Sean R. Nicholson

2010 has been a great year for Intranets. Web 2.0 finally came out of its shell and the explosive growth of Facebook,  Twitter, and YouTube brought social tools to the mainstream. This, in turn, helped many organizational leaders understand that capturing and sharing information inside the enterprise had a lot of potential, when social tools are leveraged.

In some cases, the same leaders who, in 2009, claimed that social media was “just about people sharing what they ate for breakfast” or “just for kids” finally began to understand that their employees wanted to engage in social media in the workplace and use it to share their work knowledge. As a result, Enterprise 2.0 took some great strides as organizations either added social components to their existing intranets or “ripped and replaced” them with new, social offerings.

The intranet-focused conversations in 2010 were beyond great. When I look back at my 2009 post, it’s great to see that most of the same folks that were blogging and tweeting in 2009 continued to share their valuable knowledge and experience in 2010.  To capture how great 2010 was, I looked back at the blogs of some of my favorite Intranet tweeps and thought I would share the posts I really enjoyed one more time.

In July, 2010 Carolyn Douglas (@carolyndouglas) gave a great breakdown of critical elements any organization should consider when determining whether they should buy or build an Intranet in her blog: When Looking at Intranets: Should you Build or Should you Buy? If you’re considering implementing a new Intranet in 2011, this is a great place to start.

One of my very favorite posts of 2010 came from Elizabeth Lupfer (@socialworkplace), who authors a blog called The Social Workplace. Check out her  article Will The Real You Please Stand Up?. This great article focuses on the need to be authentic in who you are, online and offline. This article is as important inside the workplace as it is outside.

My favorite Intranet series this year came courtesy of Rachel Lai (@rachellai83) in the form of  her series detailing the activities that occur each day on an Intranet. The series, entitled  A Day in the Life of an Intranet is a must read for any internal communicator or Intranet professional.

In an article he wrote for CMS Wire in October, 2010, Toby Ward (@tobyward) explains that enterprise social media has become a necessity.  The article does a great job clarifying the need for a social Intranet, as well as some of the barriers that may be encountered during the implementation.

One of the biggest fears that executives face when it comes to a social intranet is that of open communication. What if an employee says something they shouldn’t? What if private organizational information is exposed erroneously? In his September post, Open Communication – Skepticism and Fears, Bas Zurburg (@BasZurburg) exposes this fear, amongst others. A great read for anyone trying to convince their leadership of the value of a social Intranet.

In his October article, Beware of simplistic rules and strategies, James Robertson (@s2d_jamesr) did a great job explaining the dangers of setting arbitrary limitations on your enterprise because it’s easier to define a simple strategy and stick to it, rather than understanding what would really work best for your organization. The article caught my eye because I see these limitations time and time again within organizations, and rarely is there a sound business reason for some of the strategies and tactics.

I’m a sucker for a good game, so when Alex Manchester (@alex_manchester) wrote an article called Enhancing the intranet with game theory and gaming mechanics, I was hooked. In the article, Alex explains how multi-player online gaming and virtual environments are potential tools for developing employee collaboration and engagement within the enterprise.

I hope you enjoy and here’s to a great Intranet 2011!

–Sean

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

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

What Every Intranet Team Should Know by James Robertson

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

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

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

Sean R. Nicholson

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

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

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

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

Ned NewHire

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

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

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

In April of 2009, I published a blog post listing the Must Have Resource for Intranet Professionals in 2009. Included in the list are the valuable resources located at Intranet Strategies by JMC and, in particular, the annual Global Intranet Trends Report. This comprehensive resources consolidates feedback from organizations of all shapes and sizes and analyzes the trends impacting Intranets in the coming year.

If you are an Intranet professional and are interested in participating in the 2010 Global Intranet Strategies and Trends survey, JMC Services is currently seeking applicants. To understand how to apply, please visit this page and follow the instructions:

http://netjmc.com/survey/sign-up-JMC-global-intranet-survey-2009-2010.html

Participation in the survey affords the participant a complimentary copy of the 2010 report to share with their 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

Who isn’t interested in accomplishing Single Sign-On? You know, that nirvana of Identity Management where users only ever have to sign on to their local workstation and then have completely unfettered access to applications throughout the enterprise. While this concept may sound great  to end-users and executives, it’s an absolute nightmare concept for IT personnel and application administrators.

The Wild, Wild West In An Enterprise With No Identity Management Infrastructure

If you have ever been in an organization with no Identity Management infrastructure or strategy, you probably know how bad it can be…and the larger the organization, the worse it gets. When working with one Fortune 100 company in recent years, I found myself with 15 different User names and passwords on my first day. After asking around whether I was doing something wrong, one of my co-workers indicated “No…that’s just the way we do things here.” Let’s see, I had a login for my desktop, one for the Intranet portal, another for the expense management system, one for my project tracking system, the list went on and on. And to make things worse, each of these different applications had separate password expiration policies, so I was anticipating a future where my passwords were quickly out of sync.

