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

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

As a follow up to my 99 Great Intranet Resources post, I have also created a list of 99 great Enterprise Content Management Resources on Twitter. If you’re looking for the folks who know, speak, live, learn, and love ECM, these are your folks! Know someone that I missed from the list? Definitely let me know. Shameless self-promotion is also allowed if you think you should be included, just make sure your tweets back up your request.

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

Sean’s ECM Twitter List

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

Sean R. Nicholson

Imagine, for a moment, that you have accepted a new position as a corporate executive tasked with figuring our how to make your company work better, faster, cheaper.

Along with the details of your position, you have been informed that you have access to a wealth of competitive intelligence, product experience, and innovative thinking at your fingertips. Sounds like a recipe for success, right?But what if you had no means of capturing, storing, and retrieving that information? Bad situation.

It’s likely, however, that it would be easy to justify an investment in a tool that would allow you to leverage the information. But what many execs don’t realize is that they actually have the potential for this exact type of information at their disposal…if they were to invest in a social Intranet platform.

Classic Talent Management Systems vs. Social Intranet

For years, Intranet and HR professionals have been working to implement successful “Talent Management systems” with very little measurable success. The difficulty with legacy Talent Management systems is they required manual updates of employee history, competencies, training, and certifications and they rarely provide the employee with an opportunity to share their experience.

One of the  biggest shortcomings of these systems was the method used to capture and maintain the information. The process of updating employee records usually occurred (if at all) once a year during the employee annual review process. Managers would discuss employee competencies at the review and either update the system themselves or ask the employee to provide the updates. Unfortunately, a once-a-year update doesn’t provide the timely information required to operate a business and since the system was rarely referenced to identify subject matter experts, employees had no motivation to keep them up to date. As a result, these Talent Management systems quickly became outdated and useless and future investment in these types of tools were difficult to justify.

As Social Intranets are becoming more commonplace, however, a unique phenomena is occurring. Employees are sharing their previous experiences, subject knowledge, and expertise with fellow employees, management, and executives each day, providing a huge resource for internal knowledge that changes by the day, hour, and minute.

The Engagement Experience

To see how Social Intranets can play the valuable role of a Talent Management system, imagine a situation where a Sally Sales, a Sales Executive, creates a post on the Intranet forum asking:

Sally Sales: I am traveling to SmithCo Enterprises tomorrow to show them a demo of the latest version of our ERP  software. Does anyone have information about their culture, personnel, etc…that they can share?

Sam Support, a customer support rep – a role that isn’t traditionally engaged by Sales for input – posts back stating:

Sam Support: FYI, I used to work at SmithCo and you need to be aware that they are wary of “vaporware”. Be prepared to show the software in action and provide them with references of other customers who are using the latest version.  Also, I worked as a contractor with the team that implemented their existing BigCO ERP system and they have some serious limitations that need to be addressed relating to the accurate matching of POs, receipts, and invoices. If you can show how well we address that requirement, it will go a long way.

Able Accountant, an invoicing specialist chimes in with another post stating:

Able Accountant: I have used both our new version and the BigCO system they are using and the difference is night and day. Our automatic invoicing abilities are significantly better than BigCO and our implementation timeline averages 12 months, where BigCO’s implementation at my previous company took 36 months and was almost $1M over budget.

…and the conversation goes on.

While this type of dialog obviously helps the Sales Exec know how to refine their sales pitch, approach their prospect, and hopefully win the deal, there is a secondary benefit that is occurring behind the scenes. Employees are identifying what they know, where they have worked, what skills they hold, and whether they can be leveraged as subject matter experts on a specific product or topic.

As a result, the next time any Sales Executive is selling to SmithCo or any company where BigCo is implemented, a simple search of the Intranet for the terms “SmithCo” or “BigCo” will identify Sally Sales, Sam Support, and Able Accountant as resources that have information and experiences with the BigCo product. This is the exact result that Talent Management systems have sought to accomplish for years.

