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

Last week was a great week for online discussions relating to Intranets. On Monday, Alex Manchester of Step Two Designs posted an article to his blog asking whether the term Intranet is dead. His thoughts were sparked by a recent presentation by Jane McConnell of NetJMC and the conversation that ensued was a healthy dialog on the future of Intranets, their relevance in a world of social media, and whether the term “intranet” was really the best way to describe an interactive workplace. The conversation continued throughout the week and I’d encourage anyone who works with Intranets to check out the threaded discussion and add their $.02.

Tuesday continued the interesting online conversations as Jarrod Gingras and Alan Pelz-Sharpe of CMS Watch made his predictions for technology in 2010. One of particular interest to me was his prediction #1 that :

1) Enterprise Content Management and Document Management will go their separate ways
ECM as a marketing and technical concept has great validity. But the idea of having a single overarching platform to manage all sources of content management only works well in those enterprises that follow a unified and services-oriented architectural approach to IT.

I agree with Jarrod and my interpretation of this prediction is that organizations that aren’t able to settle on a single vendor for all of their information systems or aren’t able to invest in a comprehensive services-oriented architecture just won’t be concerned with Enterprise Content Management (ECM) because they won’t be able to address every departmental business process problems with a single ECM tool.

To expand on Jarrod’s prediction, I’m thinking that as more and more vendors build document management functionality into their applications, organizations will be less concerned with where it is stored, as long as it is stored properly, is accessible to the end-users that need it, and can be discovered and produced in time of legal necessity. Instead of costly redevelopment of business processes to restructure where content is stored, organizations will invest in search technology that allows content to be stored in native applications and use search tools like Microsoft Enterprise Search, Autonomy, and Google appliances to ferret out information.

In other words, federated search will become crucial to organizations that choose not to implement a structured ECM architecture.

The results of this kind of shift are as follows:

1. Content and documents  will reside in their native application, allowing the information to have more context than if it were stored in a centralized ECM system.
2. Those ECM vendors who wish to provide value to the enterprise must figure out how to store the content centrally, yet serve it back to end users in a context that is meaningful to their end users.
3. ECM vendors who provide true, enterprise-scale software MUST offer a full services-oriented architecture that will allow business applications to easily access the content and surface documents in the context of the business application.

S0…this brings me to my question of the week. Is Enterprise Content Management going the way of the Intranet and becoming an outdated notion? Will better federated search technologies negate the need for a central repository? Are organizations better off investing in the functional elements of ECM like document management, records management, and business process management instead of buying the whole enchilada?

I’m curious to see what others think…looking forward to thoughts/comments.

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

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

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

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

Sean R. Nicholson

If you haven’t figured it out already, it’s a Google kinda world out there and your Intranet users expect your search functionality to provide them with accurate, relevant results to their search queries. With that in mind, if you haven’t already begun the process of building a federate search strategy, it’s time to do so.

While the term “federated” might sound fancy, it’s just a high-tech way to say “cross-functional”. In a nutshell, if your Intranet search is federated, it means that it can go beyond searching your portal content and also retrieve results from your document management system, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system and any other relevant applications.

When putting together your federated search strategy, keep in mind that while returning a broad set of results from multiple systems is important, maintaining the security standards set forth by those applications is key. In other words, your federated search results should only return content and documents that the user is allowed to see in the originating application. This can often be the trickiest part of federated search, but many application vendors have begun exposing search APIs and Web Services that only return appropriate search results with security in mind.

The first steps to defining a federated search strategy is to take an inventory of all applications inside your Intranet that users currently search. Next, determine what roles might have a need to search which applications and prioritize the need to federate your search to those applications based on the business need. For instance, if a high volume of your users search your enterprise knowledge base and it isn’t tied into your portal search, that might be a good place to start. Your priority list will be defined on which applications are searched most frequently.

Once you have developed your priority list, work with your application vendors to determine whether they already expose Web services that would allow you to easily pass search terms and integrate results into your portal. Be sure to test your integrated functionality extensively to ensure that the results that are being returned are the same as if the user had searched in the originating application and be thorough in your security assessment of the results.

As you progress down your list of applications that are integrated into your portal search, be sure to let your users know that they can now use the portal search to quickly locate content across the enterprise. The more federated your portal search becomes, the more quickly your users will be able to locate information, which will drive portal adoption.

