“Wikis often grow out of hand very quickly and consequently many employees simply ignore them. Enterprises also face the risk of an explosive information growth far beyond their capacity to manage that information”, said analyst and MD, Janus Boye, author of a report, Wiki in the Enterprise.

“If you don’t create guidelines and processes for managing the wiki, the gap between information and capacity is a risk to the enterprise as it translates into the right information not being found and the potential creation of redundant information.”

The Intranet wiki, WikiEnt, of Prescient Digital Media - © 2008

Most corporations do not have a wiki. And most aren’t planning to have them either (just yet). A recent Forrester study found that only 51% of Global 2000 companies plan to invest in Web 2.0 in the coming year. But only between 20% of small companies, and only about 30% of medium corporations plan on buying Web 2.0 tools (for a summary, see Intranet portal solutions die, evolve & move to Web 2.0).

But almost no one had a wiki three years ago. So in truth, wikis have exploded and are multiplying like rabbits. Boye, an independent analyst focusing on online media and an expert on enterprise portal solutions, has found that wikis are increasingly gaining foothold in the enterprise due to it promises of simplicity. Yet, wikis introduce complex challenges for organisations, on a strategic level as well as on the level of actual content creation.

At Cisco, the first wiki appeared a few years ago, when an engineer installed one on the server under his desk. “He told a PM, who then told other PMs and it spread like wildfire,” says Michael Lenz, Senior Manager, User Experience, at Cisco Corporate Communications. “Literally, day over day, the increase is amazing… any number I gave you today would be useless tomorrow or next week. There are tens-of-thousands of wikis… and the number of wikis about equals the number of employees (65,000).”

Read my complete article Enterprise intranet wikis.

Facebook is not an alternative to the intranet. The intranet is a business system, one to support the entire organization, not just a social networking tool.

Now Facebook is becoming more than a social networking site, and shows great potential as a platform for intranet services, but there’s much to be overcome. Facebook is being used by some businesses, including Prescient Digital Media (feel free to join us on the Intranet Global Forum), but it is not a substitute for the intranet which must feature among other things, federated search, application integration, robust security, etc.

As Phil Wainewright writes in Is Facebook a PaaS contender?, Facebook provides us food for thought, but it’s not really a legitimate intranet platform.

"After all, many individuals and some organizations do use Facebook for business purposes. Most famously, Serena Software, which last year adopted Facebook as its intranet. I was somewhat skeptical when I first heard this but the company’s SVP Rene Bonvanie assured me when we met a few weeks ago that 740 out of 820 employees are active users, which is a lot better participation than Serena’s former intranet ever managed.

 

The Facebook platform of course constrains applications into a social networking framework, but that’s no different from the functional constraints imposed by a lot of other PaaS (platform-as-a-service) application builders (the topmost of my five-layer categorization of PaaS).

 

The problem for any business considering Facebook is that it’s a determinedly consumer play, to the extent that I don’t think it can ever seriously fly in the enterprise. Facebook trades free functionality in return for attention and relationship data — and users give up a lot of their control over that data. Businesses aren’t willing to make that trade-off.

 

Bonvanie shrugged when I put this point to him, saying that very little of what Serena’s employees post to the Facebook intranet is proprietary to the company, but at the same time he admitted that Serena stores its company confidential documents elsewhere than Facebook, so its role as an intranet platform is more limited than you would typically look for in an enterprise setting."

Skepticism on Facebook’s value as a platform aside, it could still continue to evolve and become a platform-as-a-service (a hosted intranet platform for business). There is great value in implementing the social networking approach within the enterprise.

IBM understands the value of Facebook, and is testing an employee social networking tool on their intranet called Beehive.

“Beehive truly is an experiment in our own version of an internal 'Facebook.',” says Liam J. Cleaver, Program Director, IBM Jam Program Office. “The research goal of Beehive is to aid IBMers with various people-centric challenges within the workplace. We broadly categorize these challenges into "relationship building" and "people-sensemaking”.

Relationship-building challenges include, for example, new employees struggling with making connections that are important for their current project and professional growth, remote workers having difficulties with team building and staying in touch with their team members, or employees moving on to new assignments who are not easily able to stay touch with former colleges. 

People-sensemaking includes, for example, the difficulties of discovering people with the right skills and common interests, or learning more about someone personally as well as professionally to facilitate making contact, or getting to know about ongoing projects and activities beyond your immediate team.”

IBM’s Beehive will be only one of the tools examined and showcased in the next Intranet Insider World Tour webinar on June 12th at 2pmEDT, produced by Communitelligence.com. Hosted by Liam and myself, the 90 minute webinar will look at the latest and greatest from the world’s best intranet, W3, with a close look at all its Intranet 2.0 functionality which boasts 30,000 bloggers, and thousands more podcasts (audio & video) and wikis – and an “employee directory that puts Facebook to shame.”