Through this one interaction, employees have reported to the company that they have valuable competitive information and the fact that they respond to posts like these frequently keeps their information up-to-date. While neither Sam or Able were hired into a position specific to tackling BigCo as a competitor, the fact that they both have and shared previous work experience potentially helped the company make a sale.

As the newest executive looking to improve processes and drive revenue through employee productivity, you now have a gold mine waiting to be tapped.

Sean R. Nicholson

In the second article in this series, we’ll focus on understanding Content Management and how it differs from Document Management and Knowledge Management. If you recall from the first article in the series, Document Management is all about how we create, manage, route, retain, and destroy the container that we refer to as a document. Content Management, on the other hand, focuses primarily on the information stored inside that container and how you can effectively add/edit/delete the information in the document.

Keep in mind that while some folks use the term “document” generically to refer to Microsoft Word documents (primarily because they use the .doc extension), a document can also be an PDF file, an HTML file, a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet…really any kind of container that holds content.

Distinguishing Between Pure Content Management And Enterprise Content Management (ECM)

Note: Before we dig into the details of Content Management, we need to establish that the focus of this article is to define and discuss pure Content Management separately from Enterprise Content Management. ECM blurs the lines between Document Management, Content Management, and Knowledge Management which, when brought into the conversation,  makes it difficult to discuss each of the separate components on their own merits. So, for the duration of this article, take a step back and let’s just focus on the Content Management component, apart from ECM. In the final article in the series, I’ll bring it all back together to discuss ECM.

So What Is Content Management?

In it’s simplest term, content management is simply editing a document to add, replace, remove, or modify the content. When you open a new Microsoft Word document on your desktop and type a few lines of text, you are engaging in content management using MS Word as the content management tool. You then save the document and store it on your computer, network location, or document management system. Through this process, you have engaged in both document management (the creation and saving of the document) and content management (the adding of information inside the container). Simple, right?

Content Management becomes much more challenging for organizations when you ask many people to collaborate at the same time on the same document. Issues arise such as the following:

• How do you keep one person from overwriting the content that another has added?
• How do you keep people from corrupting documents by editing them at the same time?
• How can you control the quality of the content to ensure proper spelling and grammar?
• How do you audit when someone last edited the content?

The existence of these, and many other issues has driven the creation of tools that allow organizations to collaborate around content, aka Content Management Systems. By introducing functionality such as user accounts, authentication, check in/check out, change tracking, and rich text editors (aka “WYSIWYG”), Content Management systems have addressed many of the concerns created by mass collaboration by limiting what individual contributors are allowed to do with the content and tracking when content is being edited. By leveraging this added functionality, organizations can minimize some of the risks of mass-collaboration and can maximize of the benefits that content management tools offer.

Different Kinds Of Content Require Different Editing Tools

In their early days of distributed content management, CMS tools focused primarily on editing Web pages. These Web Content Management systems allowed non-technical users to create, edit, and publish content to corporate Web sites and Intranet portals without having to know HTML, JavaScript or any other coding languages. As a result, organizations were able to empower their business users to take ownership of the content in their Web site and Intranet portals without having to engage IT for each and every change. In addition, the use of user accounts allowed organizations to control which roles were allowed to create content, edit it, and approve for publication.

Because of the proliferation of these tools and the rapid organizational adoption of them, the term Content Management System became synonymous with Web Content Management System. But as organizations saw the value of these systems and a variety of different types of content were introduced into the enterprise, new content management tools were needed.

For instance, digital assets such as images, videos, Flash movies, and audio files presented new challenges. To maintain the quality and appropriate use of these corporate assets, Digital Asset Management Systems were created to all organizations to manage the assets in a similar fashion to managing documents, while allowing some content management functionality through plugins with popular editing software like PhotoShop and Flash.

