Sean R. Nicholson

Ahhh…reinventing the wheel. It’s an age-old tradition for a lot of organizations, especially when it comes to changes in technology.  Some new class of productivity software comes along and the entire IT organization has to come to a grinding halt while a new strategy is defined. Remember stopping to define an ECM strategy? Or maybe it was an ERP strategy. Or could it have been an CRM strategy. Don’t even think about that amount of time and energy devoted to developing a .com or eCommerce strategy!

Sound familiar? Ever been locked in the “paralysis by analysis” situation where you can’t get anyone to decide because there are just too many so-called “experts”, “gurus” and “SMEs” guiding the conversation? Ever felt like you’d rather just DO something rather than sitting in yet another, non-productive meeting discussing what might happen?

Unfortunately, many organizations are living this situation right now when it comes to defining their social media strategy.  So many new tools, so many new rules, so many unknown risks…where to begin??  But the reality is, the questions being asked aren’t that different from those that have been explored in the past.

For instance, these are some of the questions/concerns facing the enterprise with respect to social media:

1) How do we engage our customers?

2) What tools should we use to listen to our customers, capture information, and interact?

3) What do we do if a customer says something bad?

4) What do we do if a customer says something good?

5) How can we best learn from our customers to create new products and services?

6) How can we make sure that we’re communicating effectively with our customers?

7) Are there experts out there that can help us engage our customers?

8 ) Do we need to put policies and guidelines in place setting expectations for how we interact with our customers?

9) How do we keep our customers coming back and engaging with us?

10) How do we measure the Return on Investment (ROI) on customer engagement?

Sounds about right…Right? Now, flash back 10 years and see if these (slightly modified) questions sound familiar:

1) How do we engage our employees?

2) What tools should we use to listen to our employees, capture information, and interact?

3) What do we do if an employee says something bad?

4) What do we do if an employee says something good?

5) How can we best learn from our employees to create new products and services?

6) How can we make sure that we’re communicating effectively with our employees?

7) Are there experts out there that can help us engage our employees?

8 ) Do we need to put policies and guidelines in place setting expectations for how we interact with our employees?

9) How do we keep our employees coming back and engaging with us?

10) How do we measure the Return on Investment (ROI) on employee engagement?

Sound familiar? These are the questions that organizations found themselves facing when they were analyzing the value of a corporate Intranet portal and the additional of Web 2.0 components like discussion forums, knowledge bases, and (more recently) wikis and blogs. Seems like very similar questions have been in front of organizations for a long time and, in most, serious time and energy has been devoted to answering the employee engagement questions.

My point isn’t to say that employees and customers are the same and the same rules should apply. Having worked extensively in the Intranet space and currently being very involved in defining organizational social media strategies, I will tell you that employees and customers are very different. My point, however, is that if you are in the process of developing your social media strategy and you haven’t invited your Intranet Manager to the table for the discussions, you are missing out on some potentially useful experience and input.

Maybe, by involving your Intranet Manager, you won’t have to reinvent the wheel….just modify one that already exists.

Sean R. Nicholson

The launch of the popular Social Network movie coupled with Facebook’s recent enhancements to their Groups functionality has fueled the requests for my opinion as to whether Facebook is becoming a viable platform for an organizational Intranet. I’ll be writing a blog post this weekend detailing the technical/functional reasons that Facebook still isn’t a good choice, but in the meantime I wanted to share this funny video pointing out that many employees just don’t take Facebook seriously.

One of the most difficult hurdles for any Intranet to overcome is adoption and if your employees don’t take the Intranet and the content that it hosts seriously, then adoption will never follow. So, in light of that….is this how your employees feel about Facebook?

I’m not saying that Facebook will never be a suitable platform, it’s just not ready right now.

Sean R. Nicholson

Let’s face it, new employees who come to your organization right out of college are probably pretty familiar with social media. Most have been on Facebook since its inception and some have been Tweeting nearly as long. The question is whether they understand the business acumen and fundamental principles of social networking to do it correctly in the workplace.

