Globally local - locally global

Intranet versus Other

I just got a question from a reader:

....My internal communications manager is pulling together a report on the intranet and had the following question:" In general, what ratio would information be stored on the intranet versus other options such as mail/folders/blogs/wikis etc. ?"....

My response is that the question cannot be answered as it is phrased. But here is my answer anyway...!

1. Blogs and wikis - an integral part of an intranet.
Blogs and wikis should not be a parallel, "underground" intranet. They serve very specific purposes within an intranet and require life-cycle management policies:

• Wikis are often used for co-creation of content. At a certain point, content may become finalized and then would logically enter the "official" or "reference" area of the intranet and not be tucked away in a wiki.
• Blogs must have a purpose. Depending on the purpose they will eventually be removed (event blog) or archived (project blog). An expert blog might remain on line forever!

So the question is unanswerable because they are an integral part of the intranet.

2. Email - a very risky situation.
"Storing information" in emails is a destructive way to work. Information stored in emails is not findable, nor sharable, nor safe.

To answer the question, I'd say too much is stored there, and organizations in this case are running major risks from a legal, financial and commercial viewpoints.

3. Shared folders, a reaction more than a choice
This usually happens when the intranet is too rigid for local needs. It is a dangerous practice because, as in the previous point, this makes the information unfindable and impossible to share outside the local network.
Even when people say the information is only "for us", it is rarely true.

I once visited a country division of a global company. They showed me their shared folders which contained about 90 % of their information, and then their intranet with the remaining 10 %. I asked how this had come about. The answers was very simple: "The intranet navigation and categories are unworkable for us."

Enough said!

Inside Enterprise Search

Reality check

"Enterprise search - seen from the inside" is the title of an article I wrote for the Enterprise Search Sourcebook published by Information Today. Two quotes from the article:

• "You get the search you deserve"
• "Out of the 178 enterprises who participated in the survey nearly 3 out of 5 are “not really satisfied” or “not satisfied at all” with their intranet search. When asked how many people were dedicated to working on supporting and optimizing search, well over half responded “less than one person”. In addition, when asked if they looked at the search logs to better understand what users were searching for, just over 40% admitted they never did this and nearly 30 % did this only when they had time."

Trends
The article just before mine "Enterprise Search: Trends for 2008" is written by Theresa Regli of CMSWatch. She talks about analysing, navigating, uncrowding and socialising search, along with other insights on trends.

Do your homework
I recommend any organisation looking to purchase an enterprise search solution to first read Enterprise Search Report published by CMSWatch. (priced from 975 $US to 2925 $US depending on licence). I've seen so many cases where companies have created major search dilemmas by either having the wrong solution in place or by not realising what's involved in implementing search.

The money invested in this report will be well worth it. I recommend making it required reading for IT, communication and business managers working on search. Hopefully, all three functions are involved, because search is one of those things that is everyone's responsibility to get right.

The Enterprise Search Report should be used selectively. Here's a suggested reading path for your search team:

Pages 1 to 83 - everyone should read

Enterprise Rends for 2008
What is Search and How Does it Work
The Business Case for Enterprise Search
Entreprise Search Requirements (this is not technical) and includes a section on "asking the right questions"

Beginning on page 84, the discussion turns to Enterprise Search Vendors, and the first few pages are helpful for everyone on the team. After that, it is more relevant to team members making the hands-on analysis.

Beginning in page 322 "Advice, Pitfalls and Best Practices", it's important for all the team to read.

Using a team approach with this report is a good way to get everyone on the same page, to ensure that the technical team members approach the search project with users and business in mind, and that the non-technical people learn enough about the technology to understand implications of certain choices.

Reality check soon for 2009
The Global Intranet Strategies survey - currently open if you're interested in participating - has deepened its section on Search, and will provide data that will help us get another reality check in last 2008, early 2009.

(Get in touch if you'd like to participate)

Fundamental needs: people by function and information by subject

I'm working on a project where I need to talk to people around the world to understand how they use the intranet.