Document Management and Content Management Come Together Through Business Process Management

As the ability to edit different types of content has grown, organizations have recognized that the content management and document management can be intertwined to improve on business processes. Business Process Management tools provide organizations with graphical workflow solutions that allow for the creation and routing of documents from one user to another. upon arrival in their workflow queue, users can edit or review the content using a content management tool and then finalize the document or route the document to another user or queue for further processing.

Business units like Accounts Payable, Human Resources, Contract Management, and Decision Support have optimized document and content management by applying automated business rules that allow the document to be management in a specific manner based on the content.For instance, in situations where an invoice has a low total amount (say under $500), an organization can auto-approve the payment of the invoice without a high level of risk. In situations where total invoice amount exceeds a threshold, the workflow can route the document appropriately for a content review to ensure proper auditing.

Bringing Content And Documents To The Users Through Knowledge Management

The process of creating documents and managing their content continues to become more difficult as the volume of information in the organization grows. Effective organizational content and document management strategies are going to have to find ways to get the right information to the right user. To do this, business process tools and content management systems are going to need to leverage knowledge management principles to evaluate content and route content appropriately.

In the next article in the series, we’ll take a look at how Knowledge Management principles can be used to ensure that content is being effectively reviewed and used in the organization.

Sean R. Nicholson

Document Management, Content Management, and Knowledge Management are three very nebulous terms that get thrown around a lot when discussing the functionality and requirements of an Intranet. Unfortunately, concrete definitions of these terms are hard to come by since the terms often mean different things to different organizations. In an effort to build a common understanding of the terms, let’s break down each of the terms and look closely at how they inter-relate. The first article in this series focuses specifically on Document Management.

Document Management – Capturing, Storing, And Routing Containers Of Information

Document management is a common term that most folks in today’s workplace are familiar with. Think of all of the Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents that you have stored on your local workstation. By simply creating, storing, and deleting those documents you are engaging in the simplest form of document management. Simple, right?

The complexity of managing documents grows significantly, however, when you have hundreds or thousands of document creators in the same organization. As the number of documents needing management grows, issues such as the following arise:

• Where do we store all these documents?
• What happens if we don’t centralize them and someone loses a workstation? Can we replace those documents?
• What security risks are presented by allowing documents to be stored on workstations?
• How do we find the documents that we need?
• How can we secure documents so that only specific individuals or groups can see them?
• How do we keep people from recreating the same document over and over?
• How do we move documents from person to person electronically?
• Is there a way to make documents go away automatically according to our retention schedules?

If you take a look at those questions, they primarily focus on how you manage the container we call a “document”, not the content inside of it. In most cases, the content tools used to create and edit the information inside the containers has been selected. ..these tools are the Content Management tools, which we’ll discuss later in this series.

Document Management Systems vs. File Shares

So when thinking about documents and the document management needs of a large group of document contributors, organizations often look for ways to store the documents centrally, pass them around the organization, secure them appropriately, and discard them when their useful life has expired. Organizations usually look to file shares (a virtual drive mapped to your computer often designated with a letter like your “F: drive”) to serve as their initial document management system, and they do serve a useful purpose…up to a point.

For small groups file shares provide a common location to save and share documents. A document creator saves it to a folder in the share and then tells others about it by either sending the link on the share via email or verbally. The difficulties with file shares present themselves as the number of users relying on the documents grow. Common issues include:

• Difficulty in applying permissions to specific documents. File shares do folder permissions well, but not file-level permissions.
• File shares do not allow for check in/check out functionality.
• Searching across file shares can be a slow process as the number of folders and documents increase.
• Documents get “stale” if the owners do not constantly update or clean up their documents
• The size of a file share can quickly get out of hand if no one monitors that number of documents that are stored there

As a result of these deficiencies, growing organizations sometimes break apart these file shares into logical clusters like an F: drive for marketing, a G: drive for Sales, and a T: drive for IT. The problem, however, is that this practice now silos documents and makes them difficult to collaborate around. When the Marketing person can’t access the Sales share, the answer is to attach documents to emails and send them, which creates a nightmare as to which version is most current, how are changes to documents merged into the parent document, and more. What happens is that growing organizations usually outgrow file shares relatively quickly and look to Document Management Systems to bring that decentralized information back together to provide a common management system.