Soon, I was relegated to having to manage my passwords in a password utility called KeePass. Obviously not ideal, but it beat the heck out of having to reset my passwords every time I tried to login because I couldn’t remember my password or getting locked out of the application due to failed attempts. On a side note, I had a conversation with an exec who informed me that most of the corporate executives were keeping their passwords on a piece of paper under their keyboard.

Putting All Your Corporate Identities Into One Basket…A Potential Single Sign-On Nightmare

The flipside to the wild, wild west is a highly organized, very restrictive identity management strategy, but even this scenario can have its downsides. While working with a customer recently that used a common enterprise IdM application to manage a single sign-on environment, the entire enterprise was brought to a grinding halt when the identity policies for their application were corrupted. The end result, no users in their enterprise were able to login to any application in the environment. Basically, their back-office business was brought to a grinding halt until the policies were able to be restored.

The real kicker? This particular organization had also tied their website customer portal accounts to their IdM system, so their entire business was brought to a standstill. Not only were employees irritated at the outage, but customers began flooding the call centers with calls and the call center reps weren’t able to access their CRM system. While watching this fiasco unroll, I began to clearly understand situations where the concept of single sign-on can actually be a bad thing. Every egg in one basket just doesn’t seem like a good idea.

The other downside to true single sign-on is that once an account has been compromised, the hacker has access to your entire infrastructure. This means that users who walk away from their workstations without locking them present a MASSIVE risk to your enterprise. It also places more accountability on your IT professionals who are working on users desktops. Think of the desktop technician who assists an executive with an issue and, during the course of the their assistance, is able to access systems using the executive account. Obviously, these professionals have a high level of accountability in the first place, but having unfettered access to all information inside the enterprise can be a risk.

Simpler Sign-On – The Middle Ground

So what’s the solution? Obviously “single sign-on” isn’t necessarily the silver bullet that execs often think it is, but requiring users to manage disparate user IDs and passwords creates a usability nightmare. The middle ground, then, is a balance of what I commonly refer to as “simpler sign-on”. The idea is to make the authentication process as easy to use for your end-users while maintaining a level of security and application stability that meets your organizational needs. The strategy I often suggest is not a complex one and can be leveraged by any organization, no matter how large or small.  The suggested strategy is as follows:

1) Classify your applications by information risk. Clearly understand and document what risk the information would pose if it were exposed to everyone inside (and potentially outside) your enterprise. While your classifications will be unique to your organization, a guideline to start from might be:

• Low risk applications – Those that surface benign information that is of low risk if it were exposed. Think of the daily lunch menu being posted on the Intranet.
• Medium risk applications – These are systems that often contain a combination of low risk data with high risk data. Intranet portals often fall into this category because they might have the daily lunch menu, but also contain strategic sales, marketing, or organizational performance information that might be risky if it were exposed.
• High risk applications - These systems contain highly sensitive data and often include (but are certainly not limited to) performance management systems, Customer Relationship Management systems, recruiting systems, and corporate records management systems.

2) Assign an appropriate identity management strategy. Decide whether each application should use its native authentication or whether a federated IdM strategy would be appropriate to secure the data.

3) Provide a secure, enterprise methodology for employees to secure their User IDs and passwords. If you’re going to require that your employees have disparate user IDs and passwords, give them a way to secure them. It’s better to provide clear guidance and, ideally, and enterprise application, to store their passwords as opposed to letting them store them on a sheet of paper or spreadsheet. You’d be surprised how cheap and enterprise license for a password storage tool can be.

4) Attempt to synchronize password expirations and document the process. If your employees are going to be required to reset their passwords on a periodic basis (a best practice for information security), be sure that you attempt to synchronize the timing of the password expirations and provide your employees with clear instructions on the process for resetting them. It’s amazing how much simpler the process can be with a single sheet of instructions.

5) Educate your employees on the importance of information security and the reasons behind your policies. Employees are much more likely to accept your IdM strategy if they understand that there is a reason behind it. The fact that the simpler sign-on strategy has been analyzed, streamlined, and employee usability has been considered will help them adopt the process and adhere to the policies.

In the end, it’s always better to be over-protective of your information and access to your organizational systems, but keep in mind that taking employee usability into account can increase employee satisfaction and reduce security risks that occur when employees write down their passwords or store them in unsecured electronic formats. The chase for single sign-on can often lead to additional security and application stability threats, while a more reasonable standard of “simpler” sign-on might achieve the security needed while driving user adoption.

Thoughts or comments? I’d love to hear your experiences with simple sign-on, IdM applications, and constructive criticism of the thoughts in this article.

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.