Globally local - locally global

7 principles for decentralized publishing

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...

A valuable strategic asset

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!

More intranet manager feedback

The Global Intranet Strategies Survey always closes with a final, open question: "Do you have any comments?"

So far this year, there have been a few suggestions for improvements for next year. One involved making it easier to use from a laptop (very good point!). It's really great to have participants contributing ideas for the 2010 survey.

Many participants have found the survey a stimulating trigger to thinking about their own intranets:

"This survey is not only thorough, but it has inspired us to starting thinking about new projects and how we can mature our Intranet strategy. It has been an educational tool - thank you!"

"Thank you for this valuable survey. I participated last year and learned a great deal from the experience and the results."

"Not only do I find receiving the results of this survey worth the time it takes to complete the questions, it offers a great learning experience just reading the material and thinking about whether or not we have considered those issues and topics in our organisation. Thank you!"

"This survey is good for us very isolated and not very visionary intranet workers as it gives us ideas!"

"Great survey. Very relevant for the online environment within organisations in 2009. Sign me up for 2010."

One participant used the final field to share his thoughts on the future of intranets:

"My overall feeling regarding the future of intranets:

• Greater time spent on 'social media literacy and training - consolidating rather than deploying
• Multi-layered communications and knowledge sharing will increase (html mixed with video, audio etc)
• Authentication will be the key - people want apps within the firewall that can be used and trusted
• Recession and swine flu will ensure intranet will be a port for knowledge sharing and virtual working
• Increasing demise of the 'newspaper' homepage for intranets. Now seen as a working task-based tool - not a newspaper
• Greater importance on finding, relating and engaging people within the intranet and invites to external users to enter controlled areas of the intranet"

You still have time to sign up. The survey closes at the end of August. (Requirements for participating.)

Social media on a global intranet - how do you choose?

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:

• List the 3 or 4 top goals of your organization (assuming your senior management have formulated and communicated them). If not, identify the top 3 or 4 goals of your intranet.
• Analyse each idea you've had so far, to see to what extent it supports the goals and what is involved in implementation.
• When analyzing, look at different aspects: 
  • How much value/what benefits can this bring to the organization? (A little, some, a lot).
  • Formulate what the value would be. Look at how it can enable people to do something new, something faster, or something more effectively than before.
  • Do this from the viewpoint of "the employee", "the business" and "the company as a whole".

• Identify what is required to implement it, and how fast you can do it?
  
  • (How much effort, what cost).
• Investigate whether or not you can build on something that exists already?
  
  • Do you have an internal champion for this idea?
  • Do you have an obvious place in the organization to do a pilot?
• Is this an idea that can work in other countries?
  
  • How would you involve them? At the beginning (highly recommended!) or later?
• What are the likely obstacles you will have to overcome to achieve our goal?
  
  • How can you manage these risks: what actions can you take to make success more likely?
• How will you know when you have achieved our goal?
  
  • What will have changed? What will be different?

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!

Why is enterprise search so hard?

Enterprise search is scary. We've all heard horror stories about how it does not work, how much it cost, and so on. Many of us have experienced this grief firsthand.
Just a couple of days ago, the intranet manager in an organisation I'm working with said to me "I wouldn't count on the search engine. I'll send you the links." That's exactly what he did as we visited his intranet and I identified things I wanted to go back and examine. This organisation is far ahead of many in that their intranet is accessible from outside the official workplace and authorised external people (like me) can get access within 24 hours. That's truly exceptional.
However, when it comes to enterprise search, they, like most organisations are in trouble.

The Global Intranet Trends for 2009 Report states that out of the 226 organisations who participated in the survey... "Only 10 percent are 'very satisfied' although another 40 percent are 'moderately satisfied'. That means half the participating organisations are dissatisfied with their search implementation. The figures are slightly more favourable than in the previous year's survey where 60 percent reported dissatisfaction. However, this situation is thought-provoking for organisations where access to the right information rapidly is a business success factor. " (page 49).

If you want to gain a better understanding of enterprise search, I highly recommend reading "Successful Enterprise Search Management" by Stephen Arnold and Martin White. Both are recognised experts in the field of search, and the cost and few hours required to read their book will bring you a good understanding of what's involved and what's required to succeed. There is more information on the Intranet Focus web site, and as you can see from the table of contents, you'll get a full view of search management from the introduction through to implementation.

