation here:
Part 1 (5 minutes)
Part 2 (3 minutes)
Part 3 (6 minutes)
You can reach Catherine at catherine@steptwo.com.au if you'd like to talk more about her thoughts, or you can communicate with her here.
I participated for the first time in the Brazilian Intranet Portal Award 2009 event this week - virtually!
If you don't speak Portuguese (as I don't) you can use a translator tool to get an idea about what went on for the two days of the conference. Try this link.
There were 12 awards announced and approximately 200 people each day.
The Twitter tag is #pip09 .
I'd like to share a preview of some major observations from this year's survey. These points and others are developed in the Global Intranet Trends for 2010 report.
The report will be available for purchase later in November and the exact date will be announced here.
The Global Intranet Trends for 2010 report is subtitled
‘Towards the workplace web’. This phrase reflects what is happening today in
intranets around the world as organizations are positioning the intranet as the
entry point into the organization’s ensemble of information, applications,
collaboration and communication tools.
The intranet is starting to be “business as usual” and thereby involving more high-level stakeholders in the organization. The ownership model is slowly moving away from the single owner model (usually communication). Forty percent of the organizations do still have this model but another 30 percent have a co-owner model where two or three functions share ownership.
The third
model, which is cross-organizational with all major functions and divisions
represented, exists in
15 percent. Although used less than the first two models, it is more often
found in organizations with mature intranets
Approximately one third of the organizations have a
high-level intranet Steering Committee. The senior level presence on this body
has increased over the last year reaching 60 percent, with middle management
and operational management decreasing slightly. This trend has continued since
2007 when the senior level presence was around 35 percent.
There are a number of indicators showing that the employee
voice is being given some room in the intranet. Two examples:
“Commenting on official content” such as letting employees
publish comments and questions about articles written by management is “in
general use” in 20 percent of the organizations. Another 20 percent are testing
it or have it “in some parts” of their organization.
Internal social network applications (similar to Facebook or
Linkedin) are not often found to be “in general use throughout the
organization”. However they are likely to increase as 30 percent of the
organizations are currently testing or “using in some parts”.
Twenty-five to 30 percent of organizations that have already implemented some form of social media have experienced 3 general benefits: increased employee engagement, more effective knowledge sharing, and better-informed employees. Stories “from the front lines” are shared in the report.
Concerns are changing as organizations gain experience. Doubts are considerably lower about the relevance of social media to business needs, senior management hesitancy and employees wasting their time. At the same time there is a higher degree of concern about two things: the difficulty of finding information and potential user resistance.
Organizations in the planning stages for social media usage have very high expectations for benefits. Their expectations are far greater than what the “implementers” have seen so far. There seems to be a potential risk of disappointment.
Intranets are leaving the workplace, or rather the workplace
is being extended to where the people are. People do not need to be in the
office in front of a computer to be able to use the intranet. Home access is
possible in over one third of the organizations and smart phone access is just
starting.
Some
intranets have services for smart phones today, but the vast majority do not.
However, twenty-five percent of the organizations in the survey say they are in
the planning stages of making the intranet accessible through smart phones and
PDAs.
In summary, intranets are being re-shaped and re-energized
around 5 underlying trends.
These trends represent new dimensions of the intranet that
better correspond to how people work today. They are discussed throughout the
report from different angles and with detailed charts and analysis.
This is the 4th annual report, and the survey
population has grown from 100 to 300 organizations since 2006. The
organizations range in size from under 1,000 employees to over 100,000 employees
and are headquartered primarily in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific.
Topics explored in the survey include positioning of the
intranet, strategy and management, business objectives, features of the
intranet, social media and measurement.
For those of you who are wondering, the 2010 report will be published the first week of November.
Many thanks to all of you for your emails of encouragement. This year's report will be worth waiting for!
Here's where I sit in early evening when I take a break from writing.
