Globally local - locally global

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 wieght" 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.

Social networking benefits

We hear about this from time to time, but I actually saw it happen (and helped it happen). I saw two intranet managers from the same, very large global group connect to each other via NetJMC & Co (linkedin group for intranet managers) when one of them posted a question that the other had already worked on.
There was no way these two people could have come together other than through this or a similar initiative.

I have three comments about this:

• They connected via an external platform, created by an external party (me).
• They had no internal means of making this connection.
• Yet, they already knew each other through other means.

They can now choose to continue the discussion privately (one-to-one) or inside NetJMC & Co, hoping to attract other people with experience to share, or both.

Have you witnessed similar of other benefits from social networking within your organization? The more anecdotal evidence we can build as a community, the easier it will be for intranet managers to convince their organizations to experiment with social networking features.

Social networking features were among the lowest internally-used social media tools in the data from the 2008 Global Intranet Strategies survey. One percent have optimized social networking or use it throughout the organization. 28 percent are experimenting with it or use it in some parts of the organization. 70 percent say they have no intention to use it, at least for now!

User-generated content for employee directories

I was invited to speak at the J.Boye inaugural meeting of the intranet manager community of practice in Geneva today. (photo view from the window of the meeting room)

I talked about social media inside the enterprise, sharing figures, trends and firsthand experiences from the Global Intranet Trends for 2009 report.

What I found the most interesting part of the day was how the participants described the social media-based features they would like to implement in their intranets in the future.

Many of their wish-list features centered around the concept of user-generated content for enterprise directories. This is a definitely a serious gap in most intranets today. Few organizations have optimized employee directories and made them a key piece in enterprise collaboration.
The majority of organizations offer very little in flexibility and user-generated content in the directory. The numbers below are percentages of the full survey population who responded “yes, in most or all parts of our enterprise” to the following statements:

• Employee directory has a free text field where the employee can add in personal notes such as their expertise or skills. (22 percent)
• Employees can set up individual profile pages or “My pages” where they can publish information about themselves, their projects and their interests. (13 percent)
• Expertise is managed by a set of controlled terms so that expertise is comparable. (9 percent)
• The employee directory also includes information generated through social media applications such as projects and/or communities (project spaces, wikis) and blog posts, produced by the person. (4 percent)

You see here a slide from a more detailed presentation on employee directories I published for the members of NetJMC & Co (Linkedin group for intranet managers). The figures show that even Stage 3 intranets, theoretically the most mature, are not very advanced in this area.

Stage 2 leads here and I'm wondering why.
The chart compares the 3 Stages and you'll see that Stage 2 is ahead of Stage 3 in this area. This is interesting, because Stage 3 is more adventurous than Stage 2 in many usages of social media. We'll see in this year's survey if this difference when it comes to employee directories is confirmed or not. (see definitions of 3 stages here).

Dream a little - then make it happen.
Some comments from the participants in the J.Boye CoP today regarding a social media angle to directories:

• "We want to add information to the directory, make it a way for staff to declare their interests, make it searchable by all staff, tagged, and possible the beginning of a community of interest around topics."
• "We want to promote social networking so that it is easier for people to put together teams of experts. But we fear the reaction of 'why look outside our own department where we have our own experts?'."
• "If we implement Facebook-like pages, it will help the people in small units, scattered around the world to feel more a part of the group."
• "We need a dynamic, collaborative directory to share contacts among people. However, I'm not sure people will share their contacts with other people."
• "People are concerned about privacy. We want to build a well-designed, non-threatening application that makes it clear we are only sharing so-called public information, not private details."

Critical mass will be slow to come.
One thing for sure, if you open up your directories or build applications like above, you'll then be confronted with the challenge of getting employees to fill in information about themselves. Some employees will do it, of course. But the real business value will come when you get critical mass.
Lots of firsthand experiences and suggestions about overcoming this were offered by participants in the survey last year. I'll share some of them later.

In the meantime, any experiences or thoughts to share?

Intranet purpose: 3 angles

I got a question a few days ago from an intranet manager who asked me:

"I'm working with my team on developing a shared understanding of the purpose of our intranet and wondered if you had a view you'd be willing to share?"

Here's my approach:
When you define the purpose of an intranet, there are several angles to examine. Each angle requires making a choice. However, they are not mutually exclusive choices. They are choices about what you decide to emphasize.

Angle One
Is the primary purpose to communicate, collaborate or work?

Granted, people need to do all three and these functions should all be part of the purpose of the intranet.
The real questions are more detailed:

• Are we trying especially to improve communication? If so, are we talking about bottom-up, horizontal or top-down. Which flow is the weakest in our organization and how can we improve it?
• Does our business need better collaboration, across different silos for example? Are we working on projects that need more efficient ways of supporting virtual teams, or teams that include our employees and external partners? How can the intranet help?
• Do we have business processes that should be supported by the intranet? Through a portal? Through integration of core process applications?
• Do we have secondary processes that we could integrate into the intranet? This could save time for employees and process owners.

Simply put, where do we want to put the emphasis?

Angle Two
Look at the intranet and its services from three perspectives: the employee, the business and the enterprise.

Are you serving all three well?

• For example, is there anything going on in the economic environment that means you should give extra support to business managers?
• Is your enterprise undergoing a down-sizing or transformation program that requires special support to employees?
• And so on.

Needs change over time. Needs can also be very temporary but nonetheless critical for the company.

Simply put, take your head out of the intranet, and think about your company, your business and the people. What do they need?

Angle Three
Do you want to position your intranet as a layer or as an integrator?

• Do you envisage a flat, thin layer over a lot of specialized sites, each one independently serving its users?
• Do you envisage a customized, single entry point into all the company's information, applications and resources. I say "attempting" because doing this successfully is hard and rare.

If you are in the first case, you need to:

• Understand what is common to all, and ensure that it is found only on the intranet-portal, leaving the specialized content for the independent sites. Otherwise, these sites will become the entry points for their users who will thereby not see the common, shared information and messages. Or they will see out-of-date common content because the site manager will not have realized there has been an update.
• Specify the purpose and scope for each piece: the layer and the underlying sites. They will most likely - all taken together - cover all the points in Angles 1 and 2.

If you are in the second case, your challenge will be twofold:

• Identify meaningful and workable profile criteria for personalization
• Ensure that the user experience is meaningful, starting with the home page

The biggest challenge here is accepting that in most large enterprises, from 10 to 15% of the content and services are common and the rest is specific. This is a switch from the way most headquarters-based intranet teams see things.
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Readers: please join the conversation. How have you gone about defining the purpose of your intranet or portal?

Future intranet manager

A group of approximately 15 intranet managers in global companies came together in Paris last week for the first JMC Intranet Manager Breakfast in 2009.

This presentation was used to kick off the discussion - which was quite lively! The participants themselves shared views on a number of closely related topics that are described briefly on the last few slides in the deck.

Enjoy, and please comment. (If you want a copy of the presentation in pdf, drop me a note, introduce yourself, and I'll send it to you.)

Future Intranet Manager - what role?

View more presentations from Jane Mcconnell. (tags: virtual-work portal)