Topics planned for this year's Global Intranet Strategies Survey

After considerable thought and field research, I've identified the key topic areas I plan to address in this year's Global Intranet Strategies Survey, which will result in the up-coming Global Intranet Trends for 2010 Report.

Now is your chance to influence the choice of topics. I've consulted with many intranet managers in both Intranet Professionals (Linkedin group for all intranet professionals, managed by Anne Mitchell) and NetJMC&Co (Linkedin group dedicated to intranet managers, managed by myself) as well as on this blog. (Thank you all.)
I'll be presenting this list this morning to a group of intranet managers from large organizations (at the JMC Paris breakfast) for their feedback.
I have posted this list here, hoping for your feedback!

What follows are the topic areas, not the actual formulation of the questions.

The positioning of the intranet within the organisation

• What systems and applications feed the intranet
• What processes are supported by the intranet (core business, secondary support such as HR)
• To what extent the intranet is the entry point into the organisation's information resources, systems, ...

Employee data

• What different information sources do organisations have for employee data (ERP, directory, phone system...)
• How it is used (filter, personalise, org charts...)
• How it is kept up to date (by employees, by HR, which methods, ...)

Collaboration, communities, virtual teams

• Moderation and management of content in these "spaces"
• Guidelines, regulation; what type, how much
• Which social media tools & technologies are being used and how

Governance and operational management

• Where is the intranet team placed in the organisation (which division or function and how high)
• Existence of high level steering group and membership

Areas to be explored through open questions: (each year 3 to 4 open questions are asked)

• What impact are social media having internally on how people work/collaborate/communicate?
• Is ROI measured on intranets and if so, how: indicators, methods?
• How is user-generate information being integrated with information coming from the traditional editorial process?
• Does an organisation's green agenda" (sustainable development programme) impact or influence the intranet and if so, how?

The topics that have been excluded this year (and will probably return in 2010) are:

• Search and findability
• Number of intranet resources (people)
• Content strategies
• Meta data

Marker and segmentation questions
There will of course be a small number of indicator questions that have been present every year since 2006, as well as a few questions about organisational demographics and types of intranets/portals that facilitate analysis and segmentation of the responses.

Feedback please!
Let me know your thoughts on these plans.
Is there a topic I've missed that you'd like to see included?
Have I included a topic that you feel is of only secondary importance?
Do you have any specific questions you'd like to see added?

A must-read for intranet managers: Twitter = 17 things

"Twitter makes altruism the work of a few seconds". This is a quote from Andrew McAfee's blog post "“17 Things we Used to Do”. Maybe "altruism" is not the right word for enterprises, but the spirit of the word is definitely right on.
This post is a must-read for intranet managers.

Andrew concludes his post with: "I think it’s important .... to keep in mind that not all exchanges are governed by incentives, mutual benefit, or economic rationality. Sometimes they’re governed by simple neighborliness, and Twitter is an awfully big neighborhood."

An enterprise is also "an awfully big neighbourhood" or should be!

I am still surprised that Twitter has not made a bigger entry into the enterprise neighbourhood. The data from the Global Intranet Strategies Survey from 2008 revealed that only 15 percent of the enterprises at Stage 3 (most advanced) intranets say that they are "testing" micro-blogging or "implementing it in some parts of the organisation". Zero % have optimised it or extended it to "general use".

Five percent of the enterprises with intranets at Stage 1 (least mature) are testing it, with 95 percent saying they are not considering it.

I expect the numbers to increase significantly this year. I sure hope they do!

Any of you out there with "Twitter behind the firewall" stories to share?

And, by the way, I should NOT be saying "behind the firewall". That's a concept that is changing rapidly as organisations are finally saying (out loud) that a lot of their project work involves external people, and that employees and external partners need to share information and therefore information systems.

So, any of you out there with "Twitter to help us do our jobs" stories to share?

The intranet - what is the elevator pitch?

I started an interesting discussion with my suggestion that the word "intranet" should be changed to something more relevant such as "web workplace" (which came from a brainstorming session inside NetJMC & Co on Linkedin).

The discussion has evolved in three places: this web, Column Two, and NetJMC & Co.

I've followed it closely in all 3 channels and have come to understand that intranet managers in companies where the intranet is already at Stage 3 do not feel a need to change the vocabulary.
This is for one of 2 reasons:

• They already have strong brands for their intranets that connote "online workplace"

or

• Their users are focused on services offered by the intranet and relate to those services more than the platform itself where those services reside (= the intranet).
  In these cases, the intranet has become invisible and is simply a transparent platform for essential services.

