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multiple windows, and ugly design but the vast majority of their frustrations are around the relevancy of content, outdated information, and poor search results.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

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.

Sean R. Nicholson

Building a great Intranet environment is often about balance. Balancing acts like those between openness and security,  corporate needs and individual desires, and the balance between content and culture often make for long meetings and tough decisions. Internal communicators and Intranet managers often have to determine how much to share and the right format in which to share it.

Take, for instance, the topic of how much strategic corporate information should be shared internally with employees, and at what time.  Some organizations are willing to post strategic information like corporate earnings and key performance indicators on their Intranet in real time or prior to formal announcements. Others are concerned about employees sharing strategic information outside the firewall where it could impact stock prices or competitive behavior. Usually, the key cultural component as to whether this information is shared with employees is one of trust.  It boils down to whether the organizational leaders trust that employees understand the critical nature of the information being shared.

In situations where a strong bond of trust has been formed between the executive layer and the employees, leaders see the sharing of this information as critical to the success and growth of the company since it tells employees where they are doing well and points out where they can focus their energies to improve. These organizations often use the Intranet to openly share corporate goals and strategies, as well as the performance metrics to measure success. Along with the communication comes a consistent message of the importance of using the information internally and only sharing when and to whom it is appropriate.

At companies where that bond of trust has not been formed or has been previously violated, executives often feel that employees simply don’t understand that sharing earnings or performance information prior to formal announcements can have an adverse impact on the operation of the organization?In these cases, Intranets are often void of critical performance measures and are used, instead,  as communication vehicles for corporate events, product announcements, and HR information. Each of these are important functions, but of little value to the employee in determining whether their day-to-day activities are helping the organization advance its corporate goals and strategies.

In organizations where executives prefer to guard the information and release it to employees at the same time they announce to the public, employees often feel as though they aren’t “in the loop” and, at times, learn about important corporate strategies online, from local news sources, or colleagues at other companies. Hearing corporate performance news and announcements from third parties, rather than hearing the news directly from their executives, often propagates a feeling of mistrust between executives and the employees.

Realistically, it would be naive to state that the best practice is to always share strategic information with employees via the Intranet. The reality is that in large organizations or those with little governance, it just may not be reasonable to assume that providing real-time feedback on performance indicators is possible without having the information leak. Even in small organizations, disgruntled employees or accidental disclosure may result in the information leaking.

Therefore, the best practice for when to share key performance metrics will have to be based on the balance of trust within the organization and the employees’ understanding of when/where/to whom it is appropriate to share. As a result, Intranet professionals will have to work to educate employees as to the importance of keeping the information secure and disclosing only when their organizational culture dictates.

Thoughts, comments, or experiences? I always welcome feedback via comments!

Sean R. Nicholson

When it comes to managing Intranets, governance is one of those topics that tends to divide folks into some pretty extreme camps. One side contends that users should be able to govern themselves freely and, when left alone, content driven by the users will be rich and meaningful. The folks on the other side of the fence believe that content should be generated by one or more specific departments (usually Corporate Communications or HR) for consumption by the end-users.  Their position is often based on the argument that end-users would pose a risk to the organization by sharing incorrect, privileged, or inappropriate content if the wild west of end-user content were allowed. The reality is that these two camps each have their valid points, but the best practice is to land somewhere in the middle by allowing individual contribution, but providing some oversight.

While it’s always good to have one or two Intranet experts who understand the technical architecture of your portal and Intranet applications, it’s also valuable to seek input from not-so-technical Intranet power users from across your org. One tried and true method is to form an Intranet Governance Council that consists of the primary power user from each of the departments in your organization. By ensuring that each department is represented, you’ll hear about issues and concerns from throughout the entire organization and these representatives can solicit feedback from their end-users as well as help you spread of the word about upcoming changes or the addition of features/functionality.  When forming your Intranet council, it’s best to keep it to a small group, usually one or two representatives from each department and make sure to schedule a recurring meeting to get together and review your content management strategy and hash through any issues that might arise.

At the start, it might feel like there are too many cooks in the kitchen and some departments might attempt to set the expectation that their department should have more influence over the direction of the functionality or content. If this occurs, remind each representative that all departments have an equal share in the success or failure of the Intranet and working together is the key to success.  Sometimes this great quote from Henry Ford can help set the tone — “Coming together is a beginning. Keeping together is progress. Working together is success.”