Recently, Andrew McAffee wrote an outstanding article on two common mistakes that Millennials make at work.  The article emphasizes the fact that Generation Y has been trained to overshare their personal information, which can result in the first mistake of creating informational clutter in the workplace. The second mistake comes from a lack of an organizational hierarchy and the appropriate channels and communication practices to be used in the workplace.

For instance, posting a message on an executive’s social Intranet Wall saying “That preso was just 2 cool! I’d luv to wrk on the project if you need a hand!” may not impress the executive and may end up damaging the employees reputation. The reality is that Millennials need assistance in understanding the workplace and the difference between sharing information on Facebook and leveraging the social Intranet at their company. Any training focused on Gen-Y needs to help them understand the rules of the workplace, any policies that are in place, and the difference between social sharing and workplace sharing.

The issue of training isn’t limited to the Millennials, though. Take a look at the Baby Boomers and you may run into highly-efficient employees who are heavily reliant on phones and email and have no understanding or desire to learn about social media. “The Facebook” or “The Twitter” are just toys that kids play with and may not have any perceived value in the workplace. These social media ostriches require a different approach for training on the value of social media.  Often, the value needs to be tied to workplace productivity, return on investment for the effort, or furthering a business goal. Often, tying proposed social activities to customer service or call center activities can provide them with the frame of reference to demonstrate that social media isn’t just people talking about what they had for breakfast.

Gen-Xers aren’t immune to the issue, either. Although Gen-Xers grew up around computers, email, and the Web some have a tough time seeing social media as more than just an activity for connecting with old high school friends. Educating them on the value of collaboration and the cost savings that can be associated with it will be required to get buy-in on a new social Intranet.

The fact is, social media brings a new style of communication into the workplace and social Intranets that offer features such as status updates, wikis, threaded discussions, and microblogging also require a new level of training to help employees understand the new tools, leverage it to the fullest in their daily activities, and share only what is business appropriate.

Have a great story about a success in training your organization on the use of a social Intranet? Feel free to add a comment and let others know about the approach you took or success/failure story.

Sean R. Nicholson

Recently, there has been a lot of discussion about whether Facebook is a suitable platform for organizations to build a corporate intranet. The fact that most employees are already on Facebook, combined with the low pricepoint (aka Free) often leads fiscally-focused executives to make statements like “Why build an Intranet, we can just use Facebook.” To see some interesting opinions on the topic, I suggest you check out this thread on the WorldWide Intranet Challenge LinkedIn group.

If you have ever thought about building your organizational intranet on Facebook, I suggest you stop and take a moment to read the following paragraph:

Facebook has no interest in being your organizational Intranet. They don’t care about your privacy or your organizational Intellectual Property. Facebook cares about attracting as many visitors to their site each day as possible so they can increase their ad buy and make more money. They love to release security-flawed features to generate lots of buzz in the press, which generates more traffic and makes them more money.

So, let’s put this issue to rest, once and for all. Facebook is not a corporate Intranet platform. Facebook does not care about your business. Facebook doesn’t care about your employees. If you want to trust your organizational information and intellectual property to a company like Facebook, then please let me know so I can stay as far away from your stock and products as possible.

Sean R. Nicholson

It never ceases to amaze me how few people trust their organizational intranets. A tool that was designed specifically for the purpose of helping employees do their job better and faster is often the joke of the water cooler. Yet organizations knowingly ignore the fact that employees don’t use or trust the information stored on their intranet.

Periodically, I have the great opportunity to sit in front of a group of employees and ask them about their intranet experiences. Often, it’s in anticipation of an intranet revamp, so the need for a “do-over” or an evolution has already been defined at some level. While the individual users and comments might be different, they usually go start with something like this:

Me: Who here uses the Intranet fairly consistently?  (half the hands in the room go up).

Me: For those of you whose hands aren’t up, why don’t you use it?

Response #1: The content stinks.

Response #2: I can never find what I’m looking for.

Response #3: Yeah, and when you do find something that looks right, it’s two years old.

