Troubled intranets often share many of the same characteristic problems:

• No defined ownership
• No content standards and policies
• Site proliferation and ‘sprawl’
• Poor usability and navigability (“I can’t find anything!”)
• Low use and employee up-take

This was the case with Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL, makers of CANDU nuclear reactors) when I started to work with them two years ago. This case study was presented to today to the 2006 Information Highways conference in Toronto. Turning the dream into reality: Harnessing people power to create a high productivity intranet was a joint presentation with my colleague and client Andre Robillard, CIO for Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd.

A little more than two years ago when AECL started down the road to implementing a new intranet portal, the Canadian crown corporation was saddled with a number of challenges:

• Ongoing news and information not communicated in a timely and consistent fashion
• Business objectives and priorities not clearly communicated
• Absence of a Communication plan
• Too much reliance on email bulletins for communications
• Senior management not taking responsibility for communication
• Employee Intranet not effective:
• No governance or control
• No consistent look and feel
• Information not current or useful
• Publishing requires technical skills
• Difficult to find information

The old AECL intranet:

To address these challenges AECL hired Prescient Digital Media to develop an integrated communications strategy that addressed email communications, people and manager communications, and the intranet. Specifically, the process included the creation of a new intranet plan with a number of key priorities:

• Develop and formalize a governance model
• Develop an  intranet editorial policy
• Hire an Editor-In-Chief
• Develop Standardization policy that enforces intranet standards and limits individual intranet development
• Develop an email “Acceptable Use” policy
• Eliminate all stand-alone sites by consolidating them under a single intranet portal with a single navigation schema.
• Design a new “look & feel” that supports the AECL brand and communication needs.
• Deploy a full database content management platform and full employee self-service and online form submission

The process moved from planning to the technology selection (driven by an aggressive RFP that had a number of vendors work for the business) and an implementation of about 2.5 months of a new content management system/portal product (IronPoint).

New intranet portal: myAECL

Though launching a new intranet portal is all well and dandy, the work does not stop there. AECL still had a number of key issues to address in the months following the launch:

• Hiring and orienting a new Editor-in-Chief
• Developing daily news articles
• Setting up efficient content processes
• Migrating old environment to new
• Changing Behaviors
• Training content providers to use new tool
• Evolving Formatting standards and guidelines

Andre Robillard shared some of the key lessons learned in redesigning an intranet and implementing a new portal with new processes and standards. He has a number of recommendations for any organization attempting the same:

• Clearly define the communication problems in your organization
• Assess where you are today by polling staff
• Create a new communication plan based on best practices, employee feedback, and company needs
• Get executive approval of new internal communication plan
• Create a new Intranet design that provides staff with any easy to use tool, plus satisfies the communication plan
• Issue an RFP
• Implement using the 80/20 rule
• Use a vendor that does this for a living

By the way, have you noticed that the CIO keeps focusing on and talking about “communications” and not the technology?

CIO Robillard understands the driver is communications and customer service, and that the intranet portal is more than just a technology solution; it’s a business system to support the business. As CIO he’s just one of several owners on a governance council that also includes representatives from Communications, HR and Customer Service. I’d like to see more IT organizations like Robillard’s that are less concerned with ownership and more concerned with business results.

If you have a question about this case study – whether its related to process, content, technology, people, planning, etc. – feel free to post your question or comment below and I’ll get back to you shortly thereafter.

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Why would I, as an intranet consultant and the owner of a firm specializing in intranet consulting, try and dissuade you of hiring said consultant? Well, it’s still ski season here in Vancouver and there’s epic ‘pow’ at Whistler this year… combined with an intense sleep deficit wrought by a newborn baby at home (who likes to eat A LOT past midnight)!

No, in reality, I want to spend more time studying all of the subtle nuances and politics in this particular Survivor series… No seriously, there are two good reasons (and a whack of lesser reasons) why you would not hire a consultant:

1-     Limited budget

2-     “Knowledge is power”

Knowing what makes a powerful intranet and putting that knowledge to practice should be a requisite of any intranet or portal manager.

Australia-based Step Two Designs has released version 1.1 of The Intranet Review Toolkit. The toolkit is free and it’s designed to empower intranet managers with a comprehensive set of heuristics (guidelines) for evaluating an intranet.