Organisations where the intranet is not yet positioned as essential work tools DO feel the need for a new term. "Web workplace" resonates with them. They believe it will help them trigger senior management interest because the term carries the purpose of what they are trying to achieve.

• "Thanks for opening up the discussion about what terms could replace the outdated intranet. "
• "To me, telling someone that I manage strategic direction and content management for our web workplace for employees provides a much clearer understanding of my role than referring to the intranet."

It is easy to say that words do not make a difference: it's what we do that counts. That's true when we are in the "friendly territory” of intranet-land where Intranet managers talk to each other and to business people who have "understood".

When we move to potentially "hostile territory" (just joking, but only a little) we need to change our language. I have a client I'm helping prepare for a 15 minute presentation to the top management board of his company. (90,000 employees). He has a short slot on their heavily-charged agenda (at a moment where the economic climate is tough) to request a multi-million euro budget to build an enterprise portal over the next 3 years.

What should he call the “thing” he is talking about? The intranet? The "enterprise portal"? The “web workplace”? How does he explain what he is talking about? Which term speaks for itself?

Words make a difference. They trigger reactions. They represent values. They are the “elevator pitch” which is what most intranet managers have a lot of trouble doing.

What term to you think works best from a "senior management perception" viewpoint?

Web Workplace - a new word for intranet?

We need to find a new word for "intranet".
Why? Because we need to wake people up, lose the "dead weight" we have with the word "intranet", help people - especially top management - focus on why intranets are business critical.

I turned to the members of NetJMC & Co, the Intranet manager group I run on Linkedin (over 300 members around the globe), and asked them the following...

"The word "intranet" is out-of-date in my opinion. I'm often asked how I defined "intranet" for the Global Intranet Strategies Survey, and I confess it is getting harder and harder to have a meaningful definition.
I'm considering concepts like "the intranet-enabled workplace" or the "web-enabled workplace" or the "connected workplace".
I need to find a phrase that embraces all the things intranets do (or could do) for people and for business.
Can you help me find a phrase or word for this?
Ideally we need a term or phrase that also speaks to senior management. "

Here's the brainstorm that resulted from my question:

• Web office
• Online office
• Online interactive workspace
• Online workspace
• Online interactive website
• Online desktop
• Online workplace
• My workplace available anytime anywere
• Employee Connected Office
• Collaborative Employee Workspace
• Mobile workspace
• My deskspace
• Workspace anywhere
• Employee Portal
• Resource and Collaboration Portal
• Communications and information mangement platform / portal
• Workplace Web - getting business done - Together
• Company information, news and collaboration portal
• Workplace Channel
• Communication and Information Channel
• Workplace Connections
• Web Workplace
• My Collective and Personal Workplace
• Adaptive Workplace
• Intranet Portal
• Workbench
• Online-Desktop

My personal favourite from this list is the Web Workplace. I like it because:

• It is not limited to internal, and expresses the business need to provide workspaces for mixed teams (internal + external)
• It focuses on work, business, what people need to do.
• It can be abbreviated into WW!

I sent out a message on Twitter about my preference, and got the following responses:

Response: "Web workplace. Not bad, but doesn't really indicate anything internal, to me. Or was that intentional?"
JMC - YES, that is part of the intention!

Response: A "Web workplace" is for Digital Nomads & is intra-extra-internet enabled.
JMC - Exactly!

Response: "Doesn't get my vote definitely needs to be a one word solution for me"
JMC - I agree, but what...???

Response: "I like it"
JMC - Me too!

Response: "Not sure if i agree with the "web" part... in my company we are creating a new "intranet" based on a RIA application"
JMC - Good point. Could you elaborate a little?

So, the conversation is not yet finished.....

Please give me your ideas on this. I feel it is really an important issue and can be part of the solution for making intranets more meaningful and visible to management, and thereby better resourced and supported in general.
What are your favourites from the list above? Do you have other words to suggest?
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P.S. If you're an intranet manager and haven't yet joined NetJMC & Co, drop me an email or click here to request membership: http://www.linkedin.com/e/gis/1360277

Design and emotion- what about intranet design?

 Don Norman and "The three ways that good design makes you happy" from way back in time - 2003 that is, on the TED talks.

How can we design intranets that make people happy? It's definitely not a question of color and images, so what is it? 

I believe it is like the tea pot Don Norman shows us:

• Every angle has meaning.
• Everything you need to do to make tea can be done with this tea pot.
• It is simple and easy to use.