During the first Globally Local open thread of a couple of weeks ago, Chamika asked:
"A topic I've been trying to research is how to set up workflow for intranet content using Sharepoint. There are several resources that explain the technical aspects of workflow set up, but rarely have I come across any articles about mapping out workflow from a centralized publishing model to a distributed publishing model. Another way it's being perceived in my organization is the approvals process for intranet content. Any best practices and lessons learned would be great."
I have identified (thanks to some challenging work with my clients!) 7 fundamental principles that I feel are very important and that each of my clients has implemented - their own way - in their organizations.
1. Define responsibility for content at the lowest level possible in the organization, but at a level of accountability.
Define the level according to the "natural business role". Publishing on the intranet must be part of normal business procedures. Whoever is responsible for the accuracy of a specific content should also be responsible for that content on the intranet.
Keep this level as low as possible, but make sure it does not go lower than the business responsibility.
2. Do not mix "content owner" with "content publisher".
The content publisher may be a person whose responsibility is to use the CMS or publishing tool and put the content online. This is not the same thing as being responsible for the accuracy and up-to-dateness of the content. This is a technical responsibility, which is very important, but different. It requires knowing how to use the publishing tool, and, depending on the sophistication of the tool, making the content easy to read online.
3. Make the name of the "content owner" visible on the content itself.
Ensure that the person with business responsibility for the content is visibly identified on the content itself. Visibility goes a long way towards making people aware of their responsibilities.
4. Have the business units and functions specify their own types of content and levels of approval.
If you are a large, global organization, you will have many different types of content with varying degrees of ownership depending on the source: business unit, country, function, etc. Ask the different business units and functions to define their own guidelines for what type of content require approval by what level or role.
Propose a content-approval grid with (1) the types of content with which you are familiar and (2) the potential levels of approval based on your organizational structure. Ask business and functional managers to indicate what level of approval is required. Push them a bit to ensure they are not placing the approval level too high.
Find examples outside of the intranet to help them analyze the true level of responsibility. For example, if certain people are allowed to communicate externally, they can certainly approve content for internal publication. If a level of management produces internal reports on a topic, they can certainly approve publication for this information on the intranet.
Avoid, as much as possible, elevating the approval level.
5. Avoid complex workflow. In fact, avoid CMS workflow completely!
With a few rare exceptions, assume the person publishing a piece of content is authorized to publish the content. Building workflow steps into a content management system simply adds to everyone's email overload.
I have rarely seen cases where the actual approval process takes place in the CMS workflow. It always happens either before (preferably) or after the actual publication.
6. Do not let content owners alone decide what end-users should or should not see. Involve user rep's!
Identify owners for user profiles (or "persona ambassadors"). Make sure that if you have defined profiles such as "marketing managers" or "employees based in France" or "customer service staff for product A" that you have also identified a person who is part of that profile and who can work with you to determine what members of that profile need to see and access to do their jobs. This person becomes the "user rep" for that profile. ("Rep" = representative)
One of the biggest pitfalls of customized intranets/portals is letting the content owners alone decide who should see what. They only have a partial view. The complementary view is from the users: "what do we need to see", and only a member of that user segment can answer that question.
7. Make sure you have no "black holes".
This is hard, but if you have top management support you can do it! :)
If you don't, you probably can't. :(
Require every part of your organization to have an intranet representative, a person who represents what the area publishes on the intranet and what the members of that area needs from the intranet.
If your top senior person makes this a requirement, you can be sure that users will be able to find what they need on the intranet. Otherwise, the intranet may be lop-sided (unbalanced) with some areas heavily present and others absent.
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Thanks for asking this question, Chamika, and I hope others will add to my list...
In the open thread last weekend, Zeb asked the following question:
I gave a brief answer in my post 30-30-30-10 Watch the Trends saying that that it is important for intranet managers to have part of their time focused on external issues.
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In the meantime I sent the question to one of my virtual colleagues with whom I have worked on numerous projects, Anthony Hamelle,VP of linkinfluence. Anthony blogs here (in French) but he is more than fluent in English as you see below in his response to my query.