Honestly, you are an absolute fool if you work on an intranet and don’t attend this webinar. IBM is doing some groundbreaking stuff that you simply must know.

It’s only $199 to attend this webinar, and you can register online at Communitelligence.com.

Web 2.0 and Intranet 2.0 will be the subject of several hours of instruction and discussion in my upcoming workshops Deploying First-Class Web Content Management For World-Class Websites (Ad Astra) in Hanoi, Vietnam (Interncontinental Hotel) from April 23 – 25. I’ll be repeating the workshop April 28 – 30 in Bali (Hard Rock Hotel).

These workshops will be three full-days and promise a lot of learning, examples and hands-on work. To register for either please phone (65) 6334-9828 or email sales@adastra.com.sg

If you'd like to learn more about Facebook and its potential value to the business, then please do join us on the Intranet Global Forum.

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I have a profound respect for charities with great vision and execution. However, I possess a monstrous disdain for those that manipulate the disadvantaged, use them as a platform to further their own personal goals, and take for granted, or even abuse their patrons.

When I heard about One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), I immediately stepped-up and supported it. I immediately wrote about and promoted the campaign to encourage the world to buy one of their computers, so that a like computer could be donated to a child or classroom in a third world country.

In fact, the Internet and its denizen of bloggers have helped turn this charity into a massive darling that has received heaps of wonderful, international praise. I encouraged friends, colleagues and readers to support it, and instructed my company, Prescient Digital Media, to spend thousands of dollars on the program.

In fact, we were a relatively early contributor during the Christmas campaign of 2007. At the time, OLPC promised the delivery of their computers before Christmas. Four months later, and five months after they took our money, no computers have been delivered.

Now as far as I’m concerned, OLPC does not owe me a thanks, special notes or consideration, or promises about making the world better. In fact, I don’t care if the computers are cheap pieces of crap. Some have been very vocal about the computer’s lack of performance and power (a group of patrons that have had the good fortune to actually see and use one of the mystical laptops).

I could give a damn. I don’t need a high-powered laptop, neither do my children, nor do most others in the Western world. These whiners deserve our scorn for the nobility of such a fantastic intention as to build a low-cost computer that so aims to improve the quality of life for third world children is far above and beyond the trifling and sniveling of spoiled, self-consumed computer addicts.

My praise for OLPC ends here. OLPC has promised millions of computers to the third world, and has failed miserably. If you’re to use the disadvantaged children of the third world as a platform, a platform that has so richly bolstered the fortunes and reputations of OLPC and its founders, you better dam well deliver on the promises made. It is grossly unacceptable for any charity to use children to promote the collection of funds, and to break the promises based on the disadvantaged use to promote the campaign. I don’t care who donated $400 for a computer for third-world children, that computer must be delivered as promised.

OLPC has failed to deliver computers, broken their promises, and in my opinion, violated a sacred trust. For when you use poor children as a subject matter for raising funds, there is ZERO MARGIN FOR ERROR.

For all of my adult life, I have been a supporter of UNICEF. My wife and I have sponsored programs and individual children through World Vision and UNICEF for as long as I can remember. I put these charities, and the individuals that make them work, above everyone else – in my opinion, none can compare nor come close to those noble souls that dedicate their time, and often their lives, to improving the lives of those that deserve the most care.

While the computers have not been delivered, I continue to clutch to a sliver of faith that OLPC will find some competence and deliver sometime soon. For this reason, I have not demanded the thousands of dollars we have spent, despite the pathetic communications (or lack thereof) and assurances OLPC. Yes, we’re told that OLPC is fixing the problems… the computers are already made, there are warehouse problems, blah, blah, blah. We’ve been given the same vague and ambiguous reassurances for months – months. My blind faith reassures me… for now.

In the meantime, the founders and chiefs at OLPC have received international praise, kudos and promotion, and are fleeing with the good PR in their pockets. Co-founder and former technology officer, Mary Lou Jepson, left to start her own company. All that goodwill and PR will no doubt be very profitable! Co-founder and Chairman Nicholas Negroponte is looking to distance himself too and has begun a search for a CEO. Ah well, the charity has proven to be a very profitable PR machine, but since it’s not delivering on those promises, he better get out while the going is good.

Performance issues are acceptable. Lack of communications and gratitude are expected. Delays in production and delivery are expected and acceptable. No delivery, and broken promises made on the backs of third-world children are not acceptable.

Shame on you, OLPC. Shame on you, Nicholas Negroponte.

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If you disagree, feel free to phone me directly at 416.986.2226 but I will not respond to anonymous posts or flame mail.

