Angie Cullen

When building a business case around a social Intranet, there are a few key components to consider.  Here are five suggested features that you might ask your potential vendors to demonstrate.

Forum Collaboration
By using a forum or threaded discussion  tool, you can engage your employees around specific topics and challenge them to start talking about topics that matter to them. For instance, Project Managers might discuss the project they are working on along with the status of that project, IT employees may share valuable technology updates, and HR personnel may share links to recruiting best practices.  Be sure that the tool  allows employees to create a profile and specify the topics they are interested in. This also provides a way for employees to get to know their colleagues and share information.

Social Tagging and Ranking
Although search engines are getting smarter by the minute, nothing replaces the ability for an employee to indicate whether an article or piece of content was useful to them in their job. Especially if the search engine takes that ranking into account in ordering their search results (e.g. articles they ranked higher, should be placed higher in the results). In addition, if employees are able to add their own keywords that helps influence search results, they will be able to find information that is more meaningful to them much more quickly.

Document Storage & Collaboration
With a document storage and collaboration tool, employees can find and share documents easily.  This tool will allow employees to create, open and edit documents by placing them in a centralized location that’s easy to access. Having this tool will allow multiple users to work and collaborate in real-time, based on the permissions that are set by the owner, on a document simultaneously.  A document collaboration tool can also help you cut down on storage costs. Employees will no longer need to email a status report, PowerPoint deck, or Excel spreadsheet to the entire project team (these multiple copies take up storage on the email server). Instead, they can simply email a link to the single copy stored on the Intranet and use check in/check out functionality to edit that single document.

Expertise Finder
Employees consistently rank the company directory as one of the most used functions of their Intranet. An expertise finder takes that directory one step further and allows users to identify employees that hold specific knowledge or expertise. This is paired with the ability for employees to create their social profiles and self-report their skills. Similar to tagging content, employees should also be able to tag other employees with terms that they could use in the future to find that expert again (e.g. tagging someone as “Intranet administrator”)

Knowledge Base or Wiki
Your employees have a great wealth of knowledge and given the opportunity many of them want to share it. Be sure to ask your potential Intranet vendors whether they offer a knowledge base or wiki functionality that would allow your employees to quickly, easily share nuggets of knowledge that may assist other employees. Keep in mind that it must be easy to use and be integrated with the search functionality so employees can use a single search to locate people or content.

These five key components  are just a few of the items to consider when reviewing potential software solutions for a social Intranet. Be sure to ask each of your vendors to demonstrate the functionality and consider inviting a few of your end users or members of your Intranet Governance Council to the demos to get their input, as well.

Have additional features that you think would be critical to a social Intranet? Feel free to leave a comment and let us know what you think is important or what has turned out to be a popular social feature for your employees.

Sean R. Nicholson

Sometimes opportunities knock quietly….and sometimes they hit us with explosive force. The trouble is, we often miss them even though they are staring us right in the face. As an example, take a look at the recent volcanic explosion in Iceland. This natural disaster has demonstrated the need for business travelers to have access to their corporate information, regardless of where they are located.

The reality is that modern business travelers are more reliant on technology than ever. Sales professionals need access to updated rate sheets and sales contacts, marketing professionals need their product collateral, legal professionals need access to up-to-date case notes, and the list goes on. Without access to the critical information required to do their jobs, traveling professionals would be at a significant disadvantage to those that are able to access their corporate information remotely.

The MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite captured an Ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano over the North Atlantic at 11:35 UTC (7:35 a.m. EDT) on April 15, 2010. Credit: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team.

In addition, the ability to keep in constant contact with employees in the home office allows travelers to make alternate arrangements for travel,meetings, and information distribution. If a sales professional is stuck in the airport in London but has access to email, their travel reservation system, and their Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system, they could reserve a train ride to France, reschedule a business meeting with their customer, and send updated product information…all from the airport.

Estimates indicate that the recent eruption caused more than 100,000 flights to be canceled. Business travelers from Okinawa to Orlando were impacted and their activities potentially disrupted. In many cases, however, employees were able to continue operating remotely due to application access provided via Virtual Private Networks (VPN), remote meeting technology like GoToMeeting, and Web-based email systems.

As a result, Intranet professionals should be looking for ways to highlight the importance of portal, security, and productivity benefits offered by Intranet applications. Demonstrating to executives how internal social media kept employees in touch and helped them conduct business during potentially disastrous times demonstrates the value of investment in an Intranet infrastructure and highlights its benefit.

