Sean R. Nicholson

It never ceases to amaze me how few people trust their organizational intranets. A tool that was designed specifically for the purpose of helping employees do their job better and faster is often the joke of the water cooler. Yet organizations knowingly ignore the fact that employees don’t use or trust the information stored on their intranet.

Periodically, I have the great opportunity to sit in front of a group of employees and ask them about their intranet experiences. Often, it’s in anticipation of an intranet revamp, so the need for a “do-over” or an evolution has already been defined at some level. While the individual users and comments might be different, they usually go start with something like this:

Me: Who here uses the Intranet fairly consistently?  (half the hands in the room go up).

Me: For those of you whose hands aren’t up, why don’t you use it?

Response #1: The content stinks.

Response #2: I can never find what I’m looking for.

Response #3: Yeah, and when you do find something that looks right, it’s two years old.

Response #4: The last time I searched the intranet for the latest information on new Java libraries, the first five search results were the hours and

specials at the local coffee shop.

Me: For those of you with your hands up, (you can put them down now) tell me how you choose to use the intranet?

Response #1: I use the employee directory. It’s right most of the time because it’s tied to our active directory and employees are added/removed as they join or leave the company.

Response #2: I use it to see what’s being served in the cafeteria. They do a good job of updating the menu each morning.

Response #3: I used it to download the forms to change my 401(k). I did have to choose between last year’s forms and this year’s forms, but I navigated directly to the HR landing page, and didn’t use the search tool.

…and the conversation goes on for another hour. Each employee sharing their stories of frustration or limited successes with the intranet platform. One failure feeds another employee’s stories and the negative sentiment in the room grows. Frustrations often include multiple logins, confusing navigation, multiple windows, and ugly design but the vast majority of their frustrations are around the relevancy of content, outdated information, and poor search results.

Now, imagine for a moment that, instead of the corporate intranet, these comments and stories were being said about another employee. If an employee had a history of providing inaccurate information, was behind the times and slow in their responses, and didn’t collaborate well with other employees it’s highly likely that they wouldn’t survive their next performance review. Yet organizations continue to ignore the fact that a tool that is key to their business success is unable to provide employees what they need. In fact, many companies invest more money in licensing fees and servers for their Intranet than any single employee in their company. Yet, the investment in keeping the content fresh and relevant is minimal. When you present your Intranet in this light, it seems like a logical deduction that an annual review of the performance of your Intranet is worthwhile.

The conversation continues to get more interesting as the focus shifts toward what the employees would like from their Intranet:

Me: First, are you interested in having a functional Intranet? If so, why?

Response #1: Definitely! It would make my job a lot easier if I could find updates to our products and pricing easily.

Response #2: Not really, we purchased a different tool for our group to store information because the Intranet is is bad.

Response #3: I would use the Intranet if I knew the search worked. Right now, it’s just too hard to navigate around a hope that I find what I’m looking for.

Response #4: I think a good Intranet would really help the company do business. It just needs to be a lot easier to use. No one asks the employees how they want it to work, they just give us a tool and say “Figure it out”.

Response #5: They should probably just start over and build something like Facebook. I’m already friends with most of my co-workers, anyway, so it would be easier if we could just make a private place on Facebook where we could share company information.

From these responses, it clear that the desire for an intranet exists in some format. Even responses #2 and #5 indicate that there is a need for a tool, they just opted to use something else or want a different tool since the organizational intranet wasn’t meeting their needs.

Steps To Develop Organizational Trust In Your Intranets

1) Ask Your Employees For Input

Most employees that I talk to feel like they have no ownership or input to the Intranet. They view it as a tool that is given to them by the organization and its structure and content are set in stone. They are, however, interested in making it a better tool and have plenty of input on how to improve it. Some of the input is good, some of it is wishful thinking, and some of it is so focused on their specific job that it may not be useful to others. Little changes to navigation and content, based on their feedback, does increase positive sentiment and gives employees a sense that they had an impact on organizational change.

2) Give Employees The Chance To Shape Content

Because content woes are top of the list when it comes to frustration with their intranet, many employees would welcome the opportunity to contribute content or, at the minimum, provide feedback on the value of the content. Although most aren’t interested in writing blogs, they would like to be able to suggest content or changes to ensure that information is accurate. To accommodate this, feedback forms, commenting systems, and content rating tools can help employees flag or suggest content. By providing these tool to employees, organizations remove the excuse that “content isn’t useful” and put the onus on the employee to shape the quality of the content.