Coinciding with this release, a new home for the Intranet Review Toolkit – released under a Creative Commons license – has been established at:

www.IntranetReviewToolkit.org

This site provides a central clearinghouse for resources related to intranets, including:

• The latest version of the Intranet Review Toolkit
• A commentary on the heuristics in the Toolkit, along with links to supporting resources, reports and books
• A simple mechanism for providing feedback or suggestions

 Step Two Designs, one of the lead authors of the Review Toolkit, has high hopes for the toolkit. “This will hopefully grow into a definitive resource for intranet teams, going beyond just explaining and supporting the Toolkit,” says James Robertson, one of the lead authors and Managing Director of Step Two.

This is a resource that every intranet team should download, to get a "health check" for their intranet. Comments and suggestions should then be posted on the site, to help the team at Step Two further grow the resource.

© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Intranet managers and consultants are the consummate knowledge workers. And as Francis Bacon has screamed to us from over the ages, knowledge is power!

In particular, an intranet manager needs to intimately know:

·         the requirements of the business

·         best practices

·         the preferences and needs of employees

On the last point, understanding the needs of employees, there are a number of tools at the disposal of managers including log analysis, surveys, focus groups and usability testing.

Each tool has its place and its pros and cons. A recent attendee to a seminar of mine in Chicago asked me: “When is it best to do usability testing? User surveys? Focus groups?”

The answer is, of course, it depends. It depends on…

·         the organization’s culture

·         the present position of the intranet on the evolutionary curve

·         the extent of “research fatigue” at the organization

·         what data “sells” best

While not necessarily applicable to other commodities such as, say, consumer packaged goods, I prepared the following table as a quick cheat sheet for comparing the various tools applicable to researching intranet target audience requirements.

What to use first?

The enquiring mind was also having a debate with their boss about what should be done first – in-depth interviews or usability testing or focus groups or survey – when orchestrating their site design. I personally think it’s best to lead with in-depth interviews of the business stakeholders as the first step. It’s critical to understand what the business needs and expects from the site.

Generally speaking I like to do in-depth interviews first, followed by a target audience survey, followed by planning and information architecture and design, followed by focus groups, and then do usability testing once you’ve built a prototype. Focus groups can come at anytime… depending on the issues at play. Sometimes it’s good to do FGs up front if there are contentious issues or you want to explore new ideas or concepts. If not, leave them until after you’ve done your site plans and played with a couple of design concepts.

There are of course many subtleties to site research – and always exceptions to the rule. Many factors come in to play when choosing your research tools and the time to implement each. A lot depends on the culture of the organization and the intranet’s position on the evolutionary curve. For example, if money is the only thing that sells a project, it’s better to invest your time and energy in measuring return on investment.

A final note: never conduct the research yourself on your own product (website or intranet) as your results will be biased and the end result flawed. No, this isn’t a sales pitch (I’m busy enough as is!). I money is an issue there is always a way to conduct low-cost research… just make sure the person spearheading the research knows what they’re doing! (When we recently began work with a new intranet client who convinced us they need not do any employee research as they had recently completed a survey they proudly produced the survey… three questions, all open-ended.)

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© 2006 Toby Ward - Prescient Digital Media

Nothing ruins a good intranet like intranet sprawl. Dozens or hundreds if not thousands of corporate intranet sites – all using different hardware, software, content, information architectures, etc. Confusing the users, wasting money, etc.

Just ask companies like IBM or Nortel who waste millions on maintaining thousands of intranet sites. The sprawl must be contained; the monster must be tamed.

Prescient Digital Media senior consultants Julian Mills and Tom Marciniak recently conducted a workshop on doing just that – taming the monster.

All organizations that disseminate information start with a dream: multiple websites integrating seamlessly into an intranet that minimizes the effort of managing content and maximizes stakeholder satisfaction. But for too many operations, the dream has become a nightmare, a Frankenstein’s monster of mismatched components that lurch onto monitors, terrifying audiences and causing managers’ sleepless nights.

Government organizations face unique challenges when setting out to tame the monster, starting with the focus necessary to organize the task. They can’t work with the obvious profit-drivers that enable private sector organizations to assess the damage being done when a monster enters their midst, or develop the return on investment (ROI) models that tell them the dream has been realized.

The ROI for a government intranet may not be derived from increased sales or profits, but it can be rapidly developed based on improving the efficiency of sharing and disseminating information, especially during an era in which political leaders promote government efficiency. After all, government departments exist to propagate information, so any initiative that demonstrably improves this core function will have an obvious impact on organizational goals.

Read the full article Taming the Monster: Creating an effective Government Intranet