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

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

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

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

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

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

Driving user adoption is one of the key challenges for any Intranet portal. One of the most effective ways to ensure that your users are getting the most of your Intranet is to ask them how they want to use it, observe how they actually use it, and either add/modify functionality to meet their needs or train them to use the portal better.

By listening to your users and understanding their needs, you can create user personas that group users by department and role.  For instance, you might be interested in developing a persona for new employees that helps you streamline the initial look/feel of the portal in a way that helps new hires find their employment forms, crucial new-hire information, and job aids related to their new responsibilities.

By creating a variety of personas for the different employee roles in your organization, you can consistently work to find new ways to present meaningful content and functionality to your users and ensure that they are leveraging the portal in the most effective manner possible.

A persona for a new hire might look something like this:

Ned NewHire

General Characteristics and Responsibilities:
Ned is brand new to the company and this is his first job right out of college. He needs to complete his W-2 documents online and should complete the New Hire Orientation eLearning class. He will also want to find information about how to enroll in company benefits, and a map of the various buildings on campus.

Key Intranet Impacts:
Ned will need to easily access online training, new hire information, and HR benefits information. As a result, it might be a good idea to set every new hires default portlet layout to include an HR portlet and a training portlet so they are prominent on the home page when they first log in to the portal. In addition, a portlet with links to relevant job aids and departmental information would help Ned understand his new responsibilities.

Angie Cullen

When selecting an Identity Management Application, don’t expected it to integrate seamlessly with every application in your enterprise. Work toward using the tool as a “simpler” sign-on solution instead of a “single” sign-on solution. Setting that correct expectation with your sponsors and users will ensure that they have the right perception of how the tool will work.