3) Conduct Scheduled Content Audits

Empowering your employees to help shape the quality of the content doesn’t mean that employees responsible for maintaining the Intranet can sit back and relax. Consistent auditing of search logs to find failed searches (those with zero results returned) can help determine a need for creating or re-purposing content. In addition, face-to-face conversations with your employees to ask what they would find valuable can result in a gold mine of  content requests. Obviously, the need to evaluate future functionality is a key responsibility, ensuring that employees are armed with tools and features that will help them in their daily activities.

4) Optimize Your Pages To Work With Your Search Engine

Although it’s tempting to blame the technology behind poor or failed search results, it’s usually not the intranet search engine that’s causing failed searches. Instead, it’s likely poor search optimization or old content that results in failed searches and employee frustration. Taking some time to understand the fundamentals of search engine optimization and tuning your pages to meet the search patterns of your employees can make a huge difference, without having to rip out and replace your search engine.

Just like any employee in your organization, neglect of your Intranet will result in poor performance and dissatisfaction. If you’re really interested in improving your business processes, doing more with less, and helping your employees do their job try investing a little more time and energy into ensuring that your content is good and is able to be found.

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Sean R. Nicholson

Sometimes opportunities knock quietly….and sometimes they hit us with explosive force. The trouble is, we often miss them even though they are staring us right in the face. As an example, take a look at the recent volcanic explosion in Iceland. This natural disaster has demonstrated the need for business travelers to have access to their corporate information, regardless of where they are located.

The reality is that modern business travelers are more reliant on technology than ever. Sales professionals need access to updated rate sheets and sales contacts, marketing professionals need their product collateral, legal professionals need access to up-to-date case notes, and the list goes on. Without access to the critical information required to do their jobs, traveling professionals would be at a significant disadvantage to those that are able to access their corporate information remotely.

The MODIS instrument on NASA's Terra satellite captured an Ash plume from Eyjafjallajokull Volcano over the North Atlantic at 11:35 UTC (7:35 a.m. EDT) on April 15, 2010. Credit: NASA/MODIS Rapid Response Team.

In addition, the ability to keep in constant contact with employees in the home office allows travelers to make alternate arrangements for travel,meetings, and information distribution. If a sales professional is stuck in the airport in London but has access to email, their travel reservation system, and their Contact Relationship Management (CRM) system, they could reserve a train ride to France, reschedule a business meeting with their customer, and send updated product information…all from the airport.

Estimates indicate that the recent eruption caused more than 100,000 flights to be canceled. Business travelers from Okinawa to Orlando were impacted and their activities potentially disrupted. In many cases, however, employees were able to continue operating remotely due to application access provided via Virtual Private Networks (VPN), remote meeting technology like GoToMeeting, and Web-based email systems.

As a result, Intranet professionals should be looking for ways to highlight the importance of portal, security, and productivity benefits offered by Intranet applications. Demonstrating to executives how internal social media kept employees in touch and helped them conduct business during potentially disastrous times demonstrates the value of investment in an Intranet infrastructure and highlights its benefit.

I’d love to hear stories of travelers who benefited from remote technology and access to the corporate intranet. Feel free to comment and share!

Sean R. Nicholson

While listening to Marketplace yesterday, I heard a great article on a French campaign that is aimed at sparking the entrepreneurial spirit in French workers. According to the piece by John Laurenson, the advertisements feature successful business people in clown outfits and makeup to highlight a new web site at http://www.jesuisunclown.com/ (i am a clown.com). The purpose behind the campaign is to feature successful individuals who have struck out on their own despite others telling them that their ideas were silly.In a time when the French economy needs innovators, the goal is to encourage citizens to risk their pensions and security for the life of an entrepreneur.

The article had me thinking today about employees around the world during these tough economic times and wondering whether employees are encouraged to innovate and share ideas. In the US, we are certainly seeing employees in “hunker and bunker” mode, where they are working hard to keep their jobs in the face of looming corporate cutbacks and downsizing. Unfortunately, when employees are hiding in cubeville, they are usually focusing on just doing their job and not innovating, for fear of looking like “a clown” and risking their employment. The problem with this is that our  global economy needs innovation now more than ever. We need employees to bring new product ideas to the forefront and innovate new service offerings. Managers and executives should be encouraging employees to come up with every new idea possible, regardless of how silly it might initially seem.