Sean R. Nicholson

Over the years, I have been privileged to work on a variety of Intranets ranging in shapes and sizes. Some were for large corporations, others were for small non-profits. Some were heavily governed, others were driven by user content. Even though each of these Intranets were unique in their own ways, they had one key element in common – strong user adoption. Without a strong user community that recognized the value of the Intranet, each would have failed.

Follow these 5 best practices and you’ll be on your way to showing your users the value of your Intranet and ensuring that they keep coming back for more.

1) Give your Intranet an identity – Just as with any Web site, your Intranet needs a strong brand that means something to your employees. Give your employees an opportunity to help choose the name and you’ll take an additional step in not only selecting something that is meaningful to your audience, but allows them to have a sense of ownership over the brand.

2) Find Your Advocates And Help Them Spread The Word – If you’re in an medium or large organization, it’s likely that you won’t be able to drive user adoption all by yourself.  Instead, recruit a team of employees who understand how valuable the Intranet can be and arm them with tips and tricks that they can use to show the value to others.  Be sure to find folks who may not have recognized the value of the Intranet in the past and work hard to convert them into advocates. You’ll be surprised how much weight their endorsement carries.

3) Give Employees A Voice – Whether it’s through forums, blogs, polls and/or Wikis, give your employees the opportunity to add content to the site. Allowing them to contribute will enhance that sense of ownership and give them a reason to come back.

4) Make It Easy To Use – It’s a Google world out there and if your users can’t find information quickly and easily, they’ll seek it somewhere else. Make sure your Intranet has an easy-to-navigate taxonomy as well as a strong search engine.  Also, be sure your following the best practice on when to open new windows with hyperlinks so your users to get lost in multiple browser sessions and can always get back to your site.

5) Update, update, update – Users come to Intranets for content. If your information is stale, your user adoption will plummet. Find ways to add new content as well as new functionality. If a feature or widget  isn’t getting any traffic, ask yourself whether it’s worth the real estate. Also, be sure to periodically ask your users what they think and make changes when it makes sense.

As always, I’m interested to hear feedback and comments, as well as strategies that you have used to drive Intranet adoption in your organization.

Sean R. Nicholson

Okay Intranet fans, here it is…the 2009 completely unofficial list of must have functionality for every Intranet.

**Please note that we reserve the right to update this list and expand it beyond 10 based on the great feedback and comments we will undoubtedly receive.

{drumroll please….}

# 10) Application Interoperability – There’s nothing like a good Intranet mashup. Being able to search for a user and see not only who they are (from the HR application), what they are working on (from the Project Management application), and where they are located (From HR + Google Maps) is pretty cool, not to mention that it brings relevant information to the user on a single page. Look for creative ways to mash up your applications and streamline information gathering. Remember that good mashup also leverage a “simpler sign-on” schema so that users don’t have to login over and over to see data in different applications.

#9) A Clean Design – Lot of functionality is good, but be sure to spend time up front determining what should be on the front page and what can be moved to secondary pages. Your users should be able to find content quickly and easily. Spend some time watching how your users physically navigate the Intranet and strive toward reducing the number of clicks they have to make to locate the information they are looking for. Need help creating a design? Bring in a consultant from the outside to provide an objective point of view.

#8) A Good Name – I always love hearing people refer to the Intranet by it’s given name, rather than “the Intranet”. Creative names allow folks to create an identity for the Intranet that gives it a life of its own. If you don’t have a name for your Intranet, try holding a company-wide contest to come up with names and then have your company vote on it. Your even more likely to get strong buy in if the name is chosen by your organization as opposed to being assigned by a developer with a Star Wars fetish.

#7) A Strong Navigation Taxonomy – Yes….it’s a Google kinda world, so folks like to find content through search, but when they find that content, they also like to see where they are in the navigation, using a folder taxonomy or breadcrumbs, so they can find other content that is similar in nature AND know how to get back to the content in the future.

#6) Personalization – Users need to be able to customize pieces of the Intranet. Whether it’s their weather, stock quote, news headlines, horoscope or other content, allow them to make the Intranet more useful to them as an information source. Also, by allowing users to relocate portlets or widgets, they can create a design that meets the way they work. Need a good source for personalized information? Look to subscription information providers such as YellowBrix.

