Globally local - locally global

The middle layer is disappearing

Lost in the middle or is the middle lost?

I wrote an article for the publication "Intranets Today" exactly 2 years ago entitled "Lost in the Middle".
Today I would give it a stronger title: "The Middle is Lost".

Seriously, I've been struck in recent months by the number of organizations I have seen that have decided to eliminate what I call the "middle layer". Decentralisation strategies in organisations result in giving more power to the out-lying parts of the organisation. Strategic guidelines come from the central head-quarters. So the centre and the entities end up being reinforced, and the middle layer severely weakened, even removed in some cases. The current economic context is pushing organizations to become leaner and meaner. Where better to cut than the middle?

This has big impact on intranet landscapes because many global intranet landscapes have relatively heavy "middle layers". So many times I've seen the divisional or regional intranets masquerade as head-quarter intranets. Sometimes, the middle layer intranet managers even attempt to prevent direct communication between the central intranet manager and the local intranet managers in their regions or divisions. I've personally experienced this when doing intranet audits. 

Removing the distance to be both "globally local and locally global"

Interestingly, when the middle layer is removed in intranets, things seem to work just as well as before. The challenges become how to provide guidance from a distance and in fact how to remove the distance:

• What is the right balance between "rules" and "guidelines", between "mandatory" and "highly recommended" when defining governance policies?
• How can you build trust, among intranet managers and with users?
• What tools and methods will help communication in a geographically dispersed group of content providers?
• How can you ensure that people in the centre listen and understand those in the entities and vice versa?

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I have provided a full reprint of the original article below as it was first appeared in June 2007 in Intranets Today. (Intranets is a subscription-based magazine, but authors can re-publish a few months after the initial publication.)

Lost in the Middle

The hard truth is that the majority of these intranets should not exist

The role of divisional and regional intranets can be both ambiguous and misleading. They are neither global nor local. Global intranet managers may feel they reproduce global content, thereby keeping users from the authoritative global site; local managers may feel they are unnecessary because they can best provide their local users with what they need. Thus, the divisional and regional intranet mangers are caught in the middle, running intranets with little guidance, other than their managers saying “we need to have an intranet.” The hard truth is that the majority of these intranets should not exist.
A global intranet has a clear mission: communicate about global strategy and values; provide strategic news; give access to organization-wide tools like employee directories and reference and policy documentation; and provide collaboration tools. A local intranet is closely integrated into day-to-day life. It provides local news; offers tools for reserving meeting rooms and ordering office supplies; has self-service centers for HR and administrative processes; publishes the canteen menu as well as local information such as traffic and weather conditions

Intermediary intranets, on the other hand, exist for less clear reasons. Some are created to deal with temporary objectives. For example, an organization undertaking acquisitions often positions acquired companies at a divisional level. An intranet is then created to communicate and facilitate the merger process but runs out of steam when the integration is completed

Companies doing business globally may create another type of intermediary intranet—regional ones that play a coordination role between global and local for marketing, training, administrative, and other needs. One would think this raison d'etre is more sustainable because the need appears permanent. However, regional intranets also find themselves "lost in the middle" as organizations implement global processes, rolling up regional content and services to the global level.

Two questions: What is unique about them? Who do they serve?
Two simple questions will help clarify if an intermediary-level intranet should exist. First, does it offer unique content and services that cannot (and should not) be found on other intranets in the organization? Second, does it serve only users who work within the same division or region, or do people elsewhere in the organization also need to use it? Examples of unique content and services include: information related to the specific business activities of the division, collaborative spaces used by managers to share regional or business-specific knowledge, and regional reporting tools. However even this uniqueness does not necessarily justify the existence of regional and divisional intranets. It simply means that certain services and content are best provided from the intermediary level. The appropriate place for users to find them may be elsewhere

If users across the organization need access to the knowledge in the expertise centers, they must be able to find it without knowing which region is the source. Marketing and customer-oriented information may be local or regional by definition, but others throughout the organization can learn from sharing experiences, lessons learned, and best practices. It makes sense to place these types of content at the global level where they can be found by subject and keyword. As business becomes more knowledge-based and organizations more global, there are few if any reasons for maintaining intermediary intranet sites