As Intranet Professionals, think about whether your Intranet is being used to encourage new ideas. Do you have a campaign asking employees to behave like clowns? Do you have an idea center where employees can submit their ideas and vote on those that they feel would be valuable? Are your executives open to new ideas and are they actively encouraging innovation?

Think about it…products like the slinky, magic eight ball, lava lamps, and mood rings might all probably seemed like silly ideas at the time, yet they have all been significant profit earners for their creators and are still considered by some to be among the top “It” products.

If you’re already finding unique and creative ways to inspire the “clowns” in your organization, please post a comment and share your strategies, tactics, and successes. If you haven’t started an innovation program yet, now might be a great time to start a clown college inside your organization. Your clowns, might just be the key to growing your business and our economy.

Sean R. Nicholson

In the first article in this series on rethinking the old model of Intranet portals, I covered the basics of why the old model of selling Intranet portal software doesn’t really work in the new world of Enterprise 2.0. The old model provided (comparatively) limited functionality at huge software price tags and infrastructure needs, primarily because the competition in the marketplace only existed with large software vendors.

The recent explosion of social media platforms, coupled with the financial meltdown driving a need for operational improvement, has left purchasers exploring low-cost open source options. This behavior is driving commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors to rethink their licensing models. In addition, purchasers of Intranet software have started to expect expanded social media functionality and a variety of options for licensing/hosting their Intranet portals. In this article, we’ll focus on the new platforms available for Intranet portals as well as some of the options available to organizations as a result of this shift.

Quick Review – Why the old model doesn’t work

1. Lengthy Return On Investment – With multi-millon dollar investments, organizations rarely have a positive business case that shows a realistic ROI in less that 5 years. This means that it usually takes an organizational event like a merger, acquisition, spinoff, or change in leadership to get the funding approved.
2. Difficult To Track Process Improvement Impacts – After making the investment, organizations like HR or Corporate Communications often take over the operation of the Intranet with their own departmental initiatives taking priority. Operational organizations like Sales and Customer Support are often too busy and too entrenched in their old processes to take time to reinvent their operations to leverage the features offered by the new portal. As a result, the inability to move the business forward relegates the portal to a (very expensive) one-way communication vehicle and nothing more.
3. Added Features Come With Added Costs – Nothing ticks me off more than seeing cool new functionality from an Intranet portal vendor that is a “bolt-on” to the core software. What “bolt-on” usually means is that it’s not going to be core functionality any time soon and that it comes with an extra price tag, not to mention additional, ongoing annual maintenance costs.
4. Expensive Infrastructure Requirements – In the old model, one enterprise-scale Intranet portal for 50,000 employees required more than $75,ooo in Sun hardware costs (web servers, app servers, database servers, etc…). Even running on WinTel with VMWare, you were still looking at $30K+ in hardware. In either situation, you also require space in the data center, cost of power in the data center, Server Administrators to maintain and monitor, and the process/hardware costs of backup and restore.

While there are other costs involved, the old model of selling/implementing Intranet portals can drive a pretty hefty investment. On top of that, once the investment is made, executives are reticent to the change platforms or enhance them, because the initial investment is so great.  The key to overcoming that hesitation is to put together a strong business case with a quick ROI, usually based on the fact that the organization can either reduce operational expenses or costly annual software maintenance agreement (SMA) fees.

New Platforms For Intranet Hosting

The beauty of the shift away from the traditional portal model means that vendors have started to get creative in the way they offer their Intranet solutions. For instance, no longer is the traditional download/install/update/upgrade model the only game in town. With SaaS, cloud computing, and other options coming more into the spotlight and social media companies wanting to get into the game, there are a whole host (no pun intended) of options out there for organizations looking to build or reinvent their Intranet.

Software As A Service (SaaS)

Software as a Service bundles software licenses with a hosted infrastructure

If you haven’t heard the term “SaaS” being thrown around the water cooler, get ready…it’s on its way. I would definitely consider SaaS to be one of the hot buzzwords in corporate America in 2009 and it doesn’t look to slow down for 2010. As organizations look for ways to cut costs, Software as a Service has offered an attractive way to reduce annual software maintenance costs and recover from reductions in headcount necessitated by the economy.