I’d love to hear stories of travelers who benefited from remote technology and access to the corporate intranet. Feel free to comment and share!

Sean R. Nicholson

About a year ago, I had a conversation with a then SocialMediaphobe who tried to convince me that social media was a fad that had no future in the workplace. His argument was that Facebook was too personal and Twitter too truncated to ever offer any value to business culture. I tried to convince him that, like all emerging technologies, social media was still finding its place in the workplace, but it was slowly, almost imperceptibly changing the way we communicate. His response was to try to dissuade me by saying “it’s just a bunch of people talking about what they ate for breakfast.”

As I look back the amazing strides social media has taken in the last year, even I’m amazed. The importance of short, meaningful messages tugged at my heartstrings as major news outlets like CNN and MSNBC relied on Tweets from survivors of the tragic earthquake in Haiti to keep us informed. YouTube has become the second largest search engine in the world (arguably the largest content engine), and Facebook continues to grow at astonishing rates, becoming one of the largest photo repositories on the Web.

Yet, somehow….corporate executives continue to ignore social media like it’s going to go away. These social media ostriches often argue that Social Media is a “B to C” (business to consumer) activity, meaning that businesses can only use it to market directly to consumers. They argue that companies selling “B to B” (business to business) can’t effectively leverage social media, because it’s the wrong market and businesses don’t pay attention to social media.

Little do they understand that businesses are not faceless organisms that make decisions without human input. On the contrary, business decisions are influenced by people and made by people, making “B to B” marketing almost irrelevant in a world where social media dominates the conversation. Executives need to understand that consumers of all type rely on product advice gained from other consumers, and the value of marketing Web sites that expound on the value of their product is diminishing. Need more convincing? Take a look at the Answers section of LinkedIn and you’ll find thousands of professionals (working for businesses) asking for recommendations on ECM, CRM, Intranet, and back office software. Yes…they even ask for advice on what blogging and social media platforms to use.

A shining example of a “B to B” corporate executive leveraging social media is Carolyn Douglas, the CEO of Intranet Connections. Her passion about Intranets, collaboration, best practices, and social media are evident in her blogs and tweets. Her thought leadership in the Intranet industry influences her peers, colleagues and customers on a daily basis. She demonstrates that although her business is technically “B to B”, her social media communication is aimed at interacting with people.

Great examples of executive leadership can be found in the “B to C” markets, as well. Just look at leaders like Marc Cenedella of TheLadders.com or Bill Marriot of Marriot Hotels. Each has established a meaningful blog and/or twitter presence that educates the public on topics ranging from interviewing tips to downtown revitalization efforts. Both activities are ancillary to their business, but provide meaning to their readers. The effect of the trust they earn from their readers is often carried over to the brand the represent.

And product marketing is just the tip of the iceberg when looking for social media opportunity. The value of collaborative activities inside your organization can justify an investment relatively quickly. You see, your employees are people, and people like to share. They share their stories, experiences, and knowledge. They talk around the water cooler, at the coffee pot, and at their cubes. At work, they feel valued and important when another employee is able to use a past experience to solve a problem. They get frustrated when they discover that the knowledge in their head could have been useful to another employee in a previous experience.  It’s the age-old knowledge management problem. How do you get the knowledge out of your employees heads and into a media that can be shared and leveraged by other employees?

The answer is social media. Give your employees and platform and they will share. Sure, they’ll share personal information, too…but mixed in with stories about their weekends, cats, and World of Warcraft are valuable nuggets of corporate knowledge that can help you solve problems, produce new products, and deliver a higher level of customer and employee satisfaction. It’s up to you to find ways to filter or segment that information to uncover that which is valuable to your business, but once you do…you’ve unlocked the potential of your employees.

In summary, social media is not about people eating oatmeal. Well…actually it is. But it’s also about people solving problems and people serving customers and people buying products. Social media is about your employees and your customers. It’s about your friends and colleagues. It’s about what they want, and what they want to offer. It’s a valuable tool that will provide insight to markets, products, and ways of doing business that you probably never thought about.  It’s up to you to get involved and show leadership. Good luck!

P.S. I’d love to hear from Execs who have taken the plunge and how your efforts are proceeding. Feel free to comment or email using our contact form.