Forget history. Move on to real value and visibility.
Many of these intranets exist for historical reasons and, if the enterprise intranet strategy was to be redone, would probably never be created. When an organization does decide to simplify and optimize the intranet structure, the validity of these sites will be questioned. Managers working at the regional or divisional levels may well want to have an intranet. Unfortunately, the "I have an intranet site, therefore I exist" feeling is still alive and well. One solution is to give high visibility to content producers and less to intranet site owners. Build your intranet strategy, governance, and communication around the concept "I exist because I provide high quality content and services to everyone that needs it." Everyone will be a winner, especially the content contributors who will be more visible and valued, and the users who will be able to find what they need faster.

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?

KMWorld & Intranets - Tagging strategies and the impact on search in the intranet

Notable quotes and key ideas from Jordan Frank from Traction Software who spoke about "Tagging Strategies & E2.0 in Action". (This is not a product endorsement - only comments on the talk.)

Described 3 wiki use cases
1.  Unordered documentation (for example a wikipedia), glossary,  policies, FAQs
2. Ordered documentation, reference manuals, proposals
3. Project team collaboration - hybrid blog and wiki, combines wiki content - order and unordered
as well as blog type content - questions, issues, status, meeting notes, comments - chronological information.

Described 5 types of tags that can be defined, then used to slice and dice information and display it in different ways. A way of bringing some structure without limiting spontaneity and flexibility.

1. Content - bulleting, requirements, milestone, process, practice, etc
2. Importance: headline, alert, priority 1,2 etc, next, etc.
3. Status:  to do, done, stalled, skipped, waiting, no
4. Assignment: person, role, function, etc.
5. Category:  strength, weakness, threat, opportunity; 4 P's of marking, and so on (depends on the group)

Put this cocktail of tags together in a  project team space, and you can see a lot of different angles

Impact on search

• Search in the wiki/blog context can outperform the traditional intranet - wikis and blogs often reference information outside themselves. They are tagged in such a way that is more effective than in the average intranet CMS-driven content.
• You can use the wikis and blogs to weight the information around them, in the enterprise, which will help to make search better.

Frank included 3 case studies in his presentation: a competitive intelligence application in  Ipsen, a team in the Department of Defense (US) doing experiments with night vision equipment and a team in the National Health Services (UK).

How Intranet & Portal Landscapes Evolve

Over the past 5 years, I have been working on defining models for different types of intranets and portals. I have reached a set of 6 types that I have tested with both international companies, with government,  institutional and non-profit organisations.
In this post, I shall attempt to describe each model in a few words, and invite your comments, questions and opinions.

The diagram below is an extract from the 2007 Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Survey. There is a lot to be said for each type: its history, its relation to organisational or business strategies, its relevance for users, and so on.

The evolution from 1 to 6 is not systematic. In fact, intranets follow specific paths depending on the history of the organisation and how it is growing, evolving, down-sizing, devolving, etc. I will write more about this shortly.

In the meantime, comments welcome.

(The  2007 Global Intranet & Portal Strategies Report resulting from the currently on-going survey will use these models as one dimension of the consolidated profiles of participating companies. Contact me if you would like to participate and receive a free copy of the Report.)

Succeeding at Information Architecture in the Enterprise

James Robertson, StepTwo, intranet blogger at Column Two, has written a very good article on Succeeding at Information Architecture in the Enterprise. The article is published on Boxes and Arrows, the industry reference site for IA related articles.

My favourite quote from the article is quite far into the article, where James puts his finger on something I have experienced often:

"For example, the greatest enemy of our projects is not active resistance, but apathy. While information problems within the organisation are generally widely known, they are not seen as sufficiently urgent or important to be addressed as a matter of priority.

Enterprise IA projects must start by creating a sense of urgency within the organisation. A strong message and vision must be created for the projects, and communicated widely to build support at all levels of the organisation."