Everything is just great! Your corporate intranet is in excellent shape!

You know you have a superlative intranet when you can say that your intranet has…

• Great senior management support – your executives ‘get it’, use it, and are active champions
• Great cooperation – key stakeholders including HR, IT, and communications all understand each other and get along (hugs are optional)
• Great funding and resources – you have more than enough money and staff
• Great governance – well defined roles, responsibilities, and policies
• Great content – everything is well written for the web, updated and relevant
• Great content management – the CMS editor really is WYSIWYG! And everyone loves the workflow!
• Great HR section – you can actually get the information you need, and don’t have to download, print and fax a bunch of PDF or Word files
• Great usability – all links work, all labels are intuitive, and you are never confused
• Great personalization – not only does your intranet offer dozens of portlets to subscribe to (including those with personalized information), but the personalization is enabled and used by most employees!
• Great search – those search results are amazing! Google has nothing on us…
• Great design – no dog’s breakfast here! A smart mix of colors, images & design elements
• Great layout – employees aren’t inundated with too many links, banner promotions and irrelevant announcements (no one is screams #@*! when they visit the home page)
• Great executive communications – our executives blog, webcast and participate in discussion forums – and they’re informative & funny (but tactful)!!
• Great, measured success – you’ve quantified and demonstrated ROI, high user satisfaction, and high traffic

Wow! That is an enormously successful intranet!

Haha – April Fools!

Yup, it is too good to be true. In fact, show me an intranet that can prove they deliver only 5 of the above 15 criteria for a great intranet, and I’ll pay you $500 (large, global technology companies with names like IBM, Cisco and HP are not included – you guys are freaks… as in freakishly good, and extraordinary exceptions to the norm).

No seriously, send me a short case study or document detailing how your organization meets 5 of those 15 criteria and I’ll mail you $500 cash (I’m tempted to offer $50,000 because I know there are virtually no organizations that would qualify… but that would only promote scam artists!).

In the meantime, enjoy your dreams of great – and happy April Fools!

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The intranet project methodology, developed by Toby Ward at Prescient Digital Media, outlines the necessary steps and processes in designing or redesigning an intranet.

The project methodology was developed in 2001, but has been updated and refined several times (most recently in November 2007).

Intranet Project Methodology - Prescient Digital Media

Read more on the process and requisites for building a successful intranet: Intranet Planning: An Intranet Model for Success.

Success has many measures, and largely depends on subjective opinions, but regardless of the metric, I rarely see true intranet success.

I’ve worked with award winners (including companies that have won big intranet awards such as the Nielsen Norman 10 best intranets of the year), and I’ve worked with a lot of organizations and Fortune 500s that have better than average intranets. True intranet success is not often achieved (or held for long), and most intranet managers and champions at those companies often rate their own intranet as satisfactory at best – less than truly successful – and requiring a lot of work.

The commitment, rigor and resources required to build and maintain a successful intranet or portal are significant. And while a successful intranet does not necessarily require a lot of money per se, there are many, many facets – from governance and design, to content and processes – that require successful planning and execution.

I refer to the collective intranet facets or requirements as the Nexus of Intranet Success. Nexus [‘nEksIs] comes from a Greek word meaning ‘meeting place’ (a fitting label given the intranet’s importance as the only true, universal meeting ground or ‘water cooler’ in the average organization).

Nexus of Intranet Success - © Prescient Digital Media

Read my full article: Intranet Planning: An Intranet Model for Success

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UPCOMING INTRANET PLANNING WORKSHOP:

If you’d like to learn how to plan an intranet and you’re in the Southeast Asia (or you can get there easily) then you should definitely attend my half-day workshop on Planning as part of a three-day workshop in the 2008 Deploying First-Class Web Content Management For World-Class Websites (Ad Astra) in Hanoi, Vietnam from April 23 – 25.

I’ll be repeating the workshop April 28 – 30 in Jakarta. These workshops will be three full-days and promise a lot of learning, examples and hands-on work. To register for either please phone (65) 6334-9828 or email sales@adastra.com.sg

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Building a successful intranet requires an enormous amount of work, and very skilled and capable individuals. To be truly innovative, as is the case of Perkins Eastman, winner of the first Intranet Innovation Awards - Gold Award for communication & collaboration an intranet team has to truly understand the employee audience and deliver superlative content and tools that meet their expectations.

Perkins Eastman won the first Gold Award (see Intranet case study: Perkins Eastman), on the strength of creating an innovative series of online Practice Area Communities (PAC). The PACs are designed to enable knowledge sharing between individuals; across project teams, studios, offices, and practice areas; and the entire international organization.

Each PAC contains key information on a key subject such as “Senior Living” (illustrated above) and features information such as:

• Design practices
• Insights and Lessons Learned
• Project Lists
• Presentations
• Glossary
• Strategic Analysis
• Planning
• Etc.