What Do Organizations Look For In A Document Management System?

In response to the shortcomings of file shares, the requirements usually sought after in enterprise-level document management systems often look something like:

• The ability to store documents in a variety of formats captured from imaging devices, created by desktop productivity applications (e.g. MS Office), and generated by other enterprise applications.
• The ability for administrators to define and enforce a common folder structure (often referred to as a taxonomy).
• The ability for end-users to add documents and sub folders to the repository using a browser-based interface or integration with productivity applications like Microsoft Word or Excel.
• The ability to move documents from user to user using workflow capabilities.
• The ability to perform full text searches against the documents in the system.
• The ability to remind users to review documents on a periodic basis to keep documents up to date.
• The ability to delete documents from the system according to a retention period.

Again, the focus is primarily on the capture, storage, and management of the containers. With the exception of being able to search the content and sometimes route through workflow, document management usually doesn’t really focus on what’s in the document, just that the document can be stored, moved around, accessed, and managed.

When organizations start looking at the content inside the document and how to create, review, and update content the focus often shifts from document management to content management, which leads us to the next topic in the series.

COMING SOON – Document Management vs. Content Management vs. Knowledge Management  Part 2 – Understanding Content Management

Sean R. Nicholson

A couple of years ago, I was involved in the selection and construction of a new Intranet portal for a large telecom company. The organization had nearly 25,000 employees at the time, distributed all over the United States and they had previously relied heavily on an Intranet portal to communicate corporate events, share HR information, and collaborate on business documents.  The project I was working on at the time was focused on creating a brand new Intranet portal for a spin-off company.

One of the most memorable moments of the project occurred during one of the initial funding conversations, when a Senior Executive at the company asked a very simple question. Amid all of the discussions about functionality, Identity Management, timelines, user adoption, and vendor selection, the Senior Exec simply asked “Do we really need an Intranet portal?”  The question was powerful enough to quiet a room of 25 people and, for an uncomfortable 30 seconds or so, I mentally wrestled between blurting out a visceral response like  ”Are you kidding?” and taking a more tactical response explaining the value of a portal. Luckily, while I was pondering the choice, one of my IT Execs jumped in and provided a quick, concise answer as to the value of the Intranet portal, which was good enough to get the funding conversation back on track. Eventually the project was funded, proved to be wildly successful (on time and under budget is always a good thing), and that particular Senior Exec got to fully realize the value of the portal in ways that had not previously been used in his organization. I still kick myself every once in a while for not having an “elevator speech” response prepared for the occasion.

How often do we question the value of the technologies we support?

An interesting aftereffect from that meeting, however, were that rumors of the conversation quickly spread throughout our IT organization. I can’t tell you how many times I got on an elevator with other IT professionals and, after a few moments of silence, one of them would turn to me and ask ”So…do we really need an Intranet?”.  We’d have a good laugh and part our separate ways on different floors.

To this day, I often reflect on the power of that simple question. The more I think about the situation, the more impressed I am with the fact that one person, in the midst of turbulent conversations had the courage to ask the simple question of “why”. Too often in IT, we press forward with technology, especially when it comes to legacy systems, without asking why we’re doing it. Sometimes we feel like we’re trapped by a proprietary platform, or maybe our end-users are resistant to change, so we simply pour money into costly upgrades or development efforts without raising our hand and asking “Why?” or “What is the alternative?”.  Different options always exist, so in these rough economic times, maybe it’s an ideal time to take a closer look at the technologies that are fueling your organization, compare them to the feature-functionality of new products, and determine whether a new product could actually do the job better for cheaper…or maybe whether you actually need the technology at all.

