IBM’s intranet portal, W3, may be the very best in the World. I’ve not seen them all but I have seen hundreds of intranets over the past few years and IBM is definitely one of the best if not the best.

IBM showcased its goods during the Intranet Insider World Tour Series -- featuring IBM’s renowned W3 portal webinar hosted by myself and IBM’s Liam Cleaver (presented by Communitelligence.com – the brainchild of communications afficianado and all-around good guy John Gerstner).  

IBM’s success is really, really impressive. Here’s just a sample of some of their numbers:  

Ø       Usage and value

§         80% of IBM employees access the intranet daily

§         68% view the intranet as crucial to their jobs

§         1.7 million page views per day (or about 6 page views per employee per day)

Ø       Employee retention:

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

Ø       e-HR

§         Employee satisfaction from 40% to 90%

§         Health care enrolment

§         Performance measurement, skill & career development

§         Compensation, stock options, pensions, insurance

§         Time off, transfers, eldercare, adoption, etc.

Ø       e-learning

§         52% of employee training delivered on the Web

§         200,000+ received online e-learning

§         $284 million saved annually

Ø       e-meetings

§         40,000 employees use every month

§         Saves travel & setup costs

§         Combines instant messaging, presentations, voice

Ø       ROI

§         More than $1.3 billion in cost savings ($683 million in direct cost savings)

IBM’s Intranet Portal: W3 (home page)

If you didn’t get a chance to attend this session then I strongly suggest you order the CD (visit the Intranet Insider on Communitelligence.com for details). 

I’ve known a few battles between IT and Corporate Communications during my time as an intranet consultant. Both like to control, but both have different priorities and different views of the world.

However, IT and Communications must work together if you’re to have a successful intranet.

Here’s an interesting stat from a Forrester survey of 2,000 IT managers: 61% of surveyed managers feel the search engine is the area requiring the most improvement on the intranet.

In terms of dissatisfaction, only the IT Help Desk ranked lower than the intranet. Only 44% of managers say that it is easy to find information on the intranet.

I’ll bet a shiny quarter that this is one area that both communications and IT can agree: the intranet needs to be better.

There you go. All you need is a process which should begin with....

1)     Documenting the priorities and feedback of every intranet stakeholder (owner, contributor)

2)     Documenting the needs and preferences of employees

3)     Understanding and documenting intranet best practices

Once you’ve done the above, you can put together the plan that makes it happen... Check out The Nexus of Intranet Success for an overview on this process.

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Nexus of Intranet Success

Blogs get most of the press and hype but wikis, in my opinion, have far greater potential for improving employee collaboration.

To review, a wiki is a server program that allows users to collaboratively contribute content to a website. Editing is done in your web browser using a user-friendly editing tool not too dissimilar to a stripped-down version of MS-Word. But a wiki is more collaborative than your average page authored by one person. A wiki may contain the writing, edits and additions of many, many users. Any user can edit any other users’ contributions.

The most famous wiki is Wikipedia.com which is an online encyclopedia authored by whomever wants to author. Yes, you can make your own edits and additions. Wikipedia now features over 750,000 files with thousands of contributors though they do disclose that “Nonsense and vandalism are usually removed quickly.”

Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein (DrKW) is the international investment banking arm of Dresdner Bank. Headquartered in London and Frankfurt with offices all over the world including Sao Paulo, New York and Tokyo, DrKW employs approximately 6,000 people worldwide.

DrKW installed a wiki of their own appropriately called DrKWikipedia which is accessible from the intranet. In addition to the main wiki, there are employee blogs, Sharepoint collaboration tools and instant messaging.

Long before most of us had ever heard of it and might mistaken the moniker for a bird, DrKW installed their first wiki in 1997 to better link their large number of employees across a wide geography of locations. The wiki has since evolved into an enterprise application that all employees can use. The wiki is powered by Socialtext.

The central wiki is used primarily for project tracking by frontline employees working with customers. In other words, customer service staff working on customer files.

According to Socialtext’s case study (Dresdner Kleinwort Wasserstein) the DrKW Global Head of IT  JP Rangaswami says the intranet is very important for employee collaboration and also for adhering to legislative securities legislation.

"Because we are regulated we need to make sure that everything we do is recordable, archivable, searchable and retrievable. Given the market we operate in, we need to ensure that we avoid any risk of breaking down Chinese walls, prevent market abuse, correctly manage confidential information and yet still have better workflow."