Sean R. Nicholson

While listening to Marketplace yesterday, I heard a great article on a French campaign that is aimed at sparking the entrepreneurial spirit in French workers. According to the piece by John Laurenson, the advertisements feature successful business people in clown outfits and makeup to highlight a new web site at http://www.jesuisunclown.com/ (i am a clown.com). The purpose behind the campaign is to feature successful individuals who have struck out on their own despite others telling them that their ideas were silly.In a time when the French economy needs innovators, the goal is to encourage citizens to risk their pensions and security for the life of an entrepreneur.

The article had me thinking today about employees around the world during these tough economic times and wondering whether employees are encouraged to innovate and share ideas. In the US, we are certainly seeing employees in “hunker and bunker” mode, where they are working hard to keep their jobs in the face of looming corporate cutbacks and downsizing. Unfortunately, when employees are hiding in cubeville, they are usually focusing on just doing their job and not innovating, for fear of looking like “a clown” and risking their employment. The problem with this is that our  global economy needs innovation now more than ever. We need employees to bring new product ideas to the forefront and innovate new service offerings. Managers and executives should be encouraging employees to come up with every new idea possible, regardless of how silly it might initially seem.

As Intranet Professionals, think about whether your Intranet is being used to encourage new ideas. Do you have a campaign asking employees to behave like clowns? Do you have an idea center where employees can submit their ideas and vote on those that they feel would be valuable? Are your executives open to new ideas and are they actively encouraging innovation?

Think about it…products like the slinky, magic eight ball, lava lamps, and mood rings might all probably seemed like silly ideas at the time, yet they have all been significant profit earners for their creators and are still considered by some to be among the top “It” products.

If you’re already finding unique and creative ways to inspire the “clowns” in your organization, please post a comment and share your strategies, tactics, and successes. If you haven’t started an innovation program yet, now might be a great time to start a clown college inside your organization. Your clowns, might just be the key to growing your business and our economy.

Sean R. Nicholson

In the first article in this series on rethinking the old model of Intranet portals, I covered the basics of why the old model of selling Intranet portal software doesn’t really work in the new world of Enterprise 2.0. The old model provided (comparatively) limited functionality at huge software price tags and infrastructure needs, primarily because the competition in the marketplace only existed with large software vendors.

The recent explosion of social media platforms, coupled with the financial meltdown driving a need for operational improvement, has left purchasers exploring low-cost open source options. This behavior is driving commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors to rethink their licensing models. In addition, purchasers of Intranet software have started to expect expanded social media functionality and a variety of options for licensing/hosting their Intranet portals. In this article, we’ll focus on the new platforms available for Intranet portals as well as some of the options available to organizations as a result of this shift.

Quick Review – Why the old model doesn’t work

1. Lengthy Return On Investment – With multi-millon dollar investments, organizations rarely have a positive business case that shows a realistic ROI in less that 5 years. This means that it usually takes an organizational event like a merger, acquisition, spinoff, or change in leadership to get the funding approved.
2. Difficult To Track Process Improvement Impacts – After making the investment, organizations like HR or Corporate Communications often take over the operation of the Intranet with their own departmental initiatives taking priority. Operational organizations like Sales and Customer Support are often too busy and too entrenched in their old processes to take time to reinvent their operations to leverage the features offered by the new portal. As a result, the inability to move the business forward relegates the portal to a (very expensive) one-way communication vehicle and nothing more.
3. Added Features Come With Added Costs – Nothing ticks me off more than seeing cool new functionality from an Intranet portal vendor that is a “bolt-on” to the core software. What “bolt-on” usually means is that it’s not going to be core functionality any time soon and that it comes with an extra price tag, not to mention additional, ongoing annual maintenance costs.
4. Expensive Infrastructure Requirements – In the old model, one enterprise-scale Intranet portal for 50,000 employees required more than $75,ooo in Sun hardware costs (web servers, app servers, database servers, etc…). Even running on WinTel with VMWare, you were still looking at $30K+ in hardware. In either situation, you also require space in the data center, cost of power in the data center, Server Administrators to maintain and monitor, and the process/hardware costs of backup and restore.

While there are other costs involved, the old model of selling/implementing Intranet portals can drive a pretty hefty investment. On top of that, once the investment is made, executives are reticent to the change platforms or enhance them, because the initial investment is so great.  The key to overcoming that hesitation is to put together a strong business case with a quick ROI, usually based on the fact that the organization can either reduce operational expenses or costly annual software maintenance agreement (SMA) fees.