I just got off the phone with an intranet user in a country far from headquarters. He has 2 fundamental needs that I have often heard expressed but never so simply:

"I need to find people by function and information by subject. That's all I need."

When you look at corporate intranets and employee directories, not many of them make this easy.
How often do you need to know a person's name or where they are in the organisation before you can look up their contact information?
How likely is it that the navigational structure and/or the search engine results reassure users that they have found all the relevant information on a given topic?

Enterprise Search - issues and trends to explore

The first day of the annual Enterprise Search Summit in New York opened today. (The sessions today touched on a number of topics that will be explored in the 2008 Global Intranet Survey - signup information here).

Among the topics and questions addressed by the speakers:

1. Do you have fundamental, guiding principles about enterprise search in your organisation?

Martin White, Intranet Focus Ltd, proposed what he called the "Magna Carta" for search in the opening keynote. This slide extract shows the key points:

2. Do you have a search team in place?

One of the success criteria Martin listed was having a search team in the organisation to work on search, maintain and optimise it. As we know from the 2007 Global Intranet Survey, one of the major gaps in intranet or portal resourcing is in the area of search, where even a high percentage of very large organisations have one or fewer people dedicated to optimising search.  The slide below comes from my presentation this morning: "Enterprise Search Reality Check".

3. Will social search be relevant for enterprises?

Social search means there is user input to the search process.  A round table on social search "Is Social Search right for the enterprise?" led by Jean Graef, Montague Institute took us into the relatively new dimension of how user participation and 2.0 technologies enable people's knowledge, experience and opinions to be integrated into the search results.

This may be from sharing bookmarks, aggregating tags, topical search (Google Co-op and Rollyo) and voting systems.

Social search - in part - shifts the work to the end user communities. However, in theory  the results should be better. The users can surely tag information in more relevant ways than the "information professionals" of your organisation ...can't they? This is an open question....

Laurie Damianos from Mitre, talked about how tagging by users is beginning to converge into tagging "agreements". They make the tags used by people visible to all people, which tends to encourage others to use the same ones. They have also found that people, when given the choice to make their bookmarks public (internally) or keep them private, chose to make them public.

4. What do people want to find?

In the past, search has been very document-centric. Now people want to find other people. They want to know what people think about other people's content. How they use it. Etc.
They want to connect the "who", "what" and "why" as described by Oz Benamram, Morrison & Foerster, rather than the "where" and "when". For example, what people really want is to find the information in emails and documents (the "what"), be able to relate it to people and contacts (the "who") and to place it in the context of clients and projects (the "who").
Oz demonstrated a very impressive mashup, bring together information that already exists in the firms systems and various applications into a meaningful "contextual and searchable network".

Global "Company Net Steering Committee" - way to avoid wasting resources

I've recently come across several cases where companies could have saved money and time if they had a global "Company Net Steering Committee" in place.

By "global" I mean one that has representatives from all parts and key functions of the organisation. By "company net" I mean with a scope encompassing intranet, internet and all online initiatives.

Several global companies have noticed that some solution providers are approaching their different entities around the world trying to sell their solutions on a country basis. In a couple of these cases, a sale is made to the country in spite of the fact that the global group had already purchased the technology.

The problem was twofold:
1. The group did not know that the country had a need
2. The country did not know that the group had already acquired the solution.

Another example is a case where a team from corporate IT had developed an interesting idea and carried it to the point of a proof of concept. When they presented it to a larger forum of intranet managers, they put up a slide intending to be reassuring. The slide explained that their new concept did not affect the intranet, nor the portal, nor the current collaborative solution. However, it did touch on these things. They had intended to define their scope so that the intranet managers would realise that the new "thing" was different and was not intended to overlap with their areas of responsibility, the intranets.

The problem here is that it should have not just overlapped, but also been co-ordinated with the intranet and integrated into the intranet. It should not have been handled as a separate project.

Here, similar to the first case - a twofold reason:
1. Corporate IT team was not fully aware of the intranet scope
2. The intranet managers were not aware of on-going IT initiatives.