Response #4: The last time I searched the intranet for the latest information on new Java libraries, the first five search results were the hours and

specials at the local coffee shop.

Me: For those of you with your hands up, (you can put them down now) tell me how you choose to use the intranet?

Response #1: I use the employee directory. It’s right most of the time because it’s tied to our active directory and employees are added/removed as they join or leave the company.

Response #2: I use it to see what’s being served in the cafeteria. They do a good job of updating the menu each morning.

Response #3: I used it to download the forms to change my 401(k). I did have to choose between last year’s forms and this year’s forms, but I navigated directly to the HR landing page, and didn’t use the search tool.

…and the conversation goes on for another hour. Each employee sharing their stories of frustration or limited successes with the intranet platform. One failure feeds another employee’s stories and the negative sentiment in the room grows. Frustrations often include multiple logins, confusing navigation, multiple windows, and ugly design but the vast majority of their frustrations are around the relevancy of content, outdated information, and poor search results.

Now, imagine for a moment that, instead of the corporate intranet, these comments and stories were being said about another employee. If an employee had a history of providing inaccurate information, was behind the times and slow in their responses, and didn’t collaborate well with other employees it’s highly likely that they wouldn’t survive their next performance review. Yet organizations continue to ignore the fact that a tool that is key to their business success is unable to provide employees what they need. In fact, many companies invest more money in licensing fees and servers for their Intranet than any single employee in their company. Yet, the investment in keeping the content fresh and relevant is minimal. When you present your Intranet in this light, it seems like a logical deduction that an annual review of the performance of your Intranet is worthwhile.

The conversation continues to get more interesting as the focus shifts toward what the employees would like from their Intranet:

Me: First, are you interested in having a functional Intranet? If so, why?

Response #1: Definitely! It would make my job a lot easier if I could find updates to our products and pricing easily.

Response #2: Not really, we purchased a different tool for our group to store information because the Intranet is is bad.

Response #3: I would use the Intranet if I knew the search worked. Right now, it’s just too hard to navigate around a hope that I find what I’m looking for.

Response #4: I think a good Intranet would really help the company do business. It just needs to be a lot easier to use. No one asks the employees how they want it to work, they just give us a tool and say “Figure it out”.

Response #5: They should probably just start over and build something like Facebook. I’m already friends with most of my co-workers, anyway, so it would be easier if we could just make a private place on Facebook where we could share company information.

From these responses, it clear that the desire for an intranet exists in some format. Even responses #2 and #5 indicate that there is a need for a tool, they just opted to use something else or want a different tool since the organizational intranet wasn’t meeting their needs.

Steps To Develop Organizational Trust In Your Intranets

1) Ask Your Employees For Input

Most employees that I talk to feel like they have no ownership or input to the Intranet. They view it as a tool that is given to them by the organization and its structure and content are set in stone. They are, however, interested in making it a better tool and have plenty of input on how to improve it. Some of the input is good, some of it is wishful thinking, and some of it is so focused on their specific job that it may not be useful to others. Little changes to navigation and content, based on their feedback, does increase positive sentiment and gives employees a sense that they had an impact on organizational change.

2) Give Employees The Chance To Shape Content

Because content woes are top of the list when it comes to frustration with their intranet, many employees would welcome the opportunity to contribute content or, at the minimum, provide feedback on the value of the content. Although most aren’t interested in writing blogs, they would like to be able to suggest content or changes to ensure that information is accurate. To accommodate this, feedback forms, commenting systems, and content rating tools can help employees flag or suggest content. By providing these tool to employees, organizations remove the excuse that “content isn’t useful” and put the onus on the employee to shape the quality of the content.

3) Conduct Scheduled Content Audits

Empowering your employees to help shape the quality of the content doesn’t mean that employees responsible for maintaining the Intranet can sit back and relax. Consistent auditing of search logs to find failed searches (those with zero results returned) can help determine a need for creating or re-purposing content. In addition, face-to-face conversations with your employees to ask what they would find valuable can result in a gold mine of  content requests. Obviously, the need to evaluate future functionality is a key responsibility, ensuring that employees are armed with tools and features that will help them in their daily activities.