Essentially, SaaS is a model where a software vendor provides all the hardware, software licenses, and infrastructure (bandwidth, backups, restores, upgrades, etc…) necessary and provides the customer with access to that environment via the Web. Instead of having to foot costly up-front capital bills for hardware and software, companies can opt for smaller monthly expense bills that are easier to digest and plan for. In addition, since the vendor is usually responsible for upgrades, new feature functionality is often added with no additional expense to the customer. Another benefit is that the ROI on a portal can be realized quickly due to the fact that there isn’t such a large outlay as in the traditional licensing model.

SaaS isn’t all peaches and cream, though. There are still concerns about placing sensitive organizational data in the hands of third-party vendors.  IT leaders are still skeptical, having seen their colleagues go through massive loss of credit card numbers, mishandling of customer information, and security breaches. Companies outside the US are also hesitant to jump on the SaaS bandwagon when data would be stored in US-based data centers. The broad reaches of the US Patriot Act makes them a bit hesitant to subject their customer or competitive information to potential seizure by US agencies. One other downside of SaaS is the fact that over the long term life of the agreement, an organization might actually pay more for a SaaS portal than they would have under the traditional model. Plummeting prices around enterprise portal software, however, are reducing that risk.

Even with these potential downsides, more and more software vendors are putting together SaaS packages to offer to their customers. Services like Ning.com and WebX’s Intranets.com are offering their services on a SaaS basis. Even companies like SalesForce.com (traditionally a CRM application vendor) is adding a Social Media component to their offering (aptly named “Chatter”) that will extend their services to more intranet-like functionality.

Hosting In The Cloud

Cloud Computing is opening up a new range of custom services for Intranet portals

Yes…you’re reading this right. I am splitting out SaaS and Cloud hosting. Too many folks are using the terms “SaaS” and “cloud computing” interchangeably and the fact is that they aren’t necessarily the same thing. SaaS solutions are one flavor of cloud computing, but SaaS agreements relegate all aspects of control over the environment and the software to the vendor. There are alternative cloud hosting agreements that allow the organization varying levels of control over installation, maintenance, upgrades, and administration. These custom agreements give the company the benefits of outsourced hosting with the required level of control that meets their needs.

Managed Services Agreements

Similar to SaaS in the fact that the vendor provides all the hardware, managed services agreements usually combine the headache-free environmental benefits with the traditional purchasing of perpetual licenses. Where the old model requires the organization to purchase software licenses and hardware, the managed services option allows companies to buy the licenses and pay a monthly, quarterly, or annual fee to the software vendor to provide servers and administration in their data center. The benefit of this model is that companies can pay the capital outlay on the software and expense the periodic costs of hosting. Managed services agreements often provide for application administration, which outsources the expertise of the application to the vendor. No longer do companies have to hire expensive knowledge experts to configure and maintain their portal application. Instead, they can go right to the source and have expertise from the vendor perform the necessary tasks.

On-Premise Leasing

On premise leasing is the flip-flop version of Managed Services Agreements. In these situations, the company usually has the hardware and resources in-house to host and administer the software, but they don’t want to lay out the large capital outlay for the portal software. Instead, they choose to lease the software licenses and host them on their servers. If/when the company chooses to discontinue use of the software, they simply terminate the relationship (per the terms of the agreement) and uninstall the software.

Appliance-Based Intranets

Some vendors are bundling hardware with software to offer an Intranet applicance

About 10 years ago, I remember reading articles like this one, touting how Intranet appliances were going to rescue us from poor productivity and change the face of enterprise applications as we know it. Vendors were looking for ways to capitalize on plug-and-play Intranets, but their primary shortcoming was the lack of a user-friendly interface that was both customizable and able to integrate with other applications.

Appliances, however, are making a comeback since the cost of hardware has dropped significantly and the bundling of high-quality Intranet software makes the user experience much more appealing. Companies such as SocialText and Bitrix are working on ways to deliver their Intranet or Social Media functionality to the enterprise in an appliance platform. These hardware appliances allow organizations to rack-and-stack the hardware, configure the software, and be up in running in days.

More To Come On Software Licensing

As more and more platform options are offered to the public, companies are also revamping their licensing options. In the next article in this series, we’ll take a look at shifts in traditional per-user and per-processor licensing, as well as new payment options such as monthly payments, ad-supported options, and on-premise leasing.

As always, feedback and comments are appreciated.

Sean R. Nicholson

Over the last few years, the social media boom has forced Intranet portal vendors to rethink some of their licensing models and expand their feature functionality. “Traditional” intranet portals that are simply presentations layers with a back-end content management system just don’t cut it anymore. Instead, organizations want their employees to generate peer-to-peer content using 2.0 functionality like blogs, wikis, and tagging instead of relying on one-way messages from the top.

