Social media and intranet case studies, best practices, & evolution by Toby Ward.
View Article  Innovative intranets

(SAN JOSE, CA) While an innovative intranet may be cool, and look great, a truly innovative intranet delivers true value and advances an organization's standing in its industry.

The Intranet Innovations 2009 report celebrates the winners of the 2009 Intranet Innovation Awards, produced by Step Two Designs, sharing remarkable ideas from across the globe.


Intranet Innovation Award winner, SabreTown (Sabre's social networking for employees)

Winning entries include intranets from all over the World including:

  • CRS Australia (Australia)

  • IDEO (USA), IBM (USA)

  • SunGard (USA/NZ)

  • NYK Group (UK)

  • Sabre (USA)

  • COWI (Denmark)

  • ChTPZ (Russia)

  • Prophet (USA)

  • AEP (USA).

The Intranet Innovations Awards celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the enhancement and delivery of intranets.Now in their third year, the awards have uncovered many innovative ideas from across the globe. Use these ideas to gain senior management support and to deliver an ever-better intranet.

For example, AEP, a US-based electric utility have created an online ideas system that has identified $8 million in savings, $2 million in the first month alone.

With winners across four categories (core functionality, communication and collaboration, frontline delivery and business solutions), there are valuable ideas for every intranet team.

The 198-page Intranet Innovations 2009 report shares the full results of the awards, including screenshots and details of the winning entries.

For more information:

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View Article  Intranet governance begets intranet success

As is the case with most websites or intranets it is simply impossible to achieve any long-lasting success without a clearly defined ownership and management structure. Intranet governance provides clarity and rules: namely the titles, roles and responsibilities of its owners, managers, stakeholders and contributors. However, at the heart of a successful model, is a powerful executive with purse strings, supported by a solid intranet team.

 

Here are some of the most frequently asked questions regarding governance and a successful intranet, culled from the Q&A of my webinar on Intranet Governance (the highest attended webinar to date) last month:

 

Q- How do you define what a great intranet is?

 

A – A great intranet:

 

  • operates from a thorough, well defined plan;
  • is managed by a rigorous governance model supported by a powerful senior executive and a solid management team;
  • has a reasonable budget for both technical and content development;
  • features solid, purposeful content and tools that actively support the day-to-day work of employees; and
  • delivers a solid return on investment in the form of cost savings / cost avoidance and increased sales.

 

Down the complete Good to Great Intranet Matrix (a guide for evolving your intranet from good to great).

 

Q - What is the governance model that fits companies who have made the move to social media on their intranet?

 

A – Governance depends on the culture, company and the management and stakeholders involved. Social media MUST have governance though it should fall under the central intranet governance unless the social media tools are purely separate and owned separately from the intranet / portal home.

 

A successful social media governance model requires:

 

  • A defined owner with clout
  • Defined roles & responsibilities for all
  • Policies (rules) for contributing content
  • Terms of use

 

Q - Can you talk to setting up a steering committee in more detail, especially when all stakeholders feel that it is their intranet?

 

A – Follow a proper intranet assessment to ensure that all key intranet stakeholders (managers and executives with a full, partial or perceived ownership stake in the intranet or its major sections and tools) have a formal opportunity to provide input and to itemize their key requirements. From assessment you move into intranet planning that actively engages these key stakeholders and culminates in the development of one of four key intranet governance models that all (or at least most) agree to adopt for their own.

 

They key is building consensus. If the stakeholder environment is particularly fractured and not given to teamwork, or have competing priorities, then a third-party, non-partisan can help facilitate the process and break down the political barriers.

 

Also read:

Intranet strategy: planning a successful intranet

Intranet Assessment

 

Q - Is there a template for comprehensive Governance Planning?

 

A - We do not have a free template because that is actually a service that we provide, and each organization is different and unique and requires their own governance model. While there are four distinct types of governance models (see Intranet Governance: Ownership, Management & Policy) we (Prescient Digital Media) has never created the exact same governance model twice. If you do not have experience with intranet governance models then you may benefit from hiring an outside intranet consultant to assist with the process.