The wiki is used as a communications tool, a collective discussion tool, and as a repository for documents and information. Socialtext has an excellent case study that documents the wiki’s use and success:

“The wiki has changed how team members are working and managing their projects. Before, it was common practice to create a traditional website for each project - with all the attendant problems of version control, multiple authors and HTML editing. Now, the wiki allows everyone in the team to upload information more easily. This encourages more collaboration and transparency through facilitating the sharing of email conversations, small snippets of information and ideas which would otherwise have either been communicated in person (an effective but non-persistent methodology) or have completely fallen through the cracks.

An important role of the wiki is to track project development so that the team and management know what progress is being made on projects regardless of any individual's geographical location. This has raised awareness across the team of what each person is doing, the status of each project, and what actions need to be taken.

One of the biggest users of Socialtext in DrKW is the Equity Delta1 equity financing team -- led by Darren Lennard, Global Co-Head -- which deals with stock loans, equity swaps, and structured equity-like financing.

The team suffered from having too much email to deal with, which made communication clumsy and difficult. They neededed a collaborative working methodology for the development of business plans and for process analysis. They also needed to have some way of storing commonly-used information that was more usable than a simple file dump.

Equity Delta1 uses the Socialtext workspace in a number of ways.

As new topics come up, such as which clients they cover or how they analyse their business, they create an open forum where anyone can post views, comments and questions on given subjects. When it matures, the discussion becomes a formal page. They also use the wiki to publish and share white papers and bulletins, coordinating sales and marketing activities, and discussing and organizing critical team tasks.

Because discussion is now happening on the wiki, email usage has dropped significantly. The Equity Delta1 team's intention is to make Socialtext their sole means of communication and indeed they are already using it daily.

However, the team are still learning how best to use Socialtext, and still see it as an equivalent to shared folders and files rather than as a more versatile collaboration tool. There has also been resistance to the openness of the wiki. The Delta1 workspace is separate to the DrKWikipedia (which is accessible to any employee of DrKW), and without this privacy, Lennard believes that his team would not have adopted it so rapidly. But once use of the Delta1 wiki matures, it will be ported over to the DrKWikipedia wiki.

Streamlining specification and documentation development

The E-Capital London Team develops back-end applications for the Digital Markets business line and supports a number of legacy systems. They had been using SharePoint to share and discuss documents, but have now migrated to Socialtext.

They are primarily using Socialtext to share and develop new system specifications, product overviews and help documentation. The wiki provides them with an instantly editable collaboration platform which obviates the need to constantly upload and reupload new files and images to a staging server, and put them through user acceptance testing before progressing to a production server, thus simplifying the publication process.

They also find the version history function useful, particularly on product specs where it is important to retain a full change audit trail.

In the future, the team hopes to be able to share code with other developers within the company to help both improve their applications and also avoid unnecessary duplication of effort.

Bridging global offices

DrKW is a global entity, and Socialtext has helped to bridge the many offices together across time zones and cultural divides. Because different cultures react in different ways to different communications media, it has been essential to not only provide a variety of ways for people to communicate, but also create a central intranet area where they can easily share information. Socialtext also enables individuals to edit the intranet without having to wait for a central team to update an HTML page.

But JP Rangaswami believes the true value of Socialtext has yet to emerge.

"Hidden within the wiki is a drive towards creating an internal glossary that will transform life, so if someone doesn't understand something they can look it up and find it defined not by a dictionary but by someone else doing a similar job."

This Wikipedia-style usage will cut down the training time and start-up costs of new hires as it will help them to understand internal and external jargon and terms more easily. It will also simplify the roles of people writing in other locations and languages. English is the language of DrKW at present, but in the future Rangaswami foresees multilingual support.

DrKW recently rolled out to over 4000 users, but it is allowing takeup to develop gradually, providing informal training to encourage rather than enforce usage. Indeed, emergent use is accepted as a valuable part of the spread of wiki culture - one team's first use of the wiki was to organise their coffee rota, which they had previously done by email. Reducing email use even in such a seemingly trivial manner has a positive knock-on effect on users' productivity and ability to manage their workload by reducing the volume of non-essential messages. It also provides an innocuous "practice run" that can facilitate the adoption of similar strategies in situations closer to core aspects of work.