Sean R. Nicholson

Over the last few years, the term “Enterprise Content Management” (ECM) has become a term familiar to those working in the Intranet, Web, or Knowledge/Information Management sectors. The difficulty lies in the fact that, while the term is easy to toss around, the actual definition of what is expected to be encompassed by ECM continues to evolve. As a result, ECM to a Records Manager often means something very different than what ECM means to a Web Developer. In an attempt to more accurately define ECM, this article deconstructs the term into a variety of subcomponents that are commonly included in discussions about ECM.

Core Functionality for ECM

Recently, when conducting a search for an ECM solution for a Fortune 500 organization, the following core requirements were set forth as required elements to participate in the selection process. These core components provided a basis for what was expected to be included in an ECM offering:

• Document Management (DM) – Centralization of millions of documents was core to the functionality of this particular business and document management is probably the most consistent component in the definition of ECM. In this case, the DM system was required to have a browser-based folder view of the repository as well as check-in/check-out document collaboration, robust full-text searching, and the ability to secure documents at the organizational, folder, and document level. In addition, the solution required full auditing capabilities of each user and object within the repository. Finally, integration with the enterprise email system, while not required, was favorable.
• Web Content Management (WCM) – Although the goal of this particular RFP was to select a content management system (CMS) for an Intranet portal, the principles were the same as the selection of a Web Content Management System.  The solution had to include a “What You See Is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) rich text editor that allowed content creators and managers to easily edit and permission content. In addition, the solution had to offer the ability to schedule content for future publication.
• Records Management (RM) – To comply with the corporate retention schedules, the RFP required that the selected solution provide Records Management functionality that included the ability to schedule the review and destruction of items marked as corporate records. The ideal solution would allow for the creation of a variety of retention categories that allow for the movement of corporate records from real-time storage, to secondary, and eventually tertiary storage as the lifecycle of the record progressed.
• E-Discovery Tools – With E-Discovery weighing heavily on the minds of corporate attorneys everywhere, it was required that the selected solution provide the ability to locate content based on keyword searches or metadata and place those documents or records on legal hold for review. These documents, while in hold status, would be exempt from the records retention/destruction policies. In this case, the E-Discovery tools were only required to access content and not data. The distinction is that the ECM tools were focused on content stored in document and portal/Web content repositories and not in application databases such as customer relationship management (CRM) solutions or billing systems.
• Enteprise Search Integration – To provide a single search interface to users, the solution was required to provide search integration through an Application Programming Interface (API) using the Web Services Definition Language (WSDL) or other suitable messaging platform. The implication was that users should be able to search many sources of content using a search interface integrated into the corporate portal.

Just to participate in the selection process, each vendor was required to demonstrate that they offered the above functionality. That doesn’t mean, however, that these five elements completely defined ECM for that organization. Even after the solution was selected and implemented, the definition of ECM continued to evolve as users identified new content types and needs. Discussions of blogs, Wikis, and digital assets identified new potential content and required the reshaping of how content would be captured, stored, and governed. As this evolution progressed, several additional components were added to the organizational definition of ECM.

Secondary Functionality For ECM

• Transactional Content Management – Activities such as claims scanning and processing, invoice processing, and human resources employee packet processing all require that data be captured via scanning or electronic methods, and processed through a workflow until completed.
• Business Process Management - Activities that require documents or content to be passed through a workflow needed to be automated using a business process management tool. These tools allow the Business Process Owner to lay out the business process in a graphical manner and then create worflow rules that govern the routing of the document or content to various roles in the organization. The classic example is that of the content creator/editor/approver. The content creator creates the content and then routes the content item to the editor queue for editing and review. Once the content is edited, the editor forwards the content item to the approver for final review and publication.
• Digital Asset Management – In this age of digital media, the protection of electronic assets such as coporate logos, images, videos, and audio files is becoming of increasing concern to organizations. Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems focus on securing and protecting those assessts, restricting whether they can be used, duplicated, or altered by users and tracking when those activities occur.
• Knowledge Management – Knowledgebases, Wikis, blogs, microblogs, forums, and mashups are surfacing more frequently in the enterprise and the content created by their authors is key to capturing information once trapped inside each employees head. Using these tools, content authors can share their experiences and understanding of the organization. Each comes with its own challenge, however, as the content is often controlled by the creator and often has not review process.

Clearly, to this organization the definition of Enterprise Content Management went far beyond the ability to simply store a document in a centralized location and locate it when necessary. Just as in this example, organizations are continually being challenged to define what should be included in their Enterprise Content Management solution. As new types of content are identified, the need to store, secure, and locate them becomes more and more crucial to business operations. As a result, the definition of ECM will continue to evolve and the solutions offered to manage these content types will be required to either specialize in specific aspects of the content or grow to become all-incluse of the various content types.