Anthony's response to Zeb:
"There are two main kinds of online monitoring services out there.
(1) Those that seek to capture and track as much data in as many languages as possible about your brands or topics of interest. They are like smart clippings services and are useful in an e-CRM fashion (hearing everything everywhere and, inasmuch as possible, providing timely answers to everyone).
Some better-known ones are Radian6 (leading paid-for monitoring service), Sysomos, Attentio, Twitter Search or Google Blogsearch (that latter two being leading free monitoring services ;-)
(2) Those that seek to make sense of the data they track and capture. These tools are akin to market research solutions and services, filtering and organising data so as to reveal interesting trends that help decide upon strategies.
Some better-known ones are linkfluence (disclosure, I am VP of linkfluence), TNS Cymfony or Nielsen Buzzmetrics.
Although almost all providers work with some form of text mining, a line might be drawn between those that provide NLP (natural language processing, i.e. automated sentiment detection) and those that choose to rely on human analysts to interpret the data.
I for one think that NLP is not yet suited for the complexity and the heterogeneous aspect of language on the social web, meaning that human analysts still have to interpret and extract insights from the data..."
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Many thanks to Anthony. Do not hesitate to raise questions to him directly, or via Globally Local here in comments.
Open thread means "over to you".
What do you want to talk about?
What's on your mind?
Start a conversation by posting a comment....
An intranet manager asked me the following a couple of days ago:
"I am looking for some comparative benchmarks for readership of news posted on corporate intranets. I get fairly regular feedback from senior management here that readership should be higher (uptake on articles ranges from very small to as high as 80% of target audience in some cases) and I would like to find something to demonstrate to them that an average readership of X% is fairly typical. Are you aware of any such benchmarks?"
I referred him to a blog post "Spam from corporate communications?" that I wrote just over a year ago, based on 2 real life anecdotes from intranet managers about corporate emails. Since then, a couple of intranet managers have asked me what percentage of viewership is average for corporate videos.
Do any of you have any figures to share?
I often say that the intranet is a process, not a project. I did a slide 4 years ago that I used then quite often in workshops and still use today: "One slide worth a thousand words". I came across a printout of this slide a couple of months ago in the office of one of my clients where he had posted it on his wall. He told me he referred to it often when "educating" his manager about intranets being more than technology and well-executed project plans.
Government as a process was one of the tracks at Gov 2.0 Expo last week, and here is a link (YouTube) to a 5-minute presentation made by Emma Antunes, webmaster for NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, last week at Gov 2.0 Expo.
I met Emma several years ago at a conference in California where I was presenting the results from the very first Global Intranet Strategies survey, which takes us back to the fall of 2006. It's exciting to remember back 3 years and see how fast intranets have evolved since then.
I still remember giving a workshop at that conference and showing participants some numbers from the 2006 survey about 2.0 experimentation and some of the people saying "not in my intranet!". There was quite a strong resistance from some of the intranet managers. I remember one of them being very worried about "losing control of his intranet". Note the "his". Those were the days where some intranet managers still thought the intranets "belonged" to them! I have not come across that thinking in some time now, thank goodness.
If you sometimes get discouraged about your intranet evolving at a snail's pace, think back a few years and reflect on the progress you've made. Remember that it's a process you're dealing with - a gradual change - and not a self-contained project.
I was very interested in the New York Times article "Who’s Driving Twitter’s Popularity? Not Teens"
I quote:
"Twitter’s unparalleled explosion in popularity has been driven by a decidedly older group. That success has shattered a widely held belief that young people lead the way to popularizing innovations."
And...
"The notion that children are essential to a new technology’s success has proved to be largely a myth."
What about Facebook?
Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and chief executive says that Twitter is a “... one-to-many network and most of the content is public, it works for this better than a social network that’s optimized for friend communication.” (read Facebook)
Take look at this article and see how it could apply to your intranet. Are you looking for colleague-to-colleague communication, a real-time communication channel or both?
I'm looking for as many Intranet Awards as I can find.
If you have one in your country or an international one, or even an intra-enterprise one, please get in touch.
I want to publicise these awards, and understand what the criteria are for winning! I want to get the best ones on to the decision-makers' radar.
What makes an intranet business critical?
How can we make the intranet part of the strategic assets of an organization that should be considered when evaluating the value of an enterprise?
Here we go, chronologically...with the awards I know:
The oldest, to my knowledge, started in 2001 and is run by the usability guru team at Nielsen Norman:
Best Intranet Design. It awards the intranets which have outstanding design and usability. (I'm pleased to say that one of my global clients won this a few years ago!)
Another one started in 2007: Step Two Design's Intranet Innovation Awards. I especially like this one because it does not attempt to evaluate the "whole intranet" (which I personally find impossible to do in the case of global organizations), but rather looks at specific innovations within the intranet.
The goal is to "celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets and find these ideas (whether large or small), and to share them with the wider community."
(Disclaimer: I am one of the judges for Intranet Innovation Awards.)
I have recently become aware of the Intranet Portal Award in Brazil, starting in 2008, organized by the Intranet Portal Institute. Its goal is to recognise portals that "facilitate access to information and knowledge which has become a necessity for those who want to be competitive in a networked economy". I love this ambition for an intranet/portal award. Very business-focused!
I know there are other awards in Denmark, Germany, Italy and Switzerland, but I don't have the specific information or links. Please send them to me. I'd like to interview you about the details.
If you organize or are aware of other intranet awards, please get in touch.
We all need to work together to bring intranets up to the decision-maker radar, which is where they belong by definition!
An intranet manager asked me recently how to prioritise ideas about social media for the intranet. They are a global organization and are currently attempting to bring all the local intranets under the same umbrella.
They ran a workshop, and lots of ideas were proposed. People gave lots of examples and even ROI figures in many cases. (I need to say "alleged ROI figures" because some of them were familiar examples currently flung about on the internet with little or no detailed information.)
Their question to me: So now what do we do?
My response to them: Don't look at the others; look at yourself!
I suggested the following:
I know there will be some of you out there who will say: Make the tools available and see what happens.
I disagree with this approach, to a large extent, mainly because there are so many tools, so many ideas, and such an obvious need to have a reason for what you do on the intranet.
Time is limited, resources are scarce, people are preoccupied with lots of other things these days.
I strongly recommend thinking about what you do and why, and finding the most "fertile" terrains for experimentation.
Let me know what you think, and what you've done!
I did not realize how lively the intranet scene is in Brazil until Fernando Viberti got in touch with me and became a Network Partner for the 4th annual Global Intranet Strategies survey. His blog is definitely worth reading: "Gestao e governança web". "Web management and governance in English."
Lots of in-depth posts.
(I use Google's Word Translator which I've recently installed in my Firefox navigation bar in order to follow intranet blogs in languages I don't speak!)
I've also heard from Ricardo Saldanha, President of the Intranet Portal Institute which is a non-profit, non-governmental organization, set up to stimulate and help professionalize the Brazilian intranet space by bringing case studies and best practices to light, in a knowledge-sharing way. Fernando Viberti is also one of the Portal Institute's directors.
Brazil also has its own Intranet Portal Award, founded by Ricardo, and now in its second year. It was started in order to recognize outstanding intranets. The first single-day event for this award is apparently considered to be a turning point in the Brazilian intranet space by intranet professionals, end users and vendors.
In addition, there is an Intranet Portal site with a discussion forum on corporate portals and intranet projetcs in Brazil. It now has around 3 thousand subscribers.
Do you need a good reason to go to Brazil on a business trip?
If so, think about participating in the two-day event in November that will be the culmination of the Intranet Portal Award for 2009. The first day will be dedicated to winners' presentations and second day to discussion tracks on IT Integration (Portal), Content & Collaboration - and Governance.
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