 

Also read:

How to hire an intranet consultant

 

Q - I feel that I own the intranet because I started it by myself 3 years ago, but I’m not sure how to set up a real steering committee.

 

A – If people don’t feel that you own it then you will be challenged or replaced as the owner – you need to get an executive champion (someone in senior management, preferably the C-suite). If you are being challenged for the ownership of the intranet, then you most definitely need to hire an external intranet consultant or expert to help you navigate these politics.

 

Q - How are policies and standards enforced? How do you make people respond to a new initiative?

 

A – Use a combination of the carrot and the stick: reward participants, and punish the non-conformists. If the intranet is a good one, with centralized technology and content management then the intranet should sell itself (and would undoubtedly be less expensive for other groups to use as their platform then maintaining and operating their own). However, if they move to the central system, they have to sign-off on the governance (which is also baked into the CMS or portal). For those that won’t cooperate, then don’t link to their site, ensure the search engine doesn’t index them, and don’t let them use the root intranet URL (this effectively banishes them to a corner of the corporate universe that isn’t easily found without the exact URL).

 

About the author: Toby Ward is an intranet consultant (Internet consultant too) and the founder of Prescient Digital Media. He has worked with and improved many, many company intranets including Amgen, HSBC, Mastercard, Manulife, PepsiCo, Royal Bank, etc. Toby and his company are consultants for hire and can build your intranet or improve an existing intranet You may contact this intranet consultant directly via the Prescient Digital Media website or email him at: toby{at}prescientdigital{dot}com.

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View Article  Top 5 intranet KPIs

In many ways, websites and intranets are like telephone systems – they assist us in accomplishing mission-critical work all the time but their true value is rarely measured.


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Register for the free webinar: Intranet Governance (Wed, 12pm EDT)

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Most people and organizations inherently know and understand the value of the telephone and don’t require a detailed ROI balance sheet before buying a phone. Like the telephone, most organizations inherently understand the value of an intranet, but don’t truly measure its value beyond HITS.


Failure to measure your intranet’s performance above and beyond simple analytics (e.g. HITS and page views) is a failure of responsibility (particularly in this economy where most organizations are looking cut costs wherever they find them).


Here are five noteworthy key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to adopt:

  1. Sales – if you’re intranet is not helping your organization increase sales, then you’re missing out. It’s far too easy to accomplish with a little planning and execution. Among the benefits:

    • Provide the sales team with better information, more efficiently

    • Solicit and reward employee leads & referrals


Additional reading:

Intranet Insider World Tour: Sodexho USA


  1. User satisfaction – more important than what employees are reading, and how often / much, is their satisfaction with the intranet. How happy are they? In particular, user satisfaction with:

    • Design

    • Content

    • Navigation

    • Tools

    • Search


Among the satisfaction metrics BT tracks on their intranet (see Satisfied BT Intranet users « Mark Morrell):

 

    • 83% satisfied with the intranet (down 3%)

    • 42% extremely/very satisfied with the intranet (down 3%)

    • 6% are dissatisfied with the intranet (up 2%)

    • 79% satisfied with BT Homepage (new design) the corporate intranet portal (down 3%)

    • 43% extremely/very satisfied the BT Homepage (down 5%)

    • 3% dissatisfied with BT Homepage (no change)

       

  1. Productivity – the intranet can significantly boost employee productivity and their ability to find information and tools to complete their work. Among the productivity metrics that Microsoft, IBM and BT track:

    • 33% of Microsoft employee survey participants (33%) agree completely that the Microsoft intranet (MSWeb) saves them time

    • 27% agree completely that MSWeb has helped to improve their productivity (8 or 9 on a nine-point scale)

    • 80% IBM employees visit w3 (the intranet) at least once per day

    • 68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs

    • 52% are more satisfied to be an IBM employee because of information obtained on w3

    • 48% agree the BT Intranet improves everyday working life

    • 57% agree the BT Intranet saves me time in my working day

    • 59% agree the BT Intranet helps me to be more efficient in my job


Additional reading:

Intranet 2.0 case study: BT

Leading intranet case study: IBM’s W3

 

  1. Stakeholder satisfaction – a far more critical and discerning audience are those managers and executives (stakeholders) that have a hand in or ownership of the intranet. Our intranet consultants (Prescient Digital Media) have solicited and surveyed stakeholders for their opinions and ratings of the for more than 100 intranet clients. Why? It’s not just about making users happy, but also making management happy.