From producer logic to user logic: the greatest challenge you may have

Moving an intranet structure from a producer logic to a user logic is probably the hardest thing an intranet manager will ever have to do, especially in large, complex organisations.

Intranets tend to start with a site per department, a site per business unit, a site per function, etc. Even getting someone to take responsibility for each of these sites can be difficult.

Most intranets I've seen started with this type of structure at the beginning. And it's not surprising. Personally, I believe it was the only way to get large intranets going. It became a question of pride and visibility: I have a site, I exist.

A major problem on these sites was the mixture of information and services for the people of the department, their projects and "internal" news and updates, and the information and services the department provides to other employees. "Us for us" and "Us for them".
Was the site supposed to propose services to other employees or serve the needs of the members of that function or department?

In addition to this confusion, and along with a proliferation of sites, headquarters would decide to implement a so-called global home page. So-called, because it did not necessarily meet everyone's needs.

Nonetheless, competition started for positions on the Home Page. The top prize was to get a spot in the primary navigation bar. And there was only room for so many!

Moving from this situation to a user logic structure raises lots of issues:

• First, you have to know what users need.
• Then you have to define the primary navigation items - the high level breakdown of all the intranet content.
• Then you have to find owners for the sections, and that's where the difficulties lie.

For example, if you have a sections called Employee Services, Reference or Practical Information, who will be accountable for ensuring that they meet employees' needs? These categories do not fall naturally into the areas or responsibility of single departments or functions.

These sections will be fed by different sources of information, managed by different people, departments and functions. Each provider will be responsible for the quality of his/her information.

But who has overall responsibility? And even more tricky - how do you explain to the head of a department that his/her information will no longer be in a single site, but will be distributed through several different sites - none of which he/she owns.

Suddenly this department has lost visibility. This may be politically difficult. So what is the answer?

Several points come to mind:

• A negotiated intranet structure or what I call a "user architecture" with a limited number of high level categories must be defined and agreed upon by a workgroup with all major functions and departments represented.
• The members of this workgroup must be high enough in the organisational hierarchy to be able to make decisions, yet close enough to real users and operations to understand what people need.
• The proposed user architecture must be validated at a very high level in the organisation.
• The responsibilities for sections and for providing content must be incorporated into job and role definitions.
• Visibility must be given to content providers as much as to owners of sections.

In a global organisation, defining the high level user architecture may take months of discussion, dozens of web and telephone conferences among the workgroup members, and 2 or more rounds or proposals.

But in the end it is worth it. The final decisions will have a greater chance of being implemented, sustainable and understood.

I have not talked here about user testing, which of course needs to be done on the global scale before finalising any proposed structure.
Nor have I talked about how an external facilitator can be essential if the context is highly complex and political.
These would both be good subjects for another post!

Be a white hat SEO for your intranet: it's good for accessibility

SEO means Search Engine Optimiser.

Some are white hats; some are black hats. Just like in the old Wild West! Which in fact is not such as bad metaphor for the internet and even some intranets!

The SEOs with white hats conduct legitimate optimising of web pages to make the site come up appropriately in the Search Engine Results Pages (also called SERPs)(Wikipedia).

The back hat SEOs implement tricks to appear high in the results pages even if the web site is not necessarily relevant. The range of tricks is astonishing (many infringe copyright) and when search engines detect them, the site is usually thrown out of their index database. Read about spamdexing (Wikipedia).

I learned a lot about this when working with ProvenceBeyond.com, web site run by my husband and online since 1995. With an average of 1.5 million pages read per month as of last year, and a Google page rank of 7, the site is one of the most popular for information about Provence, where we live. I became very interested in optimising web sites for search engines because of different ups and downs Beyond has had over the last few years, and in particular each time Google does a major algorithm change and we all go through another Google dance.

Back to intranets: I soon realised that (1) most of the techniques used by white hat SEOs were similar if not identical to the guidelines given by accessibility experts. The very things you do to make your web site more search-engine friendly also make it more accessible. (2) These guidelines can also be applied to intranets.