4) Optimize Your Pages To Work With Your Search Engine

Although it’s tempting to blame the technology behind poor or failed search results, it’s usually not the intranet search engine that’s causing failed searches. Instead, it’s likely poor search optimization or old content that results in failed searches and employee frustration. Taking some time to understand the fundamentals of search engine optimization and tuning your pages to meet the search patterns of your employees can make a huge difference, without having to rip out and replace your search engine.

Just like any employee in your organization, neglect of your Intranet will result in poor performance and dissatisfaction. If you’re really interested in improving your business processes, doing more with less, and helping your employees do their job try investing a little more time and energy into ensuring that your content is good and is able to be found.

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Sean R. Nicholson

As the centralized point of access to organizational information, your Intranet portal may also represent a potential security risk. This is especially true if your portal is accessible to employees via the Internet. If your Intranet authentication is tied to your Active Directory or LDAP, be sure to put policies in place that ensure that your employees change their passwords on a periodic basis. In addition, be sure to encourage (or require) employees to use “strong” passwords, that are comprised of a combination of alpha characters, numbers, symbols and mixed cases.

Unfortunately, according to Wired Magazine the most common password successfully used in a recent Hotmail attack was “123456″. Yes, that’s correct…virtually the same password used by Mel Brooks in Spaceballs to secure his luggage.

As an Intranet professional, it’s important that your employee communications focus on employee education around the topic of frequent password changes, password strength, and their ability to identify and avoid password phishing scams. The Journal of Accountancy provides a great analysis of different types of passwords and their ability to be compromised, as well as a five step process that can be followed to analyze your existing application password strength.

1. Start by developing a full understanding of how your computer system stores passwords.

2. Determine whether your encryption method is powerful enough to safeguard your system, and ensure users choose passwords wisely.

3. If your analysis reveals that your password security is inadequate, begin your search for improvements at the lower end of the cost spectrum.

4. If your assessment reveals that you need an entirely new password management system, look for “yes” answers to each of the following four questions when you evaluate products. (click here to view the additional 4 questions)

5. Regardless of how confident you are in the accuracy and completeness of your security assessment and any remedial solutions you may choose, consider conducting a penetration test.

Source: Journal of Accountancy, July 2009.

If you haven’t run a recent campaign reminding employees of their responsibility to keep corporate information secure, it might be a good time to put one together and teach your employees how to avoid weak passwords and phishing scams.

Angie Cullen

When developing your Intranet, it’s best not to develop in a vacuum. You may not be the best person to make decisions on how employees will use the intranet to do their job.  Be sure to identify employees that will be involved in the maintenance of the portal and get everyone involved in the design process. Create an Intranet Governance Council that will include at least one member from each department throughout your company. Bigger departments might have 2 or 3.  Let the members of the governance council represent their department and tell you what employees in their department need to be able to do their job more efficiently.

Be sure to let the members of the governance council know that while you value their input and opinions, the final decisions regarding design and functionality are the responsibility of the Intranet team.  In other words, everything that the members of the governance council submit on their wish list, might not make it in to the final product. By setting this clear direction and making the members of the council a part of the design process, you can leverage their excitement and promote collaboration, while ensuring that the Intranet design meets the needs of all departments and employees.

Sean R. Nicholson

Regardless of whether you are a seasoned Intranet Professional or just getting started with your first Intranet design, I highly recommend adding What Every Intranet Team Should Know by James Robertson of Step Two Designs to your library.  At 110 pages, this handbook packs a wealth of valuable information into a quick-read offering a background understanding of the evolution of Intranets, guidance on identifying the needs of your organization, and useful tips on designing a solution that meets those needs.

What Every Intranet Team Should Know by James Robertson

Rather than trying to educate the reader on every possible situation that could be encountered in an Intranet build or redesign, Robertson focuses on sharing industry best practices and real-world experiences that the reader can easily adopt.  Robertson’s straight-forward writing style, coupled with sample images and supporting graphics makes the content easy to understand and apply.

