Globally local - locally global

The HR edge - joker card in the intranet game

The HR function is the most variable and least predictable among all the key intranet players. Depending on the organisation, HR may be strategic, may manage knowledge sharing and skills building, or may simply handle administration and pay.

Today I was with 2 different organisations, one a very large global company and the other a very large French company. Both had HR departments that are leading initiatives on their intranets - but in 2 very different ways.

Case 1 - the global company - "make the tools available and let the people drive the strategy"
One HR group has started a collaboration initiative in the global intranet that no one else in the organisation has been able to do. The only problem - temporary I believe - is that they think that people want to communicate for the pleasure of communicating.

They've therefore made some tools available (wikis for example) but wonder why people are not yet using them. They themselves love Facebook, LinkedIn, Second Life, etc. and don't realise that not everyone finds these tools immediately useful.

My prediction is that in 4 to 6 months, some teams and groups will have found meaningful ways to use the tools that HR has at least gotten out there.

The people will drive the strategy which will evolve based on how they use the tools.

Case 2 - the very large French organisation - "understand how they work, then give them what they need"
The second case is quite different. The company is beginning a "virtual desktop" project that is led by a person who is director of both HR and Communication.

This person is what I consider "premium HR" in that he has been in the company a long time, understands the people, is very connected himself, and wants to make the intranet "the place to do your work".

He understands the dynamics of different types of job profiles, knows which ones have standardised processes, which ones are specific to very local environments, which ones will soon be automated and therefore looking for new opportunities, and so on.

He has exactly the knowledge and expertise that is often missing from intranet projects and intranet steering committees. Too bad there are not more like him in the intranet game.

HR more present where intranets are the "way of working"
The 2007 Global Intranet Survey showed that companies where the intranet is the way of working today have a higher proportion of HR involvement on the Steering Committees.

Today, after meeting this person, it really hits home how much difference that can make.

Language reality checkpoints - moving targets

Language strategies are moving targets, evolving along with your enterprise strategy and business and operational changes. You need to start by asking the right questions, then once you know what you’d like to achieve, see how technology can help you, how much it will cost and what organizational changes are needed. This article proposes some “reality checkpoints” you will find helpful when analyzing your needs.

Reality 1: International enterprises have three types of languages: corporate, working and local.
Corporate languages are the official ones, the ones used for press releases for example. Some companies have up to 4 or 5 corporate languages. The working language is the one used horizontally across the enterprise, for example the one used by senior and middle managers for reporting, and by R&D engineers, experts and other managers for collaboration. Local languages are those used by employees in their “home environment” among colleagues in the same physical location.

Reality 2: One country does not equal one local language.
Some countries have more than one language, and many “share” the same language, even if there are significant differences. It’s useful to draw a language map of your enterprise, basing it on “comfortable” or “generic” languages. For example Dutch people are usually very comfortable in English, as are many Scandinavians and eastern Europeans. People in France, Canada, Morocco and other countries mutually use and understand what is in reality a hybrid, generic French.

Reality 3: Different languages are used for different purposes.
Look at the different types of content you have in your intranet: news, strategic messages, HR policies, product and sales information to name a few. Then look at the different users of this information: client-facing employees, internal communities across the company, employees in manufacturing facilities and so on. Build a matrix comparing type of content and usage with type of language (corporate, working or local), then add the dimension of “as is today” and “target” for what you would like to achieve.

Reality 4: Not all content merits the same quality of translation.
Criteria to take into account are: How critical is the content? Is it time-sensitive? Who needs it? Will it change soon? The more critical it is and/or the longer it is valid and/or the more people who need it, the more you can justify doing a high quality translation. If it is of interest to a small group, and/or may change soon and/or is not business critical, it is acceptable to use approximate translations, or let employers use automated translation tools on the intranet to get the general meaning.

You now have a starting point for determining what should be translated into which languages and with what degree of quality.

Reality 5: Localization and translation are different.
Distinguish between adapting content and changing the language. A message from the CEO will not be localized. It will flow from Corporate Communications to employees through carefully controlled translations. However, a new travel policy may be defined and published by HQ, then sent to the business groups who may contextualize it to make it relevant to their organizations, job titles, and so on. It may then be sent to country HR teams who will adapt it based on local travel contexts (distances, air and rail infrastructures) and translate it into the local language. The key here is to make sure your process specifies who is responsible for contextualization and/or translation at each point.

Reality 6: Hot news defies the most well thought-out strategies!
Is it better to get it out in English first, then, publish the corporate language translations as they are done? Or is it better to wait until the item is translated into the relevant languages, then publish worldwide simultaneously? The jury is still out on this one, and companies make different decisions usually depending on the nature and urgency of the announcement.