Both examples would probably have been handled better if a global Company Net steering group existed. Even a lower level Company Net co-ordination team whose role is to simply update each other on on-going work, needs and ideas could have foreseen the potential conflicts and waste of time and money.

In both cases, all parties had good intentions, believed they were doing what was best for users, and certainly did not intend to waste resources or create user confusion.

User-centric UA and entry page strategies for better findability

A user-friendly, optimised search engine is only one part of the findability "tool set" for an intranet. There is a whole other side that is too often forgotten.
Three additional dimensions contribute to the total findability experience:

• the "User Architecture" or UA
• the customisation and personalisation approaches
• the confidentiality policy

and of course the governance that accompanies all three aspects.

This article deals with the first: The UA, which is my term for how the user perceives the structure of the intranet.
The UA components are (A) the top level categories (level 1 navigation), (B) the entry page design and (C) the global gateway.

A. User Architecture
There are 4 principles around which a user-centric UA can be defined:

1. Define top level categories ( level 1 navigation) in user terms, not in terms of the source of the content. This results in categories defined according to subject or purpose (user populations who have similar needs).
2. Ensure that clear mission statements exist for each : for example, this space provides these things for these people. Or even better, this space lets these people do A, B or C by providing them with X, Y Z.
3. Implement a double-ownership approach, with roles in charge of the spaces and thereby representing user needs, and other roles in charge of content, thereby ensure information and services of high quality and relevance.
4. Distinguish between content created "for us by us" and "for others by us". Departments and functions tend to want to put both in the same space on the intranet, and this is not logical for users.

B. Entry page
Consider the entry page to be a key findability driver with 3 roles:

• Guide the person to understand the structure and navigation of the intranet
• Indicate the range of content and services available
• Be global and relevant at the same time

In order to fulfil the three roles, select your entry page design by understanding three fundamental patterns. These can be blended to some extent, but overall the design must lean one way or the other:

a. Newsy
b. Navigational-based
c. Highly customised (portal style)

The slide below relates types of entry page models with different intranet landscape patterns. (I have described these patterns in previous articles: How intranet and portals landscapes evolve and Global intranets: different challenges, different paths.)

A simple entry page decision spider can be a useful tool when making these decisions, in particular when working together with colleagues in different parts of the organisation. It helps focus the discussion.

C. Global gateway page
Global gateways are more common on internet web sites than on intranets. I have personally rarely seen them done well for internal intranet landscapes. I have seen many intranet site maps (usually automatically generated and either too high level or too detailed to be useful for users). However, a site map is not a gateway page. The gateway references all parts of the whole landscape, not all parts of a single site.

The idea is to have a single page, always available from the top banner, that provides links to all parts of the organisation's intranet landscape. The links may be organised by site, topic, target user population, geography or other criteria. The gateway page is especially useful in an intranet landscape that has lots of diverse sites rather than one where there is already a user logic or portal spirit.

A list of the "dynamic places and services" of the intranet is also helpful. It lists discussion groups, project rooms, notification services, blogs, wikis and so on within the overall intranet landscape. Depending on volume, it can be incorporated into the global gateway or be a second level global page.

Of course, the more granular the gateway is, the more difficult it is to keep it up to date. With the right degree of detail it can be a useful navigational tool for users.

Comments?

It would be interesting to hear from intranet managers to see if people have experience with global gateway pages for their intranet landscapes, and also how their entry page design fits or differs from the patterns I've described.

International community of practice for online media - J.Boye

Tomorrow I'll be talking to the members of the intranet section of the community of practice for online media organised by J.Boye. The session will take place in Vienna, and group a select number of international company intranet managers. There is also a section for internet managers who will be in Vienna at the same time. You can contact Peter Erik Bang Nissen  at info@jboye.dk for more information.

It's more and more relevant to handle "online" issues in the same forum as teams are becoming merged, at least for some of their activities. Companies are looking at using the same tools - at least for some functions.