#5) A Good Rich Text Editor – Nothing helps an Intranet grow more than content, so making the creation of content easy is important. A good WYSIWYG (“what you see is what you get”) editor is important. Don’t forget to make sure your editor has a spell check. I speak from experience on this one (ahem…Plumtree/BEA/Oracle WebCenter)

#4) Governance – No need to go into full-blown lockdown mode, but governance is a good thing for any organization. It keeps your Intranet from becoming the wild, wild west and ensures that the content created has meaning and is relevant. Some areas of the Intranet (WIKIs, forums, etc… ) can be looser than others, but your governance strategy should be flexible enough to accommodate for these different needs.

#3) A Strong Collaboration Toolset – User created content will drive your Intranet page views through the roof. A good, spirited conversation about the latest product or marketing campaign can help spread the word about what your organization is doing and can drive new innovations. Try adding an “Idea Center” to your Intranet and challenge your employees to come up with new ways to do business. Products like user-driven blogs, forums, and WIKIS can turn your readers into contributors growing your content exponentially. Daily polls can also be used for gathering user sentiment on a corporate topic, or just for a little fun.

#2) A Federated Search Engine – Again, it’s a Google kinda world, so make sure your search works and it can talk to other applications. No one likes to have to search 10 different places for information, so leverage tools like Google appliances or federated search engines like FAST or Autonomy to bring all of your content together into one search. If you haven’t ever seen a demo of one of these “meaning” based search engines, give them a call and ask for one. You’ll be amazed at what modern search engines can do.

#1) Meaningful Content – The best design, the coolest name, even a great governance strategy…they’re nothing without meaningful content. If your users don’t find value in your Intranet, they won’t adopt its use. In addition (and I can’t stress this enough), the content MUST be timely and accurate.

The only thing worse than no information is bad information…Your employees will act using bad information because they don’t know it’s inaccurate. There’s nothing worse than a sales rep sharing an outdated rate sheet or a customer service rep providing an inaccurate solution to a problem. To avoid this, be sure your Intranet content is up-to-date and reviewed frequently.

There you have it, Intranet fans! 10 must haves for any good Intranet.

Additions:

Accessibility – Everyone needs to be able to use your Intranet. Ensuring that your pages comply with the accessibility guidelines will ensure that folks with disabilities can read or hear the content. Thanks to Russell @theparallaxview for the suggestion

Have input? We’d love to hear any additions, suggestions, or constructive criticism in your comments!

Sean R. Nicholson

One of the strengths of a good Intranet portal is the ability to integrate the disparate applications that exist within an enterprise. Just because links to the applications are presented in the portal or, in some cases, even natively surfaced in the portal doesn’t make them effectively integrated.  Take a look at the following tips and see if they indicate that your portal has mashups or messes.

User adoption will be low if your end-users have to login over and over again!

Some portal vendors are already integrating Identity Management functionality into their portal applications, but don’t be tricked into thinking these solutions are a magic bullet. Legacy applications often use hidden authentication fields or tricky redirects to ensure that they aren’t being “spoofed”. In one recent situation, my Development team spent a couple of weeks attempting to use BEAs Aqualogic User Interaction portal to federate authentication to applications like Peoplesoft and Concur Expense Management. Each of these applications use a specific redirect functionality to ensure the security integrity of their application. As with this situation some application IdM may not be able to be addressed by a portal or IdM suite. The goal, however, is to minimize the number of times your users have to login by federating wherever possible.

A Customer Service Mashup

5) Usability – Nothing screams “MESS!” more than a hodgepodge or information hastily slapped together on a page. Care should be taken to understand how your users expect to use the mashup before placing the content onto the page. Your end-users can often describe the flow of information they use, which will guide you in arranging the mashup appropriately. For instance, in the case of our customer service agent, do they often ask how the weather is in the customers location? If so, having the weather information prominently displayed may assist establishing a relationship with the customer. During a heaving outage period, however, it might be better to relocate the outage information to the top of the page and allow the weather to be secondary.

Creating a good mashup isn’t just about bringing together commonly-linked information. To avoid a mashup mess, take the above tips into account and you’re sure to produce something worthwhile to your end-users.

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.