My overall advice is to set up a cross-company working group to look at these issues within your own enterprise, and to come up with several working hypotheses that you can then analyze from both technology, financial and organizational viewpoints. Be aware that you will probably need to adjust your strategy as your business and operational contexts evolve.

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This post is adapted from an article first published in Intranets Today where I write the column International Intranets. Paid subscription required to access articles ($170 for one year).

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.

Global intranets - more on paths, strategies and global integration

One of the Globally Local readers (hi Samuel!) has asked me to develop my comments on paths 2 and 3 in this diagram I used in my post "Global Intranets - Different Challenges, Different Paths"

Samuel says: "The difference between companies started in the USA with intranet evolution is interesting. What is your explanation for this fact? The way US companies are organized? Organizational culture?"

JMC response: In my experience, the majority of USA companies who expand abroad do so by following the path started at point 2A. They  "impose" their intranet structure in a natural way (passing through the 2B cookie cutter stage) as they grow gradually.  They usually have a strong IT culture and a high degree of self-confidence or "we prefer what is invented here" and are thereby able to achieve the move to an integrated portal relatively easily.

European companies already have a strong sense of diversity, primarily coming from the geographical proximity of highly different cultures and ways of doing things. Personally, I have never seen the cookie cutter approach coming from a European headquartered multinational or global company.

Samuel continues: "My company relates to path 3. We are now working on one global intranet. Why do you say: it is highly unlikely these organisations will do what we are doing now?"

JMC response: What I said when describing path 3 is:  "One day, the organisation may decide it needs a single point of entry (3C). However, it is highly unlikely that it will ever become more than a thin portal with news from HQ and the businesses, multiple links to the information resources and intranets of the organisation, and a corporate directory (although it will take years to include all the entities). It will primarily be a unifying layer of common information placed on top of the standardised model."

I believe this because unless the global company has a highly integrated business model, the final 3C point will be based on what is "common" to all employees of the global company and when you get right down to it, this is much less than one thinks from the theoretical or abstract viewpoint.

Samuel finishes with a Final Question: "To a large extent I agree with your model. But don't you think there's an intermediary step somewhere between 3B and C, or 2B and C etc in which local intranets are migrated one-by-one to one global intranet?"

JMC response: I have not yet seen it. The one-by-one step is a hard one to pull off. Do you start a  big one, who will usually resist, sometimes successfully? Or with a small one, where from the global viewpoint, it does not make a lot of difference? How do you achieve critical mass?

How can you be sure your integrated solution genuinely meets all needs unless you have discussed it with all types of your entities:

• different geographies,
• mature and young,
• big (lots of resources) and small (DIY intranets),
• those where the native language is the same as HQ and those where it is different,
• Etc.

And once you've discussed the integration strategy and migration path with the key players, how do you establish priorities, timelines and functionalities such as search and indexing while ensuring that all entities are treated fairly, respectfully and without disrupting their day-to-day operations?

Of course this can all be organised, but not, in my opinion, on a "one-by-one" basis. It requires well thought-out strategy with a maximum of communication, diplomacy and change management actions. Not the least of which must address the concerns of local senior managers who are "losing their intranets"!

Thank you for pushing me with your questions, Samuel. Keep them coming.

If other readers have comments or experiences to share, please join us!

New study on globalization focuses on languages

Byte Level Research and Marketing Sherpa have published the "Website Globalisation Report 2007".

It concentrates on language issues primarily and provides some interesting statistics. I have not read it yet, and will blog my comments once I've gone over it in detail. The topic is highly relevant to intranet managers even though the language context, criteria and approaches are quite different compared to web sites.

In the meantime, you might want to download a copy as it is free until April 11th.

Download link. Please note the report is referred to the the article "New research..." near the middle of the page, and not the Ecommerce benchmark Guide at the top of the page.

Technorati Tags: globalisation, globalization, localisation, localization

Report on Best Practices in Corporate Intranets

Avenue A / Razorfish has published a report entitled "Corporate Intranets: Best Practices." You can download a free copy here.

Shiv Singh, one of the principal authors, and I have an on-going conversation about differences between US-based and Europe-based multinational organisations.

Here are some of the comments I have on the maturity cycle described in the report. I've shared all of these ideas with Shiv, and we plan to continue our conversation together in San Jose at the end of October this year at KMWorld and Intranets, which is where we began the conversation last year (with James Robertson from StepTwo also, who had a still different perspective on intranet maturity). We had an interesting 3-dimensional view of the question!

By the way, if any of the Globally Local blog readers will be at the conference, you'd be very welcome to join us. We'll set a time and place later.

Differences between US and Europe head-quartered companies:

The intranet maturity cycle described is different from that I've seen in global companies with head-quarters based outside the US. Some examples:

The collaborative stage comes much sooner. It is one of the first phases of an intranet because of necessity. Decentralised teams have no other effective working platform.