New Platforms For Intranet Hosting

The beauty of the shift away from the traditional portal model means that vendors have started to get creative in the way they offer their Intranet solutions. For instance, no longer is the traditional download/install/update/upgrade model the only game in town. With SaaS, cloud computing, and other options coming more into the spotlight and social media companies wanting to get into the game, there are a whole host (no pun intended) of options out there for organizations looking to build or reinvent their Intranet.

Software As A Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service bundles software licenses with a hosted infrastructure

If you haven’t heard the term “SaaS” being thrown around the water cooler, get ready…it’s on its way. I would definitely consider SaaS to be one of the hot buzzwords in corporate America in 2009 and it doesn’t look to slow down for 2010. As organizations look for ways to cut costs, Software as a Service has offered an attractive way to reduce annual software maintenance costs and recover from reductions in headcount necessitated by the economy.

Essentially, SaaS is a model where a software vendor provides all the hardware, software licenses, and infrastructure (bandwidth, backups, restores, upgrades, etc…) necessary and provides the customer with access to that environment via the Web. Instead of having to foot costly up-front capital bills for hardware and software, companies can opt for smaller monthly expense bills that are easier to digest and plan for. In addition, since the vendor is usually responsible for upgrades, new feature functionality is often added with no additional expense to the customer. Another benefit is that the ROI on a portal can be realized quickly due to the fact that there isn’t such a large outlay as in the traditional licensing model.

SaaS isn’t all peaches and cream, though. There are still concerns about placing sensitive organizational data in the hands of third-party vendors.  IT leaders are still skeptical, having seen their colleagues go through massive loss of credit card numbers, mishandling of customer information, and security breaches. Companies outside the US are also hesitant to jump on the SaaS bandwagon when data would be stored in US-based data centers. The broad reaches of the US Patriot Act makes them a bit hesitant to subject their customer or competitive information to potential seizure by US agencies. One other downside of SaaS is the fact that over the long term life of the agreement, an organization might actually pay more for a SaaS portal than they would have under the traditional model. Plummeting prices around enterprise portal software, however, are reducing that risk.

Even with these potential downsides, more and more software vendors are putting together SaaS packages to offer to their customers. Services like Ning.com and WebX’s Intranets.com are offering their services on a SaaS basis. Even companies like SalesForce.com (traditionally a CRM application vendor) is adding a Social Media component to their offering (aptly named “Chatter”) that will extend their services to more intranet-like functionality.

Hosting In The Cloud

Cloud Computing is opening up a new range of custom services for Intranet portals

Yes…you’re reading this right. I am splitting out SaaS and Cloud hosting. Too many folks are using the terms “SaaS” and “cloud computing” interchangeably and the fact is that they aren’t necessarily the same thing. SaaS solutions are one flavor of cloud computing, but SaaS agreements relegate all aspects of control over the environment and the software to the vendor. There are alternative cloud hosting agreements that allow the organization varying levels of control over installation, maintenance, upgrades, and administration. These custom agreements give the company the benefits of outsourced hosting with the required level of control that meets their needs.

Managed Services Agreements

Similar to SaaS in the fact that the vendor provides all the hardware, managed services agreements usually combine the headache-free environmental benefits with the traditional purchasing of perpetual licenses. Where the old model requires the organization to purchase software licenses and hardware, the managed services option allows companies to buy the licenses and pay a monthly, quarterly, or annual fee to the software vendor to provide servers and administration in their data center. The benefit of this model is that companies can pay the capital outlay on the software and expense the periodic costs of hosting. Managed services agreements often provide for application administration, which outsources the expertise of the application to the vendor. No longer do companies have to hire expensive knowledge experts to configure and maintain their portal application. Instead, they can go right to the source and have expertise from the vendor perform the necessary tasks.

On-Premise Leasing

On premise leasing is the flip-flop version of Managed Services Agreements. In these situations, the company usually has the hardware and resources in-house to host and administer the software, but they don’t want to lay out the large capital outlay for the portal software. Instead, they choose to lease the software licenses and host them on their servers. If/when the company chooses to discontinue use of the software, they simply terminate the relationship (per the terms of the agreement) and uninstall the software.

Appliance-Based Intranets

Some vendors are bundling hardware with software to offer an Intranet applicance

About 10 years ago, I remember reading articles like this one, touting how Intranet appliances were going to rescue us from poor productivity and change the face of enterprise applications as we know it. Vendors were looking for ways to capitalize on plug-and-play Intranets, but their primary shortcoming was the lack of a user-friendly interface that was both customizable and able to integrate with other applications.