Some examples off the top of my head:

• The pages should be focused on a single topic or single aspect of a topic so that they are relevant to specific search words. This makes them more relevant for users when they show up in the results page.
• Every page should have a unique, relevant title in the html coding and on the page itself
• Meta data for each page should be chosen carefully, be specific and fairly limited
• The meta data description should be unique, limited and relevant. This is what is often shown in the search engine results and provides the primary clues to the reader about your content.
• These descriptions should be short and focused, as the SERP (search engine results page) will only show a pre-defined number of characters or lines.
• Styles should include "title", "heading 1, "heading 2" and so on so that relationships and relative importance of blocks of text on the page are clear
• Links should be short text that make explicit what you'll get when you click ("large photo of building site" and not "see large photo")

You can imagine the improvement in the SERPs in your intranet, if the intranet pages followed these guidelines. I've seen so many results pages where the top results all look the same.
Of course, in an intranet context, the people responsible for indexing need to be in a "Google frame of mind". I mean they need to ensure that intranet sites that change often are indexed often. Google offers webmasters a tool (site maps) that let you tell Google how often to index your site.
I'm not a technical expert, and wonder if enterprise search engine solutions offer something similar?
Can someone answer this question?....

Technorati Tags: information architecture, intranet

Start with the Home Page? Every little bit helps - I hope

From more on starting with the Home Page:
"When we wrote the article, it was drawn directly from a client situation where it wasn't possible to redesign the whole site (no CMS, no resources, little support)."

Sounds familiar. I just finished a super short - I mean really short! - project from a very reputable organisation who asked me to "help us with the labels on our Home Page".

Sound familiar?

Well, after some hesitation, I decided to accept the job. I approached it pragmatically but with lots of second thoughts or shall we say doubts?

Here are the steps I followed in my thinking and in my report:

1. List the labels used on the HP and indicate what they suggest based on the words and their position on the page
2. Ask what content lies behind those labels.
3. (Feel frustrated because there are lots of fundamental issues you cannot deal with.)
4. Propose some changes in titles, based on what you learned about what they meant.
5. (Worry because you cannot do user tests, but don't worry because it can't be worse than it already is)
6. Suggest some regrouping of sub categories into high level categories to better meet user needs (versus the current source or producer logic) and recommend some design changes such as making navigational high level categories and the corporate directory available from all pages in the intranet.
7. (Wonder if you should have turned down the job because you know you're only touching the surface.)
8. Deliver the report with a personal presentation.
9. Accept their thanks, and know you could have done much better with just a bit more budget!

This job was great because it reminded me of what I too often forget: there are lots of organisations out there, doing the best they can. A little help from those who've already "been there, done that" can make a big difference.

When should you "do" the home page?

Interesting discussion on Peter Van Dijck's Guide to Ease blog where Peter, in reaction to an article by Iain Barker on James Robertsons's (StepTwo) blog says "starting with the homepage is the fast lane to political-hell." Here's Iain's full article.

My two cents:
1. The home page can't be redesigned on its own, nor can it be the starting point since it's the culmination of the rest.

2. The type of home page needed (i.e. balance between news; navigational stuff - links, primary navigation, quick links; strategic stuff; space allocated for customisation; space allocated for personalisation; and so on) depends on where the organisation is at ....

• culturally (e.g. is it trying to consolidate a shared vision after acquisitions or is the company culture strong and fairly unified?)
• strategically (e.g. has top management decided to strongly decentralise responsibility and budgets or are they moving towards more central control?)
• technically (e.g. is it possible to let users personalise on an individual basis? an it be customised for identified groups of users? can users be identified at log-in and get a country-specific page? does local IT determine the default home page?)

I was delighted to see that Iain's article triggered so much discussion - thanks Peter and James!
As an external consultant, I might add that "starting with the homepage is the fast lane to losing your job!" because it's real dynamite in most organisations - you've got to know your way around before you'll know how to best deal with the homepage.

I don't mean you should base your recommendations on what the organisation wants or thinks, but you'll know what arguments to use when presenting your recommendations. As the French would say, you'll know which "angles d'attaque" will work best.

Technorati Tags: information architecture