     

Additional reading:

Creating A Measurable Intranet Strategy Prescient Digital Media (PPT with case study from PNC Bank)

 

  1. Cost savings – why have an intranet if it’s not saving your organization money? Improved communications and HR are nice, soft benefits, but if the intranet is delivering those benefits, then it’s probably delivering cost savings that you just haven’t measured. Everything from paper, software, technology, administration, distribution / delivery, and travel costs to just about anything under the sun. There are hundreds of areas to save money with your intranet.

     

Additional reading:

Finding ROI: Measuring Intranet Investments (free white paper)

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View Article  Intranet Governance: Ownership, Management & Policy

Who should own the intranet? Communications? IT? HR? All of them? You may be shocked to learn that many companies don’t know the answer; in fact, many organizations can’t clearly answer with any confidence whom is the present intranet owner.

 

As is the case with most intranets it is simply impossible to achieve any long-lasting success without a clearly defined ownership and management structure. Far from being a buzz word or jargon, intranet governance provides clarity and rules: namely the titles, roles and responsibilities of its owners, managers, stakeholders and contributors.



Sample governance model – large-sized financial services firm

(Source: Prescient Digital Media)

 

Simply put, governance defines an intranet’s ownership and management model and structure including the:

 

  • Management team
  • Roles & responsibilities of contributors
  • Decision making process
  • Policies & standards

 

Like the content of your website or intranet, planning and governance is technology agnostic; whether it’s SharePoint, IBM or another portal or content management system, the necessity for and the approach to governance is the same. Given its technology neutral status in governance is largely applicable to any technology platform.

 

POLITICS

 

Politics and the issues of control, ownership and standards go hand-in-hand with intranet management and perhaps these issues, more than any other, have driven the requirement for planning and defined governance models. Sadly, very few organizations actually have a well-defined governance model, and many of those have spent hundreds-of-thousands to millions of dollars on their website or intranet – amounting to extraordinary investments left to chance and execution on a whim.

 

According to the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey:

 

  • Only 47% of organizations have a defined governance model (32% have 6,000 employees or more; 11% have 30,000 employees or more);
  • Of the tools and platforms being used by survey participants, a whopping 47% are using SharePoint (MOSS 2007) in some shape or form.

 

Politics will kill your intranet. Without a well defined governance model (and should your intranet survive the naturally occurring politics of competing priorities amongst various stakeholders – communications, IT, human resources, various business units, etc.) then the value the intranet or portal delivers will be severely hampered.

 

OWNERSHIP

 

“If you don’t have structure, you’re going to constantly run into politics,” said Terry Lister, Partner and Leader of IBM Canada’s Business Consulting Services. “Without a governance structure with standards, different silos try to do something in parallel (their own thing) and it costs more… and will lessen the user experience.”

 

Much of the problem lies in the immaturity of this nascent intranet technology. With the rational consolidation of intranet sites and services under a central site or portal, disparate departments and stakeholders such as corporate communications, human resources, IT and varying business units now must cooperate under a lone umbrella with a single intranet home page. Along with this ‘forced’ cooperation comes the predictable politics and competition for ownership of the intranet (and competition for valued home page real estate).

 

The problem lies with the traditional growth and evolution of the intranet. Initially, when intranets first came online in the early to mid-1990s, they were nothing more than a web brochure (a.k.a. ‘brochureware’) that sat on a small server under the desk of a Web developer who served as designer, writer and Webmaster.