Appliances, however, are making a comeback since the cost of hardware has dropped significantly and the bundling of high-quality Intranet software makes the user experience much more appealing. Companies such as SocialText and Bitrix are working on ways to deliver their Intranet or Social Media functionality to the enterprise in an appliance platform. These hardware appliances allow organizations to rack-and-stack the hardware, configure the software, and be up in running in days.

More To Come On Software Licensing

As more and more platform options are offered to the public, companies are also revamping their licensing options. In the next article in this series, we’ll take a look at shifts in traditional per-user and per-processor licensing, as well as new payment options such as monthly payments, ad-supported options, and on-premise leasing.

As always, feedback and comments are appreciated.

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.

Sean R. Nicholson

Over the last few years, the social media boom has forced Intranet portal vendors to rethink some of their licensing models and expand their feature functionality. “Traditional” intranet portals that are simply presentations layers with a back-end content management system just don’t cut it anymore. Instead, organizations want their employees to generate peer-to-peer content using 2.0 functionality like blogs, wikis, and tagging instead of relying on one-way messages from the top.

The collaborative efforts of the open source community have also delivered new products into the marketplace, driving the cost of software down and injecting healthy competition into the portal industry.  On top of new features and pricing models, new hosting options such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud hosting provide organizations additional options to consider when building or upgrading their portal. All of this spells opportunity for Intranet pros looking to make changes.

In future articles, we’ll take a look at some of the specific software vendors and new platforms that are reshaping portal price tags, but before we jump into the specific products, let’s take a look at a recent, real-world example of how much the climate has changed and how big the impact can be to a company.

In 2006, I was involved in an Intranet project for a Fortune 500 telecommunications company with an employee base of around 25,000. After identifying the requirements for the portal, the search for a suitable software package led the project team to three real contenders: BEA Systems’ Aqualogic portal (now Oracle WebCenter), Sun Microsystems’ SunOne portal (now defunct), and the Vignette Intranet portal (now part of OpenText).  All three offered a customizable presentation portal, content management system, search, forums and emerging blog/wiki functionality. However, each solution also required significant server hardware to be purchased and resources to be devoted to the maintenance of the hardware and the application.  After the final solution was selected and the appropriate hardware was purchased, the pricetag for the selected software and hardware tallied up to more than $2 million. Take note that the selected solution was the least expensive of the three.

Now, flash forward to 2009. I recently had lunch with the current manager of that specific Intranet solution and he and I were discussing the changes to the industry and the merits of both open source and hosted (SaaS) solutions. Knowing the price tag of the original solution and the annual software maintenance fees (20% of initial software costs), it took some simple math to come to the conclusion that he could take the annual maintenance of about $225,000 and easily replace the existing system for a hosted solution costing about $75,000 annually.

With the less expensive solution, he would get:

1. A 37% reduction in software costs ($200,000 dropped to $75,000) in year one.
2. A 93% reduction in annual software maintenance costs ($200,000 dropped to $15,000) in the following years.
3. A reduction in hardware costs, allowing $200,000 in hardware to be re-purposed in the enterprise or decommissioned.
4. No employee headcount required to maintain hardware, so reduced costs in employee overhead.
5. The SaaS vendor would now be accountable for a 99% server uptime (No more outage calls at 3am when the servers stop responding or a load balancer fails).
6. Continued evolution of the product since the annual maintenance buys him product upgrades from the vendor.
7. New Web 2.0 functionality offered by SaaS vendors that isn’t offered by the current vendor.

So basically, this Intranet Manager gets more functionality for his users, a stable platform that allows him and his team to sleep at night, and a significant reduction in annual software costs that makes him a corporate hero with the Accountant and Execs!

A second option that we discussed was looking at a lower cost software vendor or an open source solution. In these situations, he would still reduce his annual software licensing costs significantly, but would still require the hardware and headcount to maintain it. The ROI, however, is still positive in year one due to the huge reduction in software maintenance fees.

Obviously, the ROI for this organization is magnified by the size and extensive software/hardware requirements of the company. However, it’s likely that any Intranet portal built on the traditional perpetual software licenses/standalone hardware model could benefit from a review of the existing system and an analysis of potential replacement technologies. So, before you cut that next software maintenance check, take a few moments to think about how much you’re paying and where you might get some additional bang for your buck.

Check out part II of this series where we’ll take a look at some of the existing replacement platforms that could positively impact your Intranet bottom line.

