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multiple windows, and ugly design but the vast majority of their frustrations are around the relevancy of content, outdated information, and poor search results.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

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

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

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

Classic Talent Management Systems vs. Social Intranet

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

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 As a result, these Talent Management systems quickly became outdated and useless and future investment in these types of tools were difficult to justify.

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

The Engagement Experience

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

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

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

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

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

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

…and the conversation goes on.

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

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

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

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

Sean R. Nicholson

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

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

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

Sean R. Nicholson

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sean R. Nicholson

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!