 

GOVERNANCE MODELS

 

I categorize intranet governance by four broad approaches or models:

 

  • Decentralized (no single owner; do-what-you-like)
  • Centralized a single owner or department controls it all; highly bureaucratic; common in small organizations)
  • Collaborative (shared ownership via committee)
  • Hybrid, centralized (single owner, with collaborative accountability, decentralized content ownership)

 

COLLABORATIVE GOVERNANCE

 

The most common governance model in recent years, in medium to large-size organizations, has been the collaborative model. The collaborative model is most often focused on a cross-representative steering committee representing the major functional stakeholders:

 

  • Communications
  • Human Resources
  • Operations
  • Information Technology
  • Business units / departments

 

This model is most successful when the committee is championed by one or two key executives, often the CIO, the head of Communications, or HR. Instead of no owner, or one single owner, a collaborative team governs the intranet through the application of policies, standards and templates. This committee is typically responsible for the direction, vision, prioritization of projects, and future evolution.

 

About two-thirds of medium to large-size organizations have some form of collaborative governance and some form of intranet ‘steering committee’ or council. They typical committee has 6-10 individuals (mostly from IT, HR & communications) and is focused on:

 

  • Mandate and vision
  • Business objectives
  • Policies and standardization
  • Project prioritization
  • Trouble-shooting and conflict resolution

 

HYBRID, CENTRALIZED GOVERNANCE

 

The hybrid, centralized governance model is one that combines elements of all three previous models:

 

  • Centralized ownership
  • Centralized policy making and future development decision-making
  • Centralized technology and content management platforms
  • Decentralized content publishing and ownership
  • Decentralized application ownership / management

 

The hybrid model is very closely aligned to the collaborative model, with two significant exceptions: there is often a supporting steering committee, but it falls under a single intranet owner (or co-owners); and the role of IT is usually reduced from a collaborative owner to a committee member without ownership, but rather a support or enabler role for the business owner (often communications or HR). So while the collaborative model has a committee as the end intranet owner, the hybrid model puts the committee under an owner (though sometimes this business owner is in fact IT).

 

FREE WEBINAR

 

Learn more about intranet governance during the free, one-hour webinar on September 23 (12pm EST). Contact us directly to secure an advanced spot on the webinar.

 

ADDITIONAL READING

Intranet Governance

The Politics of Intranet Ownership

Collaborative Intranet Governance (Intranet Politics Part II)

Intranet management is plural

Why is the intranet so political?

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View Article  What every intranet team should know
Step Two's James Robertson has released a handy new paperback book, “What every intranet team should know for only.”


This is the definitive ‘quick start’ guide to intranets, providing intranet teams with a to-the-point overview of how to plan, design, manage and grow intranets.


A beautifully printed A5-sized 110-page book, this volume covers key topics for every intranet team:


  • Six phases of intranet evolution

    • 1: The intranet is born

    • 2: Rapid organic growth

    • 3: Repeated redesigns

    • 4: Intranet usability

    • 5: Useful, not just usable

    • 6: Business tool

  • Four purposes of the intranet

  • How to find out what staff need

  • How to design the intranet

  • How to deliver great content

  • The role of the intranet team

  • How to plan intranet improvements


Few teams have time to read a weighty tome on intranets, and what is needed is a clear ‘map’ for delivering a successful intranet. Drawing on experience from intranet teams across the globe, every page of this book provides key insights, ideas, models and methodologies.


What every intranet team should know” is perfect for a first-time intranet manager, an inexperienced contributor, or for someone who is just plain stuck or frustrated with the lack of direction for their intranet. The book is a short read, and a good value at only $US89 – a great bang-for-the buck, how-to resource for intranet managers and consultants.


This is, quite deliberately, a slim volume,” says author James Robertson. “We have distilled our knowledge to a few key concepts, to get you kick-started on the journey to a remarkable intranet.”


Review & purchase What every intranet team should know for only US$89.


FREE WEBINAR:


Intranet 2.0 becomes mandatory Open Webinar (July 21, 2009, 12 pm EDT)

Once a nice-to-have or a future wish, Intranet 2.0 tools such as blogs, wikis and other vehicles have become mainstream, and are present in nearly 50% of organizations (regardless of size) in the Western World.