The collaborative efforts of the open source community have also delivered new products into the marketplace, driving the cost of software down and injecting healthy competition into the portal industry.  On top of new features and pricing models, new hosting options such as Software as a Service (SaaS) and cloud hosting provide organizations additional options to consider when building or upgrading their portal. All of this spells opportunity for Intranet pros looking to make changes.

In future articles, we’ll take a look at some of the specific software vendors and new platforms that are reshaping portal price tags, but before we jump into the specific products, let’s take a look at a recent, real-world example of how much the climate has changed and how big the impact can be to a company.

In 2006, I was involved in an Intranet project for a Fortune 500 telecommunications company with an employee base of around 25,000. After identifying the requirements for the portal, the search for a suitable software package led the project team to three real contenders: BEA Systems’ Aqualogic portal (now Oracle WebCenter), Sun Microsystems’ SunOne portal (now defunct), and the Vignette Intranet portal (now part of OpenText).  All three offered a customizable presentation portal, content management system, search, forums and emerging blog/wiki functionality. However, each solution also required significant server hardware to be purchased and resources to be devoted to the maintenance of the hardware and the application.  After the final solution was selected and the appropriate hardware was purchased, the pricetag for the selected software and hardware tallied up to more than $2 million. Take note that the selected solution was the least expensive of the three.

Now, flash forward to 2009. I recently had lunch with the current manager of that specific Intranet solution and he and I were discussing the changes to the industry and the merits of both open source and hosted (SaaS) solutions. Knowing the price tag of the original solution and the annual software maintenance fees (20% of initial software costs), it took some simple math to come to the conclusion that he could take the annual maintenance of about $225,000 and easily replace the existing system for a hosted solution costing about $75,000 annually.

With the less expensive solution, he would get:

1. A 37% reduction in software costs ($200,000 dropped to $75,000) in year one.
2. A 93% reduction in annual software maintenance costs ($200,000 dropped to $15,000) in the following years.
3. A reduction in hardware costs, allowing $200,000 in hardware to be re-purposed in the enterprise or decommissioned.
4. No employee headcount required to maintain hardware, so reduced costs in employee overhead.
5. The SaaS vendor would now be accountable for a 99% server uptime (No more outage calls at 3am when the servers stop responding or a load balancer fails).
6. Continued evolution of the product since the annual maintenance buys him product upgrades from the vendor.
7. New Web 2.0 functionality offered by SaaS vendors that isn’t offered by the current vendor.

So basically, this Intranet Manager gets more functionality for his users, a stable platform that allows him and his team to sleep at night, and a significant reduction in annual software costs that makes him a corporate hero with the Accountant and Execs!

A second option that we discussed was looking at a lower cost software vendor or an open source solution. In these situations, he would still reduce his annual software licensing costs significantly, but would still require the hardware and headcount to maintain it. The ROI, however, is still positive in year one due to the huge reduction in software maintenance fees.

Obviously, the ROI for this organization is magnified by the size and extensive software/hardware requirements of the company. However, it’s likely that any Intranet portal built on the traditional perpetual software licenses/standalone hardware model could benefit from a review of the existing system and an analysis of potential replacement technologies. So, before you cut that next software maintenance check, take a few moments to think about how much you’re paying and where you might get some additional bang for your buck.

Check out part II of this series where we’ll take a look at some of the existing replacement platforms that could positively impact your Intranet bottom line.

Angie Cullen

When developing your Intranet, it’s best not to develop in a vacuum. You may not be the best person to make decisions on how employees will use the intranet to do their job.  Be sure to identify employees that will be involved in the maintenance of the portal and get everyone involved in the design process. Create an Intranet Governance Council that will include at least one member from each department throughout your company. Bigger departments might have 2 or 3.  Let the members of the governance council represent their department and tell you what employees in their department need to be able to do their job more efficiently.

Be sure to let the members of the governance council know that while you value their input and opinions, the final decisions regarding design and functionality are the responsibility of the Intranet team.  In other words, everything that the members of the governance council submit on their wish list, might not make it in to the final product. By setting this clear direction and making the members of the council a part of the design process, you can leverage their excitement and promote collaboration, while ensuring that the Intranet design meets the needs of all departments and employees.

Sean R. Nicholson

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

What Every Intranet Team Should Know by James Robertson

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

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

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

Sean R. Nicholson

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

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.