Digital dashboards often come sooner too, especially for industrial and manufacturing companies. They are are often business unit, or division-oriented. I've seen several that are function-oriented, such as tracking downtime in a energy provider company.

True enterprise portals are very rare because large organisations today either have gone through or are undergoing changes from mergers, acquisition, and so on. IT environments are diverse and take years to consolidate. In some cases, it never happens because the entities are not fully owned by the "mother company" who is just a partner and partial shareholder. In these cases, the corporate intranet is the only tool shared by all employees in all parts of the organisation, but their access to it is very unequal - with huge differences in bandwidth, security, access to all information, and so on.

HR applications are also different per country for obvious local legislation reasons, so self-service applications tend to be at the country or BU level and come fairly late and possibly never at the corporate level.

For many of my readers who work in global organisations, this report will bring you insight into where American companies are coming from and why there are often challenges when intranet teams involving North Americans and Europeans try to work on issues such as information architecture, definition of governance policies, priorities for implementation, etc.

The chapter "Ideas to steal from the consumer world" caught my attention because it is a useful list of web 2.0 technologies that can be very powerful on intranets. It would be useful to have some best practices in this area also - once they begin to surface. Internal blog and wiki examples are now numerous, but we are lacking examples of internal applications in the other technologies.

Trend 2: "Intranet ROI will be pushed to the back burner" and my comments

I agree, but...sometimes intranet ROI has simply not been fully recognised yet (hard, soft or quantified soft) and this results in too low investment in intranet resources and budgets.

In my Intranet Strategies survey (undergoing consolidation and analysis now), roughly 50 % of the intranet managers say they do not have to produce ROI analysis for intranet investments.

I mentioned this to a group of intranet managers in Paris recently (from very large, global organisations with operations around the world) saying that one interpretation is that senior management is maturing (!) and understand intranets better. The majority of the room disagreed with me, saying that they did not have to produce ROI analysis simply because the investments were so low it was not necessary to justify them. This completely different interpretation of the data surprised me.

Once I've gotten deeper into the analysis of the survey results, I'll be able to compare data about the ROI question to other data such as headquarter country, age of the intranet and so on to see what conclusions can be drawn - if any - based on culture, age, and type of intranet involved.

One of the readers of my French blog "Carnet intranet" has sent me a list of statements from the report where he is in agreement, and others where he is not. If he agrees, I'll publish his comments.

You may also find it interesting to read the comments of Toby Ward, another senior intranet analyst and part of the virtual network of intranet bloggers. He offers his analysis of the report on IntranetBlog.

I'd like to thank Shiv and his co-authors for producing this report that has triggered this global conversation. Let's keep it moving.

Any additional comments, Shiv, Toby, others?

Global soccer cheering and global intranet challenges

Sitting in the Newark airport waiting for my flight to Amsterdam, 13:30 local time, I hear cheers coming regularly from all the bars and eating spots in the departure terminal.

It's strange to realise that there are groups of people around the world in different places all cheering (or not cheering!) at exactly the same time.

Yet we have so much trouble learning to think global. I heard a talk show this morning in my hotel room about Warren Buffet's decision about his contribution to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

The discussion was animated. Among the views expressed:

• He (Buffet) made his money in America, he should spend it here.
• The Foundation is going to be so big and powerful that it will get a corner on lots of things, just like he (Gates) did in his business.
• In answer to that, someone said "Get a corner on what? Helping people? Funding education?"

... and the discussion went on with many other comments I do not have space or time to quote.

The commentator summed up by saying that most people have trouble understanding that their birthplace is a question of luck, and that people like Gates and Buffet feel that when you are fortunate enough to be in a comfortable life, you owe something to the rest of the world who is less fortunate.

Whatever you may think about the subject above, you will perhaps agree that without a global view on both work and life, we limit ourselves.

And to bring my comments above back to the original purpose of this blog - global intranets - I'd like to point out that three things are necessary in achieving effective global intranets, and without them, you cannot succeed:

• global vision,
• humility
• and the ability to see things from other peoples' viewpoints

It sounds trite, but I've seen it so often. That's why global intranets are so hard to manage, and why communication and change management are more important than the intranet itself.

One of my clients said to me "You'll never get a truly global enterprise until senior managers have each lived with their families in a foreign country for at least a year or two."

National or professional culture?

A participant at my "Tendances Net " (net trends) breakfast in Paris in January asked me how to make company cultures evolve towards more willingness to accept bottom up communication. He asked if companies based in the US were more conducive to internal blogging than companies based in Europe, or France in his case.
France is world leader in blogs per capita. Yet, blogging internally in large companies has not really taken off.
I think professional cultures are more influential than country cultures: researchers will blog more than lawyers. Marketing people will blog more than sales people. IT companies integrate blogging faster than manufacturing companies. And all this regardless of nationality.
What do you think?