This open, free webinar will review the findings of the Intranet 2.0 Global Survey and offer attendees a chance to learn why 2.0 has become an imperative, and what to consider / plan when implementing these social media tools.


Reserver your spot for Intranet 2.0 becomes mandatory Open Webinar

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View Article  Intranet (and intranet portal): a definition
It comes up less frequently in 2009 then it first did when I formed North America's first intranet consulting firm (Prescient Digital Media) in early 2001, but the definition of an intranet is still debatable.


Toby Ward's definition of an intranet (first committed to paper in 2001 in the Finding ROI white paper):


A private network, similar to the Internet and using the same protocols and technology, that is contained within an enterprise. It may consist of many inter-linked local area networks (LANs), desktop computers, websites and portals, and email system(s). However, in common vernacular, the intranet is the internal website home page that is for employees only -- and the other internal websites that link to it.


Wikipedia definition of an intranet:


An intranet is a private computer network that uses Internet technologies to securely share any part of an organization's information or operational systems with its employees. Sometimes the term refers only to the organization's internal website, but often it is a more extensive part of the organization's computer infrastructure and private websites are an important component and focal point of internal communication and collaboration.


No surprises, really.


Another term that causes confusion, more so than the intranet, is “portal” or “corporate portal” (sometimes referred to as an “enterprise information portal”).


Toby Ward's definition of an intranet portal (first committed to paper in version 2 (2003) of the Finding ROI white paper):


A primary website on the enterprise intranet. A web-based gateway to most, if not all, tools and information on the enterprise intranet. The portal can be a ‘catch all’ for all of the intranet, or a business unit or function specific portal (i.e. Sales or HR portal). The characteristics that best distinguish it from a standard intranet home page include:


1- application integration

2- advanced security (authentication / authorization / personalization)

3- enterprise search (search that extends beyond the intranet home page, but doesn't necessarily search every single shared drive, email folder & enterprise database).


Wikipedia definition of an intranet portal:


An intranet portal is the gateway that unifies access to all enterprise information and applications[1] on an intranet. It is a tool that helps a company manage its data, applications, and information more easily, and through personalized views. Some portal solutions today are able to integrate legacy applications, other portals objects, and handle thousands of user requests. For enterprise user, it is also known as an enterprise portal.


Now the lines blur somewhat as different consultants and vendors use different definitions (mostly to serve their sales needs). I've never seen a portal that “unifies access to all” enterprise information and applications, though “unifies access” is open to interpretation. If a simple hypertext link to a database qualifies as unified access then perhaps this is true. However, this is why my definition for the past 6 years was written to say “most, if not all, tools and information.” I don't think a portal is an “all” or “nothing” scenario, but it certainly seems to fit if the portal unifies “most” information and applications.


Why are we even talking about this?


The question once again arose last week when I wrote about the importance of strategy and planning for an intranet (see Intranet strategy & execution). An intranet strategy (which may include one universal plan or multiple plans) should encompass all internal facing websites, and apply standards across the network, including all social media, email and related systems.


The intranet strategy should include the use of a portal (where applicable), internal websites, social media, shared drives, and related knowledge management systems. Exclusions might include specialized applications that are for a small, minority audience such as senior executives and the finance team (e.g. Oracle financials, board of directors extranet, CRM system, etc.)


Here's the rub: regardless of your definition, you require a solid intranet strategy that defines what can be done by whom (roles and responsibilities) and according to defined standards (rules).


Get the funding your intranet needs: Winning support for your intranet/intranet 2.0 initiative (free webinar)


Having trouble selling an intranet redesign? Or securing funding for a new CMS or social media tool?


During times of economic downturn, organizations are seeking to discover new ways to make the most of their investments, but too many fail to understand the intranet's value and potential to increase business performance.


Join this free webinar to learn how to convince executives to cough up the cash for your intranet redesign.


  • Date: June 25, 2009

  • Location: Free Webinar 12 pm EDT


See Winning support for your intranet/intranet 2.0 initiative (free webinar)


RELATED READING:

Intranet strategy & execution

Finding ROI (Intranet ROI) white paper (free)

 

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