Sean R. Nicholson

I took some time this weekend to categorize my Twitter friends and followers into various Twitter lists. If you’re looking for some great Intranet resources to follow, this list contains 99 great folks who tweet about all kinds of Intranet topics ranging from taxonomies, governance,  platforms, and products.

You can check out the list below, and feel free to leave a comment if there’s anyone else I should add.

Sean’s Intranet Twitter List

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

Having been in the field of information management for quite a while now, I have developed a few credos that seem to prove more and more useful as the volumes of organizational information continues to grow. I used to drive one of my previous team absolutely crazy with this one:

“The only thing worse than no information is BAD information”

Think about it. When you have no information, you seek out answers, solutions, and advice. When you have bad information,  it’s likely that you don’t know it’s bad, so you react to the information. Only after you have used the information and determined that it was incorrect do you (after a few choice words) continue your search for good information.

Take an example of a call center representative who answers the phone and provides the customer on the other end with what they think to be the most current product prices from a document they printed yesterday. Little do they know that a new copy of the rate sheet was published a couple hours ago with significant rate changes that is now impacting their potential sale.

Did they have information? Yes! Was it good information? No!

The reality is that organizations are generating more and more information on an hourly basis. Take a moment and think about all the documents, spreadsheets, presentations, emails, voice mails, and sticky notes you generated on a daily basis just 3 years ago. Now, add modern day blogs, tweets, text messages, forum posts, comments, status updates, videos, podcasts, and wiki posts to your list and what do you get? More information? Definitely! But the larger problem is the fact that the information is now spread out in more places, making it harder for other employees and customers to find it.

In the past customers could simply call a 1-800 line for support and get one-stop service. In the modern day of social media, though, they can call the 800 number, tweet their problems, look for solutions in a knowledge base, email, complain in an online forum, post a video on YouTube of your product malfunctioning, or blog about it. Compound the problem with the fact that your employees are having a difficult time finding the most current methods to resolve the customer issues and you have quite an information disaster in the making. In fact, it’s a situation that could have a negative impact on both customer and employee satisfaction.

For some, the temptation might be to throw their hands up in the air and surrender to the fact that there are just too many channels out there. If you’re curious as to how confusing it really is, just take a look at all the new channels being created in the social media space alone via the Social Media Prism! Now think about what your employee-to-employee and employee-to-customer communication channels are going to look like in 5 years. Believe me…I understand the desire to just crawl back in bed and ignore social media. The reality is, however, that few business ever succeed by ignoring change. Instead, you’re going to need to stop dismissing social media (both internal and external) as a fad and start working on how to resolve the issue.

Unfortunately, I don’t have a magic product that I can sell for $19.99 to serve as the magic bullet. This one’s going to require smart people in your organization rolling up their sleeves and building a solid information management architecture. No, it’s not easy, but it’s going to be a requirement for businesses to survive in the future! A good place to being would be by looking at the following criteria:

1. How do your employees work? Are they being asked to store information in multiple locations (e.g. My Documents, file shares, document repositories, WIKIs, etc…)?
2. Do your employees know where to go for the single source of truth? (hint, hint…it should be your Intranet)
3. Where are you storing your information? In legacy applications that aren’t searchable? In repositories that require no periodic content review?
4. Does your organization offer a single search interface that allows employees to search information in multiple repositories?
5. Is your information governance killing your employees ability to share information (e.g. no blogs, wikis, microblogs, etc…)?
6. How are your customers interact with your organization? Are they seeking answers from multiple sources (e.g. Phone, website, Twitter, etc..)
7. Do your customers know where to go for a single source of the truth (hint, hint…it should be your Web site)
8. Do you have the infrastructure in place to respond to new types of interactions? Do you have corporate accounts for sites like Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, LinkedIn, and Facebook? Does someone monitor searches on your company and products?
9. Are you making it as easy as possible for your customers to get help and resolve issues?
10. Are YOU embracing internal and external information tools that will allow your employees to share information more easily and provide customers with more ways to serve themselves or seek assistance?

If you haven’t started a review of your current information architecture, it’s time to start and because I find the Social Media Prism to be so useful in explaining the external growth challenge that faces organizations, I have also put together an internal information stratification diagram that hopefully will help IT, Intranet, and ECM professionals demonstrate the internal complexities that exist inside the firewall.  Click on the image below for a larger view or feel free to print out a PDF version.

As always….this is a work in progress and all input, comments, feedback are welcome!

Internal Information Stratification Wheel