The second reason I often think about that situation has to do with a mindset of automatically assuming that the technology we advocate for is invaluable to the company. Regardless of whether your area of experience is Intranet, Business Intelligence, Data Warehousing, CRM, or any of the other IT realms, you need to be prepared for the question of “Why”. As your business partners begin to look for places to cut costs, reduce their overall application portfolio, or move to a Software as a Service (SaaS) model, you need to be able to realistically justify the technology you support.

To that end, here are my top 10 justifications for a corporate Intranet portal. I’d be very interested to hear additions that readers feel are important.

1. A centralized location for corporate communications – This is more important to larger organizations than it is to companies of 25 employees. The larger and more distributed the organization, the more important it is to the corporate culture to have a single place where all employees can go to find information on company strategies, announcements, HR information, and special activities.
2. Application and information aggregation - There is nothing more frustrating to employees than to have to open 15 different browser applications and 10 different application clients to find the information they need. Employees (especially those facing the customer) need to find information quickly and almost need the information to find them. Case in point, one of the more recent Intranets I worked with allowed the employees to look up a customer by name in the Intranet portal. The resulting page created a mashup of application information including links to the customers service contracts, open service tickets, and even a Google map of where the customer was located with the closest service technician shown on the map via an integration with a Global Information System (GIS) application. All of this information came from several different applications, mashed into a single view of relevant information.
3. Federated Search – A good Intranet portal offers a federated search model, allowing end-users to use a single, simple search interface to find information stored in a variety of applications. For instance, the portal should be able to leverage APIs from the corporate HR system, document management system, as well as CRM and ERP applications. The value of locating information stored in disparate systems makes a strong business process improvement case for the ROI of a portal.
4. Identity Management (aka “simpler sign-on”) – Modern portals provide a single point of entry to corporate applications and information, so they should either include an Identity Management (IdM) solution, or leverage a third party system. To ensure a high rate of user adoption, end-users should be required to authenticate as few times as necessary to support corporate security policies. This “simpler sign-on” schema reduces the number of times a user has to log in, saving time, and enhancing employee satisfaction.
5. Knowledge Management and Collaboration - Through the use of collaboration tools such as knowledge bases, Wikis, forums, chat rooms, or blogs, Intranet portals capture the corporate knowledge of how things get done. These collaborative tools ensure that commonly repeated solutions are captured in a searchable manner that can be discovered easily by future employees. In addition, these tools mitigate the danger of allowing knowledge to “walk out the door” when employees leave the company.
6. Decentralized Content Management – Intranet portals with integrated security and content management systems allow each department within the organization to manage their own content creation/management strategy. Long gone are the days where every article published to the portal had to be scoured and approved by a Content Manager in Corporate Communications. Instead, the Corp Comm group often establishes guidelines and best practices for the departments (and sometimes at the individual level) to follow. This allows for information to flow more freely within the organization and updates to the content to made in a more timely manner.
7. Organizational Transparency (aka “silo-busting”) - An added bonus to the decentralization of content management is a transparency factor. The more content that is published by each department, the better the chance that the rest of the company will gain an understanding of their goals and strategies. This helps drive cross-departmental communication, reduces the amount of overlapping work being done, and drives organizational collaboration.
8. Environmental Sustainability – More information stored in electronic format that is easily searchable naturally results in fewer file cabinets full of paper. Intranet portals can serve as document repositories for smaller companies and integrate with third party document management systems in larger organizations. The end result is less paper, and a better solution for the environment.
9. Employee Satisfaction – The easier information is to find, the more likely an employee will be able to resolve the business problems they face in their daily duties. Whether it’s locating customer information in order to resolve a customer issue, or locating research information that the employee can leverage in their next presentation, the more business information that is available throughout the organization, the better decisions employees can make in their jobs and the more successful they will be.
10. Customer Satisfaction – Last, but by no means least, is customer satisfaction. By centralizing information and providing access to federated search tools, customer-facing employees can reduce the amount of time it takes to locate customer information and can make better business decisions that reduce call handling times, increase first-call resolution in call centers, and lead to upsell opportunities that provide customers with enhanced services that meet their needs.