Over time, DrKW intends to use technologies such as blogs, wikis and search to mold their entire approach to customer service and project planning. Rather than using monolithic systems to solve these problems, the intent is to create an ecosystem of tools which, alongside the use of more granular permissioning, will allow information to be shared across silos. The value of this approach to problem solving, incident management and project planning/execution will be vast.”

Building community and activating the employee population is a frequent goal in many organizations seeking to boost employee satisfaction and morale. By involving your employees in the communications process and putting them front and center – be it in the form of pictures and/or stories on the intranet, portal or employee publication cover or home – can be a positive step in the right direction.

However, there are good and... errrr, stupid ways of activating employees. Steve Crescenzo recently wrote a hilarious blog, Ask a stupid question... about playing the ‘roving reporter’ within the company and asking stupid questions of employees that could only lead to stupid answers.

Among Steve’s favorite ‘stupid’ queries:

·         What can always be found in your refrigerator?

·         What book is on your nightstand right now?

·         Who is your Greatest American Hero?

·         If you could be a candy bar, what kind of candy bar would you be?

To the latter, I think I would have to say a Skor bar. I have no idea what’s in it nor comprehend its preservation effects on my inner organs but it so dam good! (My inner organs – except maybe the pancreas – also agree).

I’ve come across some pretty stupid answers in my days too. Particularly answers from senior managers and executives to business analysis questions about the intranet and its value to the organization. A sampling of this stupidity...

·         A Director of Human Resources: “I don’t understand why we need an intranet... I mean we have a pretty good phone system that cost us a lot!”

·         A CEO of a major financial services company with a horribly pathetic intranet that barely earns the title ‘intranet’: “I think we’ve invested too much in technology already.”

·         An SVP of Communications for one of the U.S.’s biggest energy utilities who has an email address and uses it... sort of. He has his assistant print every email so he can hand write responses to each and then snail mail replies back to the writer. This is the SVP of COMMUNICATIONS...!

·         An intranet manager who put an animated cartoon caricature of a jogging Bill Clinton on the intranet HR home page of a Canadian company. Said the intranet manager when asked the value to the business of an animated U.S. President, “But he’s sooo cute!”

Oh there’s plenty ‘stupid’ out there.... heard any good ones lately?

HALIFAX, NS - If you build it they will not come. Of course, there will always be the curious and keeners and those that inherently understand it, but an intranet firing at maximum value requires marketing.

In a survey of 500+ intranet managers by Melcrum Research, the number four issue or challenge facing intranet managers was low take-up or usage (the number one issue was ownership/politics).

One of the reasons why even the best intranets need to be marketed to employees is that computer-based workers are often exceptionally busy and do not have time to explore and surf the intranet. They need to be educated as to what is there and why it is of value to both them as individual workers and also to the organization as a whole. Employees need to be ‘sold’.

A couple of years ago I was undertaking some research on an insurance company’s intranet. My research included a company-wide survey which included the participation of some 2700 employees. One of the key findings underscored one of the ubiquitous findings at many organizations – people like the intranet but weren’t using it. In fact, employees rated the intranet a 7.5 out of 10.

So if the intranet was rated so highly, how come employees weren’t using it? I dug deeper in employee focus groups and found the answer: the average employee had been to the intranet home page and liked what they saw but they hadn’t spent much time on the intranet and therefore didn’t know what was there. As such, the average employee didn’t understand that the intranet was a valuable resource because they didn’t know better. Mystery solved; employee use was not for a lack of value, but for lack of knowledge. The employee population needed to be better educated as to what the intranet offered and why it was of value to them. The intranet needed marketing.

In short, every intranet needs a marketing plan followed by execution with results. Sodhexo USA knows this all too well. The leading provider of food and facilities management in North America and 110,000+ employees has a built a marketing plan that is critical to the success of its intranet portal, Sodhexonet. Angelo Ioffreda, VP, Internal Communications Sodhexo USA, shares their intranet marketing plan that focuses on six major components:

1. Promote ongoing SodexhoNet name recognition and key wins.

2. Highlight the variety of useful content through on- and off-line.

3. Increase essential content and applications available only online.

4. Increase content – including fun content – that drives repeat visits.

5. Encourage continued endorsements from senior leadership.

6. Support content owners – increase skill level and enthusiasm, identify and leverage best practices.

As far as tactics go, dust out your old marketing texts. Marketing tactics could include:

·         E-mail broadcasts

·         newsletter stories

·         internal press conference

·         executive promotion

·         hosted chats with the CEO

·         posters and mousepads

·         premiums (handouts)

·         screensavers

·         etc.