Although the book might appear small at first glance, Robertson proves that good things come in small packages by tackling complex issues such as requirements gathering, usability design, and governance. Each chapter provides clear, actionable steps while surfacing potential pitfalls and providing guidance on how to avoid them.  Throughout the text, Robertson progressively lays out the fundamental concepts necessary to understand not only how to design an Intranet, but how to design one that your employees will actually use.

What Every Intranet Team Should Know has found a permanent place in my library and will become a must-read for those involved in current and future Intranet projects.

Sean R. Nicholson

Building a great Intranet environment is often about balance. Balancing acts like those between openness and security,  corporate needs and individual desires, and the balance between content and culture often make for long meetings and tough decisions. Internal communicators and Intranet managers often have to determine how much to share and the right format in which to share it.

Take, for instance, the topic of how much strategic corporate information should be shared internally with employees, and at what time.  Some organizations are willing to post strategic information like corporate earnings and key performance indicators on their Intranet in real time or prior to formal announcements. Others are concerned about employees sharing strategic information outside the firewall where it could impact stock prices or competitive behavior. Usually, the key cultural component as to whether this information is shared with employees is one of trust.  It boils down to whether the organizational leaders trust that employees understand the critical nature of the information being shared.

In situations where a strong bond of trust has been formed between the executive layer and the employees, leaders see the sharing of this information as critical to the success and growth of the company since it tells employees where they are doing well and points out where they can focus their energies to improve. These organizations often use the Intranet to openly share corporate goals and strategies, as well as the performance metrics to measure success. Along with the communication comes a consistent message of the importance of using the information internally and only sharing when and to whom it is appropriate.

At companies where that bond of trust has not been formed or has been previously violated, executives often feel that employees simply don’t understand that sharing earnings or performance information prior to formal announcements can have an adverse impact on the operation of the organization?In these cases, Intranets are often void of critical performance measures and are used, instead,  as communication vehicles for corporate events, product announcements, and HR information. Each of these are important functions, but of little value to the employee in determining whether their day-to-day activities are helping the organization advance its corporate goals and strategies.

In organizations where executives prefer to guard the information and release it to employees at the same time they announce to the public, employees often feel as though they aren’t “in the loop” and, at times, learn about important corporate strategies online, from local news sources, or colleagues at other companies. Hearing corporate performance news and announcements from third parties, rather than hearing the news directly from their executives, often propagates a feeling of mistrust between executives and the employees.

Realistically, it would be naive to state that the best practice is to always share strategic information with employees via the Intranet. The reality is that in large organizations or those with little governance, it just may not be reasonable to assume that providing real-time feedback on performance indicators is possible without having the information leak. Even in small organizations, disgruntled employees or accidental disclosure may result in the information leaking.

Therefore, the best practice for when to share key performance metrics will have to be based on the balance of trust within the organization and the employees’ understanding of when/where/to whom it is appropriate to share. As a result, Intranet professionals will have to work to educate employees as to the importance of keeping the information secure and disclosing only when their organizational culture dictates.

Thoughts, comments, or experiences? I always welcome feedback via comments!

Sean R. Nicholson

Searchability is key in allowing your users to find content on your Intranet. While most users are happy with conducting a simple keyword search using a single text box, an advanced search feature allows users to find information and find it faster.

In typical Intranet search results, users are presented with content and documents that contain the keyword or keyphrase they have entered. What’s often not present is the context in which the information is stored. For example, suppose that the user searched for the phrase “key performance indicators”. Likely, they’d receive a lot of content and documents in their results, but the results may not necessarily specify whether the results are KPIs for the Sales department, IT, Marketing or another department.  As a result, the user spends time sifting through the information to find the specific content they are seeking.

By leveraging advanced search functionality, Intranet Administrators can provide their users with the ability to refine their search sources prior to ever clicking the “Search” button. Maybe the user is only interested in the PKIs that are located within the IT departmental content and are stored in PowerPoint documents. By using advanced search, this type of filtering could be offered making it easier to find the correct content located in the appropriate context.