Sean R. Nicholson

First, let me start off with a bit of a disclaimer. I’m not an anti-Facebook zealot and my goal isn’t to discourage the use of Facebook by companies and organizations. To the contrary, one of the biggest roles of my job is to explain how social media channels can be used effectively by organizations and within organizations. So, with that said, my goal with this series of posts is to educate anyone considering the use of Facebook as their corporate Intranet to seriously reconsider. Using Facebook for a corporate Intranet is like using a hammer to loosen a nut. It can be done, but there’s a lot of risk involved.

So, to help you understand why Facebook shouldn’t be considered when selecting the platform for your Intranet, here are 10 more reasons why it just doesn’t stack up to the competition out there.

10) No integration with organizational LDAP – Your employees are going to want to login using a “single sign-on” with your company domain. Facebook does not provide this type of integration, meaning that your users will need to manage separate accounts. Not a huge problem (because they probably already do), but most platforms built for Intranets will include this functionality, reducing the number of logins your employees require.

9) No document sharing – Don’t be confused by the recent announcement that Groups will allow the sharing of documents. That’s a bit of a misnomer. Facebook does not currently allow for the storage/sharing of documents and the new  “document’ functionality will simply allow members of the group to create a “document” (think Notepad) and share it within the group. You won’t be able to share PowerPoint decks, MS Word docs, or Excel spreadsheets. This means that your employees will be using local drives or shared network drives to save information, which can turn into an IT nightmare. Retrieving lost documents or dealing with document versions without a system designed to handle the complexities will consume a lot of IT bandwidth.

8 ) Search isn’t designed for Intranet purposes – If you have an Intranet right now, ask your employees which functionality they wish worked better. My bet is they’ll say “search”.  Facebook’s search is designed to find people and pages, not information. Even if Facebook did add document storage and sharing, the chances of your employees actually finding anything would be slim to none.

7) Facebook is architected as an entertainment platform, not an organizational Intranet – Ever build an organizational information taxonomy for your Intranet? It can be incredibly painful, even with the right tools. Facebook doesn’t offer you the flexibility to build your Intranet navigation structure in a way that will work for your team. Instead, you’re stuck with what they give you. Also, you’d better hope they don’t change it in the future. Also, would you really want your intranet competing for resources with the likes of Farmville and Mafia Wars?

6) Changes that might not be in the interest of your organization – Facebook is in the business of making money…for Facebook. They aren’t really interested in making your organization successful and if they need to add or change functionality that is adverse to your organizations needs, there’s likely nothing you can do about it. Facebook will do what’s good for them and their future, not yours. If Facebook feels it’s more important to their pocketbook to place your competitor’s ads on your private group, they’ll do so.

5) Groups are limited to 250 members – The recent enhancement of Groups functionality has spurred additional interest in Facebook as an Intranet platform. Keep in mind, however, that in the announcement of the new Groups Mark Zuckerberg continually mentioned the 250 member limitation and that these groups are really intended to be used on a smaller scale.

4) Discussions and walls offer no pre-moderation options – Although many organizations don’t want post moderation in their intranet discussion forums, there are some that do. With Facebook, there is no pre-moderation of wall posts or discussion posts.  That means when an employee posts it, it goes live. This makes some Intranet managers uncomfortable.

3) Employees may not like the “forced” blending of work/social – Many of your employees may view Facebook as their personal social network and may not like the forced blending of their personal and professional lives. Before setting your mind on Facebook as your Intranet platform, you might want to get the input of your HR executives. They may feel that what’s out there on Facebook isn’t really the business of the organization and blending business/personal poses a potential risk.

2) No integration with your other enterprise applications – While Facebook does offer an application platform, it is definitely not geared toward integration with a corporate Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tool or an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) system. Your corporate Intranet should be the place where your employees work and where they can access their timecard apps, PTO management system, online form builder, ECM system, and ERP applications. Facebook just doesn’t offer the service-oriented architecture that is required to serve as a centralized portal.

1) Privacy, privacy, privacy. Facebook was not developed with privacy in mind. In fact, the concept of Facebook is pretty much anti-privacy. Share everything…and restrict access to those things you don’t want shared. A corporate Intranet should be exactly the opposite. Share nothing, and decided what you want shared with the outside world. Can you imagine sensitive documents being shared on Facebook and someone accidentally forgetting to set the right restrictions? For a private company, it could be a nightmare. For a public company, under FTC regulation, it could be full-blown Armageddon.

So there you have it….10 more reasons that Facebook shouldn’t be considered for a corporate Intranet. Have suggestions for the list? Feel free to add them in the comments!

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

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.

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.