If you have some truly innovative tools or features on your intranet then I would encourage to apply to this year’s Intranet Innovation Awards – now open for submissions, which must be received by May a6, 2008. Full details on the awards (including the entry form) are at: http://www.steptwo.com.au/iia/  

The Intranet Innovation Awards are global awards that celebrate new ideas and innovative approaches to the design and delivery of intranets. Created by Step Two Designs of Australia The Intranet Innovation Awards are truly global awards, supported by a network of intranet-savvy organisations from the US to the UK, Europe and beyond.

All intranet teams are encouraged to enter their innovative approaches to the design or delivery intranets. This may be may be an entirely new piece of intranet functionality, or a good idea implemented particularly well. The awards recognise individual intranet improvements, and not intranets as a whole.

Submissions are received and judged based on four categories:

• core intranet functionality
• communication and collaboration
• frontline delivery
• business solutions

Winners will be showcased in the Intranet Innovations report, as well as in articles, YouTube interviews, online presentations, international conferences and major industry journals.

See last years winners:

   http://www.steptwo.com.au/products/iia2007/index.html

Find out how to win an award presentation:

   http://www.slideshare.net/jamesr/how-to-win-an-intranet-innovation-award/

Watch video interviews with last year's winners:

   http://www.youtube.com/profile_videos?user=JamesRobertsonAu

“I can’t find anything!” At the risk of sounding repetitive, this is still the number one complaint of most employees at most organizations, regardless of size, industry and geographic location. Notwithstanding the effectiveness of the search engine which,  more often than not, is rated as being somewhere between “awful” and “piss-poor”, Information architecture is often the top priority of most intranet managers when undertaking a redesign.

Information architecture (IA) is mostly science with a dash of art. As it relates to the intranet, the IA is best represented by a site map or organization chart of the major information or content categories (parents) and the sub-categories (children) and how they all relate to each other.

Information architecture is defined by the Information Architecture Institute as:

1. The structural design of shared information environments.
2. The art and science of organizing and labeling web sites, intranets, online communities and software to support findability and usability.
3. An emerging community of practice focused on bringing principles of design and architecture to the digital landscape.

The ultimate goal of the intranet manager, architect and consultant is to create an ‘intuitive’ IA – information categories and navigation paths that are intuitive or easily understood at a glance.’ Of course the principal challenge of any information architect is that what is intuitive to one person is not always intuitive to another – and is sometimes not intuitive to others.

When redesigning an intranet or portal there is a natural inclination by some architects and consultants to reinvent the IA to best reflect ‘best practices’ and/or the IA or labels used by other clients with successful and intuitive IAs. This of course is a dangerous trap as no outside consultant or architect could truly appreciate and know intimately the culture and both formal and informal corporate nomenclature as those who have worked for an organization for years. Furthermore, legacy labels and nomenclature considered awkward or poorly named by the architect redesigning the IA are in fact reinforced and validated by years of employee use. For example, the content category “HR” is not a very cool label employed by design firms and architects who have come to use cute, new millennia labels like:

Ü      People Place

Ü      My Services

Ü      Employee Central

None of these labels are wrong per se, but if employees have spent years finding benefits and compensation information and tools under the “HR” section, why would anyone change the label? Frankly, there better be a solid, demonstrated reason for doing so or risk further confusing employees who demand simplicity.

Firstly, no two organizations are the same. Notwithstanding different industries and services, each organization (even closely related competitors) may in fact differ in very significant ways:

Ü      Corporate priorities

Ü      Corporate values

Ü      Target audience & customer base

Ü      Management

Ü      Culture

Ü      Geographic locations

Ü      Personal life experiences and preferences

Ü      Career path & development

All of the above factors, any many others (including dozens and perhaps hundreds of sub-factors), influence an individual employee’s definition of “intuitive”. Therefore applying labels and schema from one company to another makes absolutely no sense and is reckless in principal.

So while reinventing an intranet’s information architecture from scratch, and removing common and generally accepted labels and information paths is counter-productive, there are some general lessons to be learned (though not always universally applicable):

Ü      The vast majority of practical content should be no more than 3 clicks from the home page (this is impossible with millions of pages of content, but note the emphasis on majority)

Ü      Major parent categories (major sections or channels that represent virtually all the content on a corporate intranet) should be limited to 6 or 8 including sections for:

o        About Us (Corporate profile, business structure, bios, directory, etc.)

o        News (news stories, announcements, events, etc.)

o        HR (human resource related information and tools)

o        Products & Services (and/or Customer related information)

o        Forms & Tools (an aggregate section of links or originals)

o        Manuals & Policies (an aggregate