A regional subsidiary of a large financial/investment services company embarked on an ambitious marketing campaign to promote the launch of their redesigned intranet portal. The campaign included an email campaign, promotional cookies for each employee, posters and even a professionally produced 10-minute promotional video replete with a famous voice as the narrator. The CEO personally launched the new intranet with an internal press conference for employees. In total, the company spent about $20 per employee on promoting the new portal.

As for results, Sodexho can bear witness. As a result of their efforts, those never using SodhexoNet dropped from 19% to 1% and registered users who visit the site monthly increased from 55% to 90% (see Best practices case study: Sodhexo USA for more details).

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UPCOMING TELESEMINAR:

Intranet Insider World Tour: IBM’s W3 – October 26

Large companies with many thousands of employees dispersed across great regions and dozens of locations require an effective intranet. Communications, connection and community are critical making the intranet a mandatory requirement for success.

Sodhexo USA provides a solid example of how to deploy just such an intranet for a large diversely situated organization – and it’s one of the biggest companies you may not know. Sodexho USA (www.sodexhoUSA.com) is the leading provider of food and facilities management in North America, with $6 billion in annual revenues and 110,000+ employees. Sodexho runs cafeterias, housekeeping in the hospitality sector, grounds keeping, plant operations and maintenance and laundry services to more than 6,000 companies principally in health care, schools, and the military.

Headquartered in Gaithersburg, MD, Sodexho has employees spread out across and in all corners of the continent. An even greater challenge than the geographic disparity of its employees is the nature of their work. The vast majority of these employees are hourly workers who are not desktop workers with their own computers – they’re on the frontlines rather preparing and serving food, cleaning, and performing site operations. The intranet home page, SodhexoNet, is a tying bond that links most of the managers and management of this diverse and disparate group.

While most employees are not registered users with access, the value of the intranet drives the growth in the number that do use the intranet. Registered users have grown from 2,000 in April, 1999, to more than 14,000 users today.

Like all effective systems, SodhexoNet has a vision: SodexhoNet is a one-stop shop for all of our managers’ information needs and an indispensable part of a Sodexho work day.”

Accompanying the vision is some practical but key goals:

·     Essential business and communications tool

·     Robust, timely, relevant, accurate content

·     Intuitive navigation

·     Quick access

·     Easy to search

·     Feedback capacity

·     Cost-effectiveness

SodhexoNet’s greatest strength however is its management team, lead by corporate communications. To be specific, the strength lies in the team’s understanding that the intranet must intimately understand its target audience and constantly measure its performance. By measuring its success, Sodhexo knows where to concentrate its efforts and resources and constantly strive for improvement.

Among the many measures the intranet team tracks (for the last year measured compared to the previous year):

·     User behavior and how usage is trending (those never using SodhexoNet dropped from 19% to 1%)

·     SodhexoNet as a “valuable resource” to employees (from 74 to 84%)

·     Registered users who visit the site monthly (from 55 to 90%)

·     Most visited pages (career center, HR, health care, phone book, and search)

·     Most searched terms (forms, recipe collection, performance appraisal)

·     Return on investment (where possible)

One of SodhexoNet’s more innovative and successful tools is its SuperSleuth sales lead program. SuperSleuth is an intranet web page and application that encourages employees to submit sales leads and prospective clients via the intranet. Successful leads submitted via the SuperSleuth intranet page generate cash rewards of up to $1000 for the person making the submission. Sodhexo says it has contributed to a 100% increase in sales leads in the past year. Let me repeat: a 100% increase in company sales leads. Wow!

While the site has evolved considerably and its value has grown measurably in recent years, it hasn’t been without considerable effort and some lessons learned, says Angelo Ioffreda, VP, Internal Communications.

Amongst the key lessons learned:

·     Create a vision

·     Partner with IT (“big time,” says Ioffreda stressing the importance of a healthy working relationship with IT) – and HR

·     Establish clear standards for the site

·     Make end-users the center of your universe

·     Incorporate real-time feedback from end-users

·     Track user behavior

·     Make content ‘king’

·     Involve, support, and communicate with your content owners

·     Develop an editorial / programming mindset

·     Strive for intuitive navigation

·     Improve your search and speed