Here is a snapshot of the page from the 2007 Global Intranet Trends report called "the reality of the company net".

Intranet and managing customer complaints - good for productivity and company culture

An article has been published about Siemens Building Technology: "Siemens BT Improves Global Productivity, Corporate Culture with Internal HR Complaints Tracking" that shows how managing customer complaints on the intranet (using a specific application) not only increases productivity but helps form the company culture. (Although the article is written by the software solution provider, it is not too commercial in style.)

Quotes from the article:

"In a company as distributed, dynamic and expansive as BT, employee productivity and corporate excellence hinge on effective internal communications. "In any large organization, there’s a gap between who wants to know something and who knows it," said John O’Sullivan, Program Manager for Complaints Management. "There’s a lot of internal movement, and when those with specific knowledge move to another position, they often create a missing link in the knowledge chain."

"Before, we just heard about complaints, but couldn’t measure or formally address them. Maybe everyone was experiencing the same problems but not communicating them globally," O’Sullivan said. "i-Sight makes it really transparent to see complaints, to understand them and measure them."

"Complaint management is an efficiency driver," he said. "We’re changing the culture and philosophy toward complaints, putting the focus on complaints as an opportunity to improve."

Questions from intranet managers present at JMC breakfast on "2.0 and globalisation, collaboration & personalisation"

The NetStrategy/JMC traditional January breakfast took place on January 16th at UNESCO.
There were 3 presentations, all around the theme of 2.0 and the role it can play in globalisation, collaboration and personalisation:

• Florence Devouard, Chair of the Wikimedia Foundation about the Wikipedia and how the system works, the goals, the projects, the economic models
• Stephen Roberts, Web Portal Coordinator for UNESCO about the multilingual aspects of the UNESCO presence on the internet and intranet
• Myself on results from the JMC Global Intranet Strategies Survey

The three presentations triggered questions from the audience, most of whom are intranet managers, and the purpose of this article is to share some key questions with you and to solicit your responses.

The breakfast took place in French so all the questions below are my translations, not the exact phrasing of the intranet managers present.
Note that although the event took place in France, and in French, the audience was highly international. On the podium itself, out of 4 people, only 1 was French! Practically all the intranet managers work in companies that have extensive activities in countries throughout the world, sometimes more than in France, and many use English as their official language or one of their official languages.

Some key questions:

1. In internal communication we attempt to structure information to reflect our strategic priorities. A wiki puts all the information at the same level. How can we reconcile these two approaches inside the same intranet? (in response to Florence's description of the Wikipedia)

2. Will the shared intranet disappear in favor of a highly personalised (by the individual) approach? (in reponse to my comments on how some companies where the intranet is the way of working today have a much higher degree of individual personalisation than other companies)

3. Are there many intranets today that employees can access using their cell phones? (in response to Florence's comment about the Wikipedia being accessed by cell phone, also to Stephen's final slide showing "the earth at night")

4. How should a company position Facebook vis a vis the company intranet? (in response to Florence's comments about how young people work today, and my own figures on the entry of 2.0 tools into the company intranet landscape)

5. Why is it important to have a global intranet team (representation from all parts of the company) if the intranet itself is customised for each part of the company? (in response to my figures about global teams, and the fact that companies where the intranet is the way of working today have more global intranet teams than other companies)

6. How is it possible to have an intranet in all employee languages given the cost and effort required to have content in many different languages? And does this not delay the access to information by all employees, because of the time required to translate? (in response to Stephen's talk about the multilingualism of the UNESCO portal)

I invite you to propose answers, give opinions and in general comment on the questions above. In a few days I will post the responses that were actually given in the breakfast itself.

Three people volunteered to take notes during the breakfast. You can read the articles/notes (in French) of Pierre Grenet (graduate student in a French university), Corinne Saurel, multicultural communication specialist, and see a mindmap by Cyril Drusne, webmaster of a website of a French philosophy magazine (all in French) on my French blog.

You can download the slides used during the breakfast (all in French except Stephen's which is in English) from the documents section of the French side of netjmc.com. Go down the page to after the 4th paragraph and you'll see the section entitled "intervenants et documents". The "earth at night" view I referred to is on the last slide in Stephen's presentation.

Intranet resources: numbers, "way of working", what next with 2.0?

Intranet teams always feel under-resourced. Are they?

First, let's take a look at some numbers. I am aware of 3 relatively recent sources which are in fact quite similar.

1. James Robertson's intranet resource survey conducted by StepTwo  in 2005, where he and Iain Barker published their findings: Intranet teams: survey results and key findings:

• Organisation with over 10,000 employees - from 10 to 13 intranet headcounts
• From 1,000 to 10,000 - around 7

2. A second source is the survey conducted at the Intrateam Event in 2007, organised by IntraTeam A/S.

• The 103 respondents were from organisations averaging 7,000 employees, had 5.4 intranet headcounts, which makes an average of 0.8 per 1,000 employees.

3. The third source is my own Global Intranet Survey of 2007  where I reached the average of 1 headcount for 2,300 employees. This is based on data per size category going up to very large organisations of over 100,000 people.  When I look at the smaller sizes within the survey population, the figures are similar to StepTwo and IntraTeam.

• Less than 1,000 employees - 3 intranet headcount
• 1 to 5,000 employees - 8 intranet headcount
• 5 to 15,000 employees - 12 intranet headcount
• 15 to 30,000 employees - 19 intranet headcount

When the intranet becomes the "way of working" do resources go down?
If we consider content providers part of the intranet team, the number of resources will vary according to how decentralised the publishing model is. Logically, the more the intranet is integrated into the way of working, the lower the official "intranet headcount" will be. Why? Because people who provide content will consider it part of their "normal" job. It will be considered the natural way of working, and, hopefully the CMS and/or content publishing systems (including 2.0 tools) will enable highly decentralised publishing. If they don't, then the intranet as the "way of working" will be crippled.

Low resources for what should be a strategic asset for an organisation
As we go higher up in size of organisations (the Global Intranet survey offers categories up to over 200,000 employees) the ratio of intranet headcount to employee base drops, but not always consistently. There are different explanations for this: 

• In large decentralised organisations, intranet managers and major content providers do not always know each other, nor are they aware of each other's existence.

• Another factor to consider is that organisations with a significant percentage of people who are not pc-connected may have an intranet headcount that is not proportional to the total employee base.

I personally conclude that big or small, the numbers we've seen in these 3 surveys are too low!

Will 2.0 publishing tools bring a new dimension to the intranet resource issues?
The easy of publishing content on a blog or wiki will make it easier for people throughout the organisation to contribute content. This raises issues for many organisations who fear they will lose control of both content (what is published and when) and quality (how it is published).
Among the big questions every organisation will have to answer are:

• What degree of regulation should be defined?
• Will groups of users be able to self-regulate?
• Should anonymous contributions be allowed?
• Should the intranet structure be defined so that official content and user-generated content should be published in separate places?
• Which in turn raises the question of what is meant by "official" versus "user-generated"? How are they different? How are they complementary? Does one threaten the other?

No right or wrong answers
I've heard intranet managers discussing these questions in several forums recently, and it's clear there are no right and wrong answers. I've concluded that there are 5 factors that play very great influence on this:

1. The organisational culture: an open, trustful environment or a suspicious one where people must be "careful" of what they say.
2. The industry sector: highly regulated with high legal risks or not.
3. The professional culture: for example, legal and financial people are more conservative than marketing and R&D people when it comes to sharing content
4. The tools in place: basically a question of how easy or hard to use, and centralised, partially or fully decentralised models.
5. The will to change at the top of the organisation:  senior management awareness and attitude to communication and knowledge sharing.

Please feel free to add comments about your own resource context and how you think 2.0 tools may or may not impact how intranets are managed and how content publishing will evolve.

P.S. You can now purchase the Global Intranet Trends Report and the Global Intranet Analysis Report